You’ll never be a Digital Enterprise until…

You’ll never be a Digital Enterprise until you’ve Integrated your Digital and Traditional Customer Channels.

Your customer engagement capabilities, whether digital or traditional, are only as strong as their weakest link, and more often than not it’s the contact center.  This is because most contact centers leaders are stuck between the thorny issues of both cost cutting while increasing sales and customer engagement opportunities—and failing at both. So how can they provide more value with less resources?

Our research into the digital customer experience shows barely more than half of CX leaders feel they are well prepared to take advantage of digital customer engagement. Many contact centers still exist as they did years ago, with low-cost labor answering calls and reading scripts, with very limited integration (if any) to the customer’s online or mobile experience.

Organizations must integrate digital or they will be doomed to failure by rivals, often disruptors and digital natives, that are better at meeting expectations. It is up to customer experience (CX) leaders to recognize the opportunity to improve—including integrating newer and traditional engagement channels—and executing on this strategy.

One glaring example of this kind of failure is within ecommerce when a shopper cannot quickly or easily find an answer about a purchase they’re trying to make and abandons the site.  Whether it’s due to ill-equipped live agents behind a chat or a poorly executed pivot from a chatbot to a live agent, the retailer loses revenue and the chances that the shopper will return by not having a well- integrated digital customer experience.

We recently spoke with a customer service leader (a large networking major) about its customer experience transformation initiatives and its work with service provider CSS Corp. CSS Corp is seeking to change the old contact center paradigm with its blend of BPO and technology capability. To do this, both buyer and provider need to partner to reimagine customer experience—leveraging interactive digital channels, such as social and mobile to meet customer expectations and turn the contact center into a profitable engagement hub.

Only half of enterprises see digital customer engagement as a part of their big-picture strategy

When looking at customer experience under the lens of digital expectations, the first point of failure is often a customer engagement design strategy that misses with customer expectations by not incorporating a social and mobile strategy. We asked 154 customer experience leaders to share how digital customer engagement fits into their big-picture customer experience journey; we found that nearly half admit that digital customer engagement is deployed piecemeal and is separated from traditional channels rather than being integrated into the big picture journey (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: Forty-five percent of digital customer engagement is deployed piecemeal

Q: How does digital customer engagement fit into the big-picture customer experience journey?

Source: HfS Research, 2017 Sample: Enterprise CX Leaders 154

This will fundamentally hinder the ability for companies to be competitive when their customer engagement strategy is siloed and patched together without a big-picture design. Enterprises are well aware of this dilemma, as the same set of executives said the greatest means of improving digital customer engagement is to design a more comprehensive CX strategy (Exhibit 2). But, while they know they need to transform their whole approach to delivering the customer experience, siloes across the enterprise, concerns about legacy thinking, and a lack of talent, hold enterprises back from being able to deliver an effective digital customer engagement strategy. Frequently, the contact center is one of those legacy siloes stuck behind a wall of cost-center legacy thinking and under resourced. 

Exhibit 2: Improving digital customer engagement

Q: What do you consider to be the top means of improving your digital customer engagement?

Source:  HfS Research, 2017 Enterprise CX Leaders = 154

Networking major demonstrates how an enterprise can leverage a provider partnership to reinvent its CX model

As we can see in Exhibit 2, many enterprises know that they need to transform, but struggle with the vision, talent, and expertise to form a strategy and execute it. The primary skills gap that the executives identified was technical talent, followed by customer service expertise and analytics. It’s here where leveraging the expertise of a services partner can help an enterprise reimagine its customer experience strategy and better implement the social and mobile elements that will help drive the touchless customer experience.

Over the course of the buyer’s 15-year relationship with CSS Corp, the networking giant has sought to reinvent itself and its business model in order to stay competitive. This enterprise has transformed its traditional business into a provider of networking equipment to omnichannel enterprise solutions, which required partnerships to help pivot their business model. CSS Corp has been a partner across several key areas impacting social and mobile customer engagement. Most recently, CSS Corp developed a mobile app for customer support functions, including a dynamic knowledge base that can help customers self-serve using the app’s FAQs or schedule a call with a live agent (of which 60% of the volume is handled by CSS Corp employees).

As the Director of Customer Support for the company stated, “Our primary goal is customer experience, to be more relevant to our customers’ needs. On the internal side, it helps to improve the efficiency to find an answer to customer inquiries more easily.” He added, “CSS Corp is always very adaptive to us, they come up with good new ideas in the effort to move to a more revenue generating model, not just a cost center.” CSS Corp is also using social media analytics to improve on the capability—this is free data in the public realm that is not time consuming to gather or to analyze. The analytics used behind the scenes helps a live agent know when a cross-sell or upsell opportunity is likely and which services to recommend based on the customer’s data, which can be from a CRM file or sourced from a social media web crawler. This is an example of how customer engagement can be maximized when the right blend of talent and technology is injected into a design that seamlessly blends traditional and digital channels. This is the kind of design that’s required to pivot the contact center toward being a more important strategic part of the enterprise and not just a cost center.

Adopting a OneOffice strategy is the path to supporting a social, mobile, and touchless customer experience

The real-world example provided by the networking major reveals the benefits of taking a holistic approach to CX by integrating social and mobile with traditional channels.  However not all enterprise leadership teams will have the same drive to reinvent their traditional models to take advantage of new and powerful digital options. To take full advantage of social and mobile customer engagement, CX professionals must convince enterprise leaders to look at customer experience from a more holistic perspective. Enterprises need to start viewing social and mobile customer experience as investments that can improve experiences and create new revenue streams. The HfS Digital OneOffice, as defined in Exhibit 3, provides the conceptual framework within which such outcomes can be achieved.

The Digital OneOffice is where an integrated support operation has the digital capabilities to enable its organization to meet dynamically customer demand—as and when that demand occurs, and sometimes be smart enough to anticipate those needs even before they happen. This is enabled by interactive digital technologies to create those touchless interfaces with the customers.  Smart analytics and artificial intelligence enable organizations to anticipate these needs based on the ability to recognize patterns and inferences over time, but nothing can really substitute for human intelligence to bring customers and employees closer together, unimpeded by frustrating silos and legacy processes. 

OneOffice is realized when the needs and experiences of the customer are front and center to the entirety of business operations. The old barriers between the customer and corporate operational functions are dissolved and the constraints of legacy ERP systems are minimized. This allows the business to invest in digital technologies and capabilities that enable it to cater proactively to its customers’ needs, at the forefront of the market. This provides for greater flexibility and enables a rapid response if these needs change unexpectedly.

Exhibit 3: The Digital OneOffice conceptual framework

Source: HfS Research, 2018

Digital is all about creating new revenue channels using interactive technologies, but it is only effective when the business’ operations can be integrated into customer digital channels, to cater to customer needs in real time. Mobile and social technologies are huge enablers in supporting the seamless and autonomous flow of data between the customer facing front office and the enabling “OneOffice.”

The bottom line: Enterprises need to redesign their customer experience strategies, including integrating digital technologies with the contact center, in order to remain competitive.

Business imperatives have changed forever with the evolution of digital business models, which is having the impact of driving much smarter, value-driven partnerships for ambitious clients and service providers. As we discussed here, it’s critical for ambitious enterprises to identify service partners which can work with them on their digital customer experience journey – providers which understand the pivotal need for contact centers to embed the customer digital experience with traditional voice channels. 

For many enterprises, the partners which helped their businesses arrive at their current states may simply not be the same ones to get them to experience true OneOffice customer impact. A true digital business cannot succeed without unifying front, middle, and back offices – it’s no longer about being great at one component of customer engagement, it’s about integrating together the disparate parts to bring customers and employees as closely together as possible to create the best possible customer experience that wins out in cut-throat markets.