CX Trends and the Future of the Contact Center

Article - CX
By Tim Cassidy|6th February 2023

In the last decade contact centers have changed beyond recognition, from the rise of omnichannel to virtual agents and the metaverse. CX driven disruption has increased the expectations of modern-day customers who want to resolve issues in as few interactions as possible. It’s no longer just calls. Its texts and tweets and everything in between to meet customers on the channel they prefer. Speed matters, convenience matters, so does personalization.  

Customers expect you to know who they are and why they are getting in touch (sometimes even before they do) but they don’t like it when you know too much either, that’s why personalization remains a fundamental challenge for so many organizations. So, what are leading brands doing to master the CX journey? How is AI and other innovative tech helping brands achieve their CX goals?  

At a recent GDS Group  virtual event executives gathered to discuss challenges and best practices. Here are some key takeaways from our Sprinklr Showcase. 

Challenges Enabling a Differentiated and Personalized Digital- Social Care CX Model

With looming economic uncertainty and tightening resources care leaders are operating under intense pressure to support customer issues while at the same creating personalized experiences. CX leaders are being asked to do more with less but know an elevated customer experience is necessary to remain competitive. On top of that, CX leaders may also struggle to have the strategic know how to develop an experiential practice, resources and other initiatives may compete as priorities for the business and the challenge of data silos remains. Two executives at Sprinklr walked us through their digital / social care CX platform and their brand value approach. Here are the top 5 things to note: 

1. Listen and Understand / AI Driven

Improving engageable volume with smart digital/social listening and AI can help your organization understand your customer better and their intent. As Christie Fitzgerald, Presales Director, Care Specialist at Sprinklr said, “we hear a lot today about creating a 360-degree view of the customer and I think there is a disconnect as to what that means, what matters is a unified view of what that customer is experiencing, what it has been and where that experience needs to go. It’s about being able to take all that unstructured data, pull it all in while leveraging AI to start to index, categorize, amplify, and contextualize those conversations, so a conversational AI driven bot or a live agent can see the history and be able to provide next best step for this customer.”  

2. Identify & Assign

This step is all about being able to funnel all unstructured data to determine where their journey needs to head next and which type of channel and agent the customer prefers to work with. Agent assisted customer profile information based on their digital and social interests that can lead to engaging contextual responses.  

3. Engage & Analyze

Personal, contextual customer engagements can deliver the unique, personalized experience your customer is craving. Getting real time feedback during a care conversation provides a new level of CX satisfaction and opportunities. Ken Madrigal, Senior Director CXM Best Practices at Sprinklr told us this is where you can make it the experience rememberable, returnable, repeatable, and recommendable.  “I always say it’s the 3 Rs that you are trying to achieve in engagement. He shared,  

“Try to make it rememberable, so that customers can actually think about how positive it is. They want to return to it because they found so much value they want to repeat it. You want to make sure its applicable over and over again to create value for yourself and in the social/digital world that we live in. That its recommendable and creates advocates.” 

4. Amplify

When customer experiences are exceptional, that is the perfect opportunity to enable your best customers to share and amplify their positive experiences. By operationalizing experiences, they can be more easily shared using each channels strength. 

5. Retarget – Developing Audience Knowledge

Retargeting allows you to use content to re-engage customers and invite them to connect around initiatives targeted to their customer profile. It can bring a customer back into the experience with follow-up content based on their interests and behaviors. Ken says again, it’s all about personalization, “how can I personalize and categorize somebody that I have interacted with? The great part about this platform is there is hyper-categorization that can happen in there. From the profile that a customer has to the conversations and the words that they use – we can put a customer into a place where we understand who they are and more than just what they bought from us.” He goes on to explain, 

“This isn’t about understanding things that are private, but understanding how we can connect with them deeper, so that this idea when we do reach out to them that idea of marketing and conversation and personalization is more purposeful.” 

In Summary

In today’s hyper competitive market, companies cannot afford to slip on customer experience and its importance to brand credibility. Brands need to balance traditional focus with progressive experiential customer driven focus. One platform that can help your organization focus on strategy, process, and capabilities.  

GDS Summits are tailored 3-day virtual event conferences that bring together business leaders and solution providers to accelerate sales cycles, industry conversations and outcomes. Regarding the CX Innovation Summit 86% of Delegates said the overall experience of Digital Summit they attended was either Above Average or Excellent and 71% of Delegates said the Digital Summit provided them with actionable outcomes to support their current initiatives.  

For more, click here to hear from attendees on how GDS has helped them to achieve their business outcomes. 

Continue the debate at GDS’ CX Innovation Summits where we bring together senior marketing executives who are actively seeking to share, learn, engage, and find the best solutions. 

Apply to Attend

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