Nemertes Research, a research-advisory firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies, has identified five trends that are defining the evolution of customer experience management.
As reported by WhaTech Channel, Nemertes Research claims that the major trends “underscore a need for those responsible for contact centers to proactively prepare for a rapidly changing environment.”
The research firm notes the five trends as: increasing adoption of mobile devices; big data and speech analytics; the popularity of consumer social services such as Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter; personalized, multimode self-service; and new browser-based technologies that “broaden the ability to deliver rich media interaction to any user on any device without the need for custom software.”
Nemertes finds that when deployed together, these trends largely enhance how customers can interact with businesses. Moreover, customers are actually excited to deal with organizations leveraging these strategies.
By seizing these trends, businesses have a chance to set themselves apart from others and to raise the bar.
“The rise of consumer mobile devices, social media, and the coming of browser-based rich media capabilities create a growing challenge for customer service and customer engagement professionals: How to transform ‘contact centers’ into platforms that can support a seamless customer experience spanning phone, Web, mobile device, via text, voice, video and social media,” reports Nemertes.
Nemertes advises that to get started with these key practices, customer engagement and contact center managers need to “carefully evaluate each of these trends to ensure they are following a clear roadmap that integrates new communication channels into a consistent platform; extend contact centers to monitor and engage with customers on social media; provide a seamless customer experience across phone, mobile, social and Web, providing customers with the flexibility to utilize channels that work best for them; deliver real-time decision-making support directly to business managers; and plan for the ability to conduct rich-media sessions directly through mobile and desktop Web browsers.”
The rapid growth of mobile devices is a presiding trend, demonstrated by both consumers and businesses.
“With the rise of both consumer and enterprise mobility comes tremendous opportunity for customer service managers to differentiate their companies via a superior mobile experience and to leverage mobile capabilities, such as GPS and micro-marketing, to customize users’ experience based on their location, purchasing history, interest and even type of device,” Nemertes says. “Furthermore, contact centre supervisors can leverage mobile tools to stay engaged in critical customer service issues, regardless of their personal locations.”
What is crucial in any practice deploying customer services is to present a unified brand experience so that the customer has a clean, coherent interaction with all branches of the business. Unifying divisions, Nemertes points out, will, in improving customer interactions, go on to greatly improve sales, retain customers and reduce costs.
Edited by Alisen Downey