Data, technology, and people stimulate digital transformation and drive CX

Online media’s emergence has shaped customers’ behavior over the last two decades. The tech-savvy generation interacting over multiple channels also spurred the need for omnichannel services, challenging enterprises to rapidly adopt several technologies simultaneously. Cognizant of the opportunities, service providers came to the rescue, and kaboom!—enterprises are witnessing multi-fold revenue growth with digital-transformation-led customer experience (CX) taking center stage. In the process, CX leaders and service providers have realized the importance of maintaining the balance between data, technology, and people to drive successful CX transformation.

Today, service providers are investing significantly in digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), analytics, and IoT to achieve data-driven business outcomes. Technology helps enterprises accommodate changing customer behavior by tracking customer footprints across multiple channels and creating a distinctive customer experience.

At a leaders’ discussion panel on digital transformation driving customer experience for 3x revenue growth organized by NASSCOM, the panelists (Akhil Agarwal, COO, IGT Solutions; Anil Chawla, MD, Customer Engagement Solutions, India & SAARC, Verint Systems; and Vikas Bhalla, EVP & Head of Insurance Business, EXL) addressed the importance of maintaining a balance between data, technology, and people.

People are the difference between a good customer-centric culture and a great one

Mr. Agarwal emphasized bringing data and technology together as it helps derive patterns of the ever-changing customer needs. Making sense of what the data is telling us, analyzing it, and drafting actionable insights requires people (domain experts and agents). A domain expert seeks to understand how a customer interacts with the business and where the pain points are, bringing the emotional intelligence needed to read between the lines and speak the customer’s language.

Technology solves a lot of problems, but human intelligence or knowledge can’t be eliminated.

— Akhil Agarwal, COO, IGT Solutions

Mr. Chawla further added the importance of feeding the right data to the right systems at the right time. He described how leveraging data and technology helps service providers gain and disseminate contextual knowledge across the organization, particularly to the domain experts and agents, who effectively solve the customers’ problems at any point of the engagement.

People and technology go hand in hand to drive CX’s success

As the discussion continued, the panelists mentioned how important it is to maintain a balance between people and technology. There was a consensus among the panelists that the combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence results in greater CX. Technology helps systems centralize customer data, making it easier to access across the organization, drive insights, and make data-driven business decisions. Needless to say, the right decisions help provide customer-centric CX services and create a personalized experience for every customer engagement.

Mr. Chawla emphasized how critical it is to handle the co-existence of human agents and bots. While the bots continue to handle the data-related situations with built-in algorithms, agents handle the complexities with empathy. In a recent study on the future of experience in a hybrid reality, 83% of the digital transformation leaders and 55% of the digital transformation laggards in Exhibit 1 agreed that humans+bots is the new staffing model for BPO, indicating that leaders are keen to drive the right balance of automated and human-led CX.

Exhibit 1. Digital transformation leaders see the new model of CX as a blend of humans and automation

Sample: 300 CX decision makers
Source: HFS Research, 2022

Legacy environment, fragmented systems, and a lack of data flow are the most significant challenges driving digital transformation

There was a consensus among the panelists that the legacy environment, fragmented and siloed operations, and lack of data flow are the most significant challenges for CX leaders. A legacy environment creates hurdles in the process of adoption of digital technologies. It is also necessary for the organizations to handle the change management across departments and work as OneOffice™ to attain CX success. Although data management plays a crucial role in helping organizations analyze customer behavior, the lack of data flow across departments makes it difficult to capture the customer footprint across the channels.

The Bottom Line: The pandemic churned the BPM industry’s digital transformation wave. Human intelligence, technology, and data are the critical factors of customer experience success. Organizations should build their experience strategies, maintaining and prioritizing the balance between these factors.

Customer experience has a new dimension. In the words of Mr. Bhalla, customer experience now demands hyper-personalization; non-intrusive, digital deflection; and omnichannel services, leaving no choice for organizations except to go digital. However, organizations must overcome the barriers of change management, technology adoption, budget constraints, and a lack of skilled talent to gain momentum and reap the benefits of digital-led CX.