Four ways data-driven insights create frictionless customer journeys

Charlene George, sales director at Connect SA.

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Amid the intense competition of today’s market, delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) is mission-critical for companies that want to attract new customers and retain them throughout the customer lifecycle.

Crafting a frictionless customer journey, characterised by ease of use, seamless interactions across channels, and memorable customer service that delights, is the cornerstone of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

However, many contact centres struggle to achieve this goal due to four common challenges, with a lack of data-derived insights being the major stumbling block to success.

Gaining deep data-driven insights into customer preferences regarding engagement and behaviours is an important step when crafting frictionless customer journeys.

While organisations have opportunities to gather customer information at every touchpoint, many fail to leverage this data effectively due to inadequate data collection, storage and integration capabilities. Operators also require the tools and capabilities needed to analyse the information in real-time.

Deficiencies in these capabilities typically lead to poor understanding of customer needs and preferences and an inability, resulting in the failure to identify common pain points that detract from CX. Contact centre operators need robust data management strategies and solutions that connect structured and unstructured data from multiple channels and sources, including customer interactions, feedback and social media.

By collecting and analysing data from various sources, contact centre operators can build a unified view of each customer that informs their CX strategy and drives personalisation at scale.

Another major obstacle to creating frictionless customer journeys with data-driven insights relates to data fragmentation across internal systems and departments. Customers often find themselves repeating information to agents due to poor integration of back-end systems due to the inherent data silos that exist in organisations that still operate legacy on-premises systems.

To overcome this challenge, contact centres must invest in cloud-based solutions that enable seamless data sharing and discovery across the organisation, and provide instant providing agents with real-time access to integrated data that empowers agents to provide personalised, relevant and efficient service.

Without a clear understanding of the operation, companies often invest in capabilities that are not aligned with their specific needs. Consequently, key issues and pain points remain unresolved despite significant capital expenditure.

Implementing solutions that measure quality of service metrics by analysing customer interaction data, customer satisfaction feedback and agent performance, operators can use to identify the most common issues. These insights ensure investments are made in solutions that directly address the identified and unique operational pain points that their customers and agents face, to maximise return on investment.

Moreover, leveraging data-driven insights empowers operators to make informed decisions about the best processes, architectures and technology solutions required to construct a 360-degree plan that addresses every aspect of a business and drive the operation towards sustainable success.

A frictionless customer journey requires a consistent experience across all channels. A contact centre solution should enable customers to seamlessly transition across voice and digital touch points without a loss of context or relevance, and without the need to repeat any previously supplied information.

However, operational and data silos can hinder channel integration, which typically leads to fragmented CX and a lack of personalisation.

Cloud-based solutions that can support seamless data integration, allowing operators to personalise engagements via automated digital or agent-assisted interactions. This delivers consistent, relevant and personalised CX at scale.

As data sits at the heart of transforming every step in the customer journey, contact centre operators that invest in AI-enabled data analytic capabilities can more effectively create a customer-centric environment where seamless, efficient and memorable interactions become the norm.

With customer data volumes growing at exponential rates, AI-based predictive analytics tools can analyse historical customer data to predict future behaviours and needs, while identifying customer preferences, enabling contact centre agents to anticipate customer inquiries and offer proactive advice or recommendations to improve outcomes.

Additionally, AI-powered routing systems can direct customers to the most appropriate agent or channel based on their specific needs and preferences, reducing average handling times and improving customer satisfaction.

AI solutions can also analyse customer interactions, helping to identify emotional cues or understand customer intent to pre-empt needs, which helps agents tailor their responses and predictively address potential issues.