With an explosion of social channels and types of media interactions, customer journeys are becoming more complex. There’s no single improvement to make along the way to make things better for every type of customer. Many organizations rely on surveys to measure customer experience (CX), but that’s no longer the most effective way to get a complete view of your CX – especially as consumers turn digital first.
According to McKinsey, 75% of people who used digital channels for the first time during the pandemic said they will continue to do so when things return to “normal.” However, only 16% of organizations said that their digital transformation efforts have set them up to sustain changes in the long term. One reason for this disconnect is data silos. Organizations trying to understand the customer experience face challenges when they don’t have access to the full picture. For example, using the phone to contact a customer support agent is still the top engagement method for most customers. Call centers therefore have a lot of valuable data related to customers’ problems. But if this data isn’t integrated with your digital team’s survey data, you aren’t getting the full picture.
Here are three steps you can follow to move beyond surveys and connect departments for a holistic view of your CX.
The Limitations of Survey Data
Surveys can only capture a limited amount of data from your customers. They need to be delivered to customers at the right moment and through the right channels, and the length of the survey is critical. If it’s too short, you may not get all the information you need, and if it’s too long, customers are less likely to complete it or spend the time necessary to submit thoughtful, honest answers. With these limitations, it’s difficult to use surveys to capture customer feedback and get a holistic idea about how they feel about their experiences with your company.
Meanwhile, call centers have access to many real-time metrics such as customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score or average handling time — all of which give you valuable CX insight. This information can be used on its own or combined with relevant survey data. Data from a wide range of sources will give your digital team the data it needs to accurately analyze the customer experience. It’s also helpful when companies have access to a platform that houses all feedback in one place. This gives both digital team members and contact center agents access to a wide range of data instead of just what is created in their own department.
More Collaboration Between Your Digital Team and Contact Center
Customer experience data comes from not only surveys and text analytics, but also digital feedback, social media, VoC solutions and digital behavior analytics. But this information isn’t always appropriately integrated. According to a recent study, 80% of companies report problematic data silos holding back their organization. Data silos have many unwanted consequences. The digital team may have valuable intel about what consumers expect from their customer experience, but if call center agents don’t know this information, they can’t act on it. Also, different teams may duplicate customer feedback efforts, leading to frustrated customers who are being bombarded with multiple surveys at once.
With integrated data sets, businesses in any industry can have access to a holistic view of the customer and make more informed decisions. For example, product teams can optimize customer offerings, marketing teams can create a more informed strategy for their outreach and customer support teams can adapt their services to meet the changing needs of customers. This is especially useful when companies are trying to gauge the customer experience for consumers who use both digital feedback channels and the contact center to address their issues.
Learning Opportunities
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Accelerating Content Velocity Across the Digital Supply Chain
Learn to integrate DAM with upstream tools to improve workflow efficiency.
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Composable Commerce The Future of Retail
The Adobe Commerce approach to composable and why it's best in class
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Drive Business Growth Through Customer Service and Support
Defining the future of technology. What is AI’s role in the future of customer service?
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Future-proofing Your Marketing Through Better Customer Understanding
Understanding your customers and how to reach them in real-time across all channels
Webinar
Mar
30
An Optimized Customer Contact Strategy Combines Transparency and Intelligence: The State of Outbound Communications
Learn from the Neustar-commissioned Forrester Consulting study on challenges and solutions for contact centers
Webinar
Apr
5
Adopt a Modern Digital-First Marketing Strategy
Learn how to use a composable DXP to your advantage
Adopt the Latest Data Technology
The latest technologies make it possible to collect a lot of useful customer data from call centers. In particular, speech and text analytics show promise, gathering insights about the customer experience without any manual work required. They can be used to mine unstructured data from many channels – including chat logs, call transcripts, emails and live call interactions – and look for important CX trends.
Getting this intel on customers without having to ask them any questions is a great opportunity. In a nutshell, speech analytics listens to customer interaction and offers insights without anyone needing to do a manual analysis or random call sampling. Meanwhile, text analysis can pull insights from unstructured text-based documents across a variety of channels. Both can improve customer insights and agent performance.
Start Integrating CX Insights Now
Companies who already have an experience management platform can talk to their vendors and see if they’re already collecting the necessary insights across channels and connecting everything in one place. Meanwhile, if you don’t have a partner yet, make sure to ask about data integration and data silos. Without a way to integrate data and access it in one unified place, improving the customer journey will be that much more challenging.
Learn how Verint can boost your digital transformation efforts here.
