¿Are we prepared for the future?
Currently, a successful enterprise has the imperative need to anticipate the needs of its customers. To achieve this, it is a requirement to have the flexibility and rapid adaptation capabilities to react to the changes that are demanded.er capacidades de flexibilidad y adaptación rápida que permitan reaccionar a los cambios que se demanden.
Within this framework, agility in a company must be adopted as one of its main characteristics. This is the only way to develop customer experiences that are aligned with what the market is demanding at that moment. It is key to be constantly observing the environment and your customers, while reacting quickly and efficiently.
The importance of agility lies not only in responding to changing market and industry conditions, but also in transforming these moments of change into opportunities for growth. Therefore, a business culture oriented to agility and total transformation of the corporate approach is required.
Eva García-Luna, solutions consultant at Zendesk, in an interview with TechTarget mentions how to achieve an agile mindset in enterprises:
- Make an integrated analysis: With no real time information on customer experience trends, it will be almost impossible to have an idea of where your enterprise needs to go.
- Create standards and processes that drive collaboration and knowledge sharing, in order to adapt to new habits and position to scale and evolve in CX.
- Use automation to reduce redundant tasks and the cost of change management, which means you will not have to train your agents for every change. This will allow you to evolve your operation and test new strategies.
In addition, the same interview mentions the three key elements required for Enterprise Agility:
- Facilitate customer listening: the majority (75%) of Latin American customers are more or much more likely to buy from an enterprise that offers good customer service, as well as different customer care channels, and this value is considerably higher than the world average (49%). However, many enterprises continue to miss valuable opportunities to listen to their customers in the channel in which they are. Only 34% of medium-sized enterprises offer three or more channels to their customers, and that figure drops to 32% for large enterprises.
- Consolidate teams that can remain productive in times of change: 88% of business leaders report that making changes in customer service is a challenge. To be prepared for an ever-changing landscape, enterprises are adopting agile and flexible frameworks for both technology adoption and implementation, which helps their support team work better. Improvements can positively impact employee engagement and thereby increase customer satisfaction. In addition, they will help in reducing costs through operational efficiency, and even increase revenues. These are benefits that will positively affect both the business and the customer experience.
- Invest in the right technology: When considering where to invest, technology is a great starting point. Providing a single unified workspace for your agents plays an important role in increasing team productivity. Moreover, it can help you get a better view of the customer; in fact, leading enterprises are 5.8 times more likely to say they provide agents with a unique view of the customer’s most important context.
In addition to this, the phrase “the customer is always right” is very much ingrained in our minds, but the ways in which this is accomplished tend to be in constant evolution, especially in recent years. Enterprises struggle to perfect and maximize their customer experience, which was intensified in 2020, and during 2021 has remained a constant that will not disappear.
As a result of COVID-19, it is clear to us that the enterprise-customer relationship has changed forever, but the CX areas have not reacted as quickly as the markets demanded. During 2021, many enterprises are correcting those pending gaps, seeking ways to correctly reach their customers remotely and through new communication channels in this fractured world.
In this context, there are tangible trends that are predicted for the future:
Centralize CX on a single management platform
CX management is complex and involves multiple areas within enterprises, so it is complex to survive and carry out this task by applying patches or keeping these areas separated. During the last time it has become clear how crucial it is to move towards the centralization of CX elements on a single platform.
Scott Harris, CEO of experience management enterprise Experience.com, told CustomerThink.com that, “As businesses become more sophisticated, they will demand a single, integrated CX platform that combines data, behavior and marketing from a single platform. Such enterprises will not have to pay millions of dollars for a consultant to build a customized program.” In the past, suitable platforms to do this were prohibitively expensive, however, during 2021 we will see prices reach a point where most enterprises will have no choice but to buy it.
Leveraging networking opportunities
The pandemic limited the one-to-one relationship with customers and left the digital means of contact as the protagonists. This, in addition to the trend of today’s consumers seeking to face your enterprise increasingly more informed, using multiple ways to access information about you; makes it essential to have a correct mapping of the channels in which you as an enterprise can be found; of the information they can access through those channels; and of the support generated by this in alignment with your value preposition. Enterprises must be prepared for these multichannel interactions and to connect properly with their customers wherever they are.
Active CX
The relationship with customers through CX is usually focused on guiding them through the enterprise, while customer acquisition is left to separate marketing and sales areas. This model is obsolete and needs to be updated. Nowadays, the CX must work actively to attract and retain customers, taking a step ahead from the traditional areas. This means that, in practice, the role must be much more active. The future of the customer relationship will be driven by the ability to collect data about the experience, whenever and however it is happening, so that actions can be taken while the experiences are still ongoing.
Self-Service Optimization
Even though the importance of human connection cannot be overstated, there is something to be said for letting customers handle things the way they want to. According to Kate Crane, content marketing manager at Zendesk, 67% of customers prefer self-service over dealing with an employee.
Whichever self-service medium is chosen according to its channel, the approach in all of them must be to facilitate through sufficient and efficient infrastructure that the customer can be autonomous and respond to their service preferences. Efficiency will be the key for enterprises that expect to meet future challenges and customer demands, and there is no better way to respond to this than by providing true self-service alternatives so that these customers can do the work themselves.
Automation
Even the most refined customer service models have customer service agents as the main focus, and these agents are increasingly demanded and required for repetitive, systematic tasks, etc. Due to the fact that these agents will not disappear from the customer service ecosystem in the near future, automation systems must be devised to relieve the burden on them and enable more efficient use of their time and resources. This is the only way to ensure the proper quality of service in response to current high demands, focusing on high-value interactions and better distributing efforts.
All the trends and predictions mentioned above that interrelate Agility with CX correspond to the key focuses that your enterprise should work on or consider as part of its near-term strategies. Belltech, as experts in Digital Transformation, we can be the business partner you need to help you take these missing steps and properly prepare you for these new challenges and environments. Contact us and get the advice you need to overcome these challenges https://belltech.la/contactanos/.
