Customer experience strategy
CX Network’s recent Digital Customer Experience Report 2020 leveraged the insights and analysis of a range of CX industry experts, to uncover their views on digital experience design, customer behavior analysis and automation as 2020 draws to a close.
Dedicated digital teams
Bernard Slowey, worldwide lead for digital customer support at Microsoft, noted that failure to create a dedicated digital team is one of the biggest mistakes a brand can make with regard to digital CX.
“A lot of companies have teams of people focused on call centers, as well as improving minutes-per-incident and handle times for voice calls with customers, but then digital is merely treated as a bolt-on to support organizations,” says Slowey.
Despite this, research by CX Network revealed that 36 per cent of organizations have yet to develop a dedicated digital team. Microsoft has set a strong example of the benefits that can be gained from a dedication to digital in a brand's customer experience strategy, having increased ROI threefold within 18 months of implementing a dedicated digital team.
Current data infrastructure
The vast majority of CX respondents appear to lack the data infrastructure necessary to fully optimize digital experiences, with more than 35 per cent admitting to severe data fragmentation.
Siloed data is one of the toughest challenges the CX industry faces, however, progress is being made on connecting data sources together. Brands have taken steps toward unification of customer data, with 50 per cent of respondents claiming to have achieved it. However, with just under 40 per cent failing to utilize unified customer data to consistently improve CX there does still appear to be work to be done on cultural and technological levels.
Digital automation
In the report, Adeel Ahmad, CX analyst at PayPal noted that the unification of customer and organizational data is critical for achieving personalized and targeted CX automation.
Customer journey maps can be utilized to identify areas of CX that are ripe for automation, through the location of specific pain points or inefficiencies. They can also serve to bring datasets together by providing a view of how data relates to each aspect of the customer journey.
“Automation is only as good as the data and content it is based on,” Ahmad remarks. “It is important to understand the level of data maturity for the process you are automating. If the data is not enriched with a multi-touch cohesive system like a journey map, the automation is just passing on the problem to the next touch point.”
“Automating in silos is useless,” notes Ahmad. “Automation must enhance your entire CX strategy.”
To access the full range of expert insights around the variety of digital CX topics covered, access CX Network’s Digital Customer Experience Report 2020 here.