As countries around the world continue to navigate the challenges of economic uncertainty and a cost-of-living crisis, businesses find themselves under increasing pressure to cut costs while still generating results.
While recent government initiatives in the UK – such as extended tax relief for small businesses and greater investment in digital infrastructure – can offer support for growth and innovation, companies are still grappling with tightening budgets and uncertain market conditions.
To thrive in this climate, businesses must move beyond relying on traditional funding or government support. One element of this lies in rethinking their marketing and customer engagement strategies to build a more profitable value chain.
So, what workflow adjustments and innovative solutions can help businesses better optimize their customer experience budgets, while still building a competitive offering for customers? This article sets out three potential solutions.
1. Affordable contact center upgrades
Organizations that are already under pressure often hold back on bettering their contact centers, amid worries of adding pressure to existing workloads and draining budgets by overhauling legacy systems. But as customer expectations continue to change, brands will need to respond by elevating their offerings and providing new and improved customer channels.
It’s true that upgrading the on-premises software solutions typically used in contact centers can be costly. These challenges can be fixed by investing in modern contact centers that are flexible and scalable; they can easily add or remove channels as needed and adjust to changes in call volume throughout the year.
Relying on such flexible consumption models can spare organizations from expensive maintenance expenses tied to legacy contact center solutions.
CX Network’s most recent research into the Global State of CX found 15 percent of practitioners worked in organization that were cloud native, while 19 percent said they have fully migrated. At the other end of the spectrum, 14 percent said they plan to migrate their contact center to the cloud in future, while 13 percent said they have no plans for migration.
Cloud-based contact centers allow businesses to make changes and iterate quickly without requiring new contracts, translating to significant savings overall. Businesses can also scale their solutions on demand as necessary, without facing fines. As they can easily build, deploy and iterate with only minor impact on the operating budget, businesses will have greater control over costs, without compromising the quality of their communications solutions.
2. Scale smarter using virtual agents
With customer expectations of brands only increasingly, customers long for rapid responses, accurate information and effective solutions.
Automating customer service solutions is a suitable alternative to constantly hiring human agents to fill in gaps – which can be costly and impractical as business scale up. With little to no coding needed, businesses can use personalized, conversational, smart virtual agents to answer common customer questions and provide 24/7 support across IVR and digital channels.
Virtual agents can also function as an important first point of contact for resolving recurring problems and improving call deflection, expediting time to resolution and lightening the load for human agents. And with the capacity for such next generation virtual agents to effectively humanize interactions and engage more realistically, customer satisfaction will be on the up, too.
3. Leverage zero-party data
Another challenge customer service and marketing teams need to consider is transitioning from third-party cookies when building customer insights.
This process requires shifting away from invasive third-party data collection and instead relying on data that consumers voluntarily and intentionally share with brands, known as zero-party data.
Based on Twilio’s recent study, trust, transparency and education are crucial elements of creating a sustainable data-sharing ecosystem for digital marketing in the UK. Six in 1- consumers say protecting their data is the top way for brands to earn their trust, and 49 percent say they would trust a brand more if it disclosed how customer data is used in AI-powered interactions.
But beyond being a step in the right direction for a more trustworthy cookie-less future, moving to zero-party data also allows businesses to cut expenses significantly.
Businesses can save on fees typically associated with engaging second and third-party data brokers and verifying said data. Instead, businesses can rest assured of the quality of zero-party data as customers themselves are the source of information, providing a more accurate and direct peek into customer behavior.
Adding zero-party data and first-party data collected from interactions with consumers through business-owned channels can arm agents with strong insights that can improve the customer experience. Ultimately, it will help improve brands’ ability to personalize interactions – whether its tailoring marketing efforts, or empowering agents to better handle customer requests with crucial customer history and context.
Thriving with efficient budget management
While it is uncertain when inflation and the UK cost-of-living crisis will ease, businesses can take the initiative to protect their operations by making strategic changes to their customer engagement value chain.
These changes can effectively reduce costs without jeopardizing quality or customer satisfaction, ensuring that businesses stay competitive in a tough economic climate.
By adopting more efficient processes, leveraging technology and targeting their spending more effectively, businesses can maximize their return on investment while still building a competitive offering for customers.
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