The Customer Journey of the Future

The global Covid-19 pandemic changed the landscape of sales and customer service overnight. As businesses were forced to adjust rapidly to a new reality, digital interactions almost completely replaced physical interactions.

Quite suddenly, for companies in Asia and around the world, contact centres became the dominant face of their customer experience.

For some, this was a source of relief; without the operational agility of an effective contact centre, they would have struggled to keep their customer services functioning efficiently. For many others, however, this exposed an uncomfortable truth.

Millions of customers experience this truth every day, in the form of endless self-service menus, repeated questions, robotic responses, misdirected calls and stonewalled feedback. Far too often, today’s contact centre is inward-looking, focusing on KPIs that bear little relation to customer satisfaction. The plain reality is that the majority of companies are not delivering on expectations.

And those expectations are growing.

Customers are becoming ever more informed and, rightly, ever less tolerant of bad experiences. A Bain & Co. survey found that only 8% of customers described their experiences with companies as “superior”, while 69% switch brands because of poor experience. It costs a company six times more  to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, and 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a good experience.

Clearly, there’s a gulf in logic in the way companies are approaching customer interaction. This is now a serious business risk, because lackluster service will no longer fly in a world where customer experience is the biggest differentiator. Businesses that can build experiences to match these expectations will be the ones that retain and win customers.

A Digital Future

So, what will that future look like, and what must companies do to successfully shape the customer journey?

One thing is particularly clear: the future is digital. Data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly be used to forecast, design and mould the customer experience. Customers will expect that experience to be consistent, regardless of the channel through which they engage the company: online, voice, or face-to-face.

While too many customers today find themselves starting from scratch when dealing with different channels of the same business, technology will be able to knit that journey together into one seamless experience.

“The introduction of AI into the customer journey will mean organisations will always be one-step ahead of the customer,” says Jamie Romanin, Head of Global Contact Centre & Experience Management for Asia Pacific, Japan & China at Cisco. “Using AI to track and predict sentiment will allow companies to proactively solve problems before the customer even realises there is a problem.”

Asia is well-placed to ride this transformational wave. Firstly, the contact centre business is rapidly expanding. The industry grew 8.4% in 2019  – outpacing other regions of the world – and employed 6 million people, compared with 3.7 million in 2012. Another Bain study found that companies in Asia have the world’s highest adoption rate for customer experience tools .

Implementing a customer-first culture is not straightforward, however. Many companies don’t have a good understanding of what drives their customers’ experiences, partly because they suffer from disjointed or missing data. Add to that the persistent problem of organisational silos, and you have a recipe for a company destined to frustrate and drive away customers.

According to Forrester, nearly 40% of companies that are focused on customer experience cite a lack of cooperation across their organisation as a key challenge.

First Steps

“Before you embark in trying to change your customers’ experiences, you first have to understand your employees, and in particular, your contact centre agents,” Romanin says. “A simple survey is the easiest way to learn what challenges are getting in the way of becoming ‘customer-first’. Aligning key stakeholders within the organisation to ensure optimal decision-making is also critical.”

Only once that alignment is in place can a company start to focus on the customer journey itself.

Cisco’s Webex Experience Management solution is designed to help organisations improve their customers’ journeys and enable data-driven decision-making by applying the three key pillars of customer experience: Listen, Analyse and Predict.

Listening enables the company to measure its customer journey experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Analysing helps break down silos, encourage employees to take ownership of the customer journey, and drive greater accountability.

“Becoming predictive and proactive is where the magic comes in,” says Romanin. “Predictive analytics enables you to make informed decisions to improve your customers’ experience, before you actually implement the changes.”

IDC, a global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, predicts that by 2025, “AI-powered” enterprises will be able to achieve Net Promoter Scores 1.5 times higher than those of their competitors.

Quite simply, the more a business spends on customer happiness, the more money it makes.