Customer experience is the focus of every organisation the world over, but it is not without its challenges.
"When we engage with customers, we typically see a combination of technology-related, business, market and customer-driven challenges," says Deon Scheepers, senior manager, Strategic Business
and Solutions Consulting: Africa, Genesys.
One example, he says, would be disparate back-end systems that are difficult and expensive to integrate, making a "single view of the customer" strategy very difficult. Another would be the use of different products and suppliers in their current multi-channel contact centre, making the transformation to provide omnichannel customer service difficult and costly.
Then there's a lack of real-time and historical information and reports that provide accurate and trusted data to help manage the contact centre operations and improve workforce management and customer service.
They also have difficulty in reducing operational cost, while finding ways to improve customer service and customer experience, and ever-changing customer needs and demands, that include additional digital and self-service channels such as bots and mobile, or asynchronous-messaging.
"We also see data overload and analytics challenges. Customers find it difficult to analyse all the data and information available to them in order to get actionable insights that ensure real business and customer value," adds Scheepers.
Struggling to change
Many businesses are struggling to make a decision to change the way they deliver customer experience (CX), choosing to rather remain with the status quo. This is for a variety of reasons such as information overload from vendors and products, and too many people involved in the decision-making process.
"It is difficult to get all of these people on the same page, and address all of their individual needs and wants and get consensus," says Scheepers.
He says businesses have too many options to choose from, especially on features and price, and this actually raises the anxiety around making a decision because they will never be sure that it's the right decision.
"They are worried about the risk to the business and if the technology will help them achieve their desired business outcomes and enable them to change with future market and customer demands."
However, Scheepers says that if customers fail to address the above-listed challenges and do not change, they will not be able to achieve or improve their CX strategy. They will lose customers and revenue, and be left behind by their competitors.
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