A Customer s Journey: Looking Down the Road in 2018

Transcription

1 A Customer s Journey: Looking Down the Road in 2018 How analytics is adapting to a changing customer service paradigm A Whitepaper by Nexidia

2 Taking the Journey with Your Customers The way we understand our customers will define how we serve them and, in turn, how they interact with our organizations. And, in an important feedback loop, our interpretation of those interactions influences how we shape their experiences with us. The interpretation of aggregated raw data to tease out meaningful, and preferably actionable, insights is the heart of interaction analytics. In the customer experience arena, this is applied to information collected about consumer behavior, objective factors, and subjective feedback. Customer experience information can be obtained for any interaction and across any timeframe. Ideally, for analytical purposes, the data would be drawn from all those touchpoints that make up the customer journey, from beginning to end (or at least to the current time). These touchpoints are far more than just interactions with the contact center they reach into every point at which a customer engages with a business. This means website activity, social media posts, any digital interaction on the spectrum. Analytical tools applied to the entirety of that data, creating what is known as journey analytics, can identify patterns and processes that would otherwise be missed in a more siloed analysis of individual interactions. As one of the most influential business research firms, Forrester, defines it, journey analytics combines quantitative and qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior. As we look down the road into 2018, understanding both the customer as an individual and the entirety of their journey is rapidly becoming the dominant service paradigm. However, most companies are still just beginning to grapple with the challenges and opportunities this entails. Let s take a look at how the modern customer journey will affect service organizations in 2018 and beyond. It s All About the Customer Once upon a time, there was the call center, with banks of phones and rows of agents fielding all manner of customer inquiries, requests and complaints. Then came the contact center, no longer limited to voice-only interactions. It was a natural progression, as communication technology underwent serial revolutions and options rapidly proliferated globally. The interpretation of aggregated raw data to tease out meaningful, and preferably actionable, insights is the heart of interaction analytics. These touchpoints are far more than just interactions with the contact center they reach into every point at which a customer engages with a business. Now, customers interact with companies through a multitude of channels, including , chat, self-service IVRs, traditional phone calls, social media, and more. In 2018, NICE analysts expect that video interactions will become increasingly commonplace as well. These various options have necessitated the creation of different digital environments to engage customers in their interaction comfort zones. The result has been an ongoing shift toward a more customer-focused contact center. 3

3 One aspect of that shift is the drive for more self-service channels. Cognitive automation is playing a large and growing role in facilitating rapid, adaptive and accurate customer service. This is already taking the form of cognitive interactive chatbots, virtual agents, rapid customer authentication, and more. DMG Consulting LLC, a leading research and consulting firm, predicts more than 100% growth year over year in the number of process automation customers by The opportunities for customer-centered artificial intelligence are clearly growing rapidly and will continue to do so, creating more fine-tuned customer experiences. A key source of information about those experiences is the voice of the customer direct and indirect feedback regarding the customer s perceptions. Self-initiated speech, texts and behavior during interactions, as well as prompted survey responses, can reveal sentiment, intent and expectations. Going forward, the capability to capture all manifestations of the voice of the customer, across new and diverse channels, will become even more critical for superior contact center services. Alongside the focus on interactions themselves, a wealth of hard data on the efficiency of services provided to the customer is becoming increasingly available thanks to desktop analytics. Information on the actual use of applications, tools and reference materials by employees highlights not just individual efficacy and training opportunities, but what everyday interactive and back office processes looks like and how they can be improved. We are increasingly able to glean better information about our customers and their experiences, while the channels through which they interact with the contact center are diversifying, changing and multiplying. This poses both a challenge and an opportunity, with the need to focus more than ever before on the complexities of the entire customer journey. It s All About the Journey The constantly evolving service environment includes much more than just new communication channels. As technology changes, customer behavior and even culture changes as well. New paradigms are created ever more rapidly regarding how mobile apps are used, the role of social media, the variety of cloud-based services, the functioning of online stores, and other aspects of our lives that we can t yet imagine. Alongside the focus on interactions themselves, a wealth of hard data on the efficiency of services provided to the customer is becoming increasingly available thanks to desktop analytics. The challenge for the contact and service centers of tomorrow is that those changes are not generally smooth, slow and incremental. They often lead to cumbersome attempts at specialized digital transformation projects or workaround patches, both of which tend to create siloed customer touchpoints. While such solutions may indeed allow companies to provide multichannel interactions, in the sense of having a tool for every channel at a given time, they do not have the customer experience metrics that account for the full customer journey. 4

4 At the same time, the customer experience is becoming more journey-oriented. Their interactions with a company to resolve a single issue, for example, can take place across multiple channels and touchpoints. They may involve many different processes and require the application of various policies. The future of contact centers is no longer multichannel; rather, it is omnichannel. It is the capability to provide coherent, seamless service across multiple channels, throughout the customer journey, while collecting holistic data on every step of their experience. The next step in the omnichannel customer service evolution is to replace the contact center with the experience center. Combining solutions that provide more robust insights into complete customer journeys, the experience center identifies opportunities to promote greater satisfaction, personalization and consistency across all channels. The experience center structure facilitates a rapid response to changing customer expectations, derived from a constant flow of journey insights, while also making it possible for companies to shape their customers journeys. In order to exercise that kind of influence on the complex customer journeys of 2018, organizations will need to incorporate insightful and innovative analytics into their experience centers. The next step in the omnichannel customer service evolution is to replace the contact center with the experience center Analytics for a Complex Age In what author Jim Blasingame called the Age of the Customer, consumers expect businesses to satiate their needs quickly and trouble-free, despite exponential growth in available data and interaction channels. Coherent, actionable insights for meeting these expectations can only be obtained with effective analytics for each interaction, across journey touchpoints, in context of the wider customer base, and with a view of process efficiencies. Typical customer interactions produce waves of valuable structured and unstructured omnichannel information, especially passive or implicit feedback, for analysis. Identifying and heeding the emotional cues embedded in such interactions is a key component of understanding the voice of the customer. Therefore, speech analytics with its focus on context, language use, and speech patterns is becoming more sophisticated and more in demand than ever before. As DMG observed in a forward-looking 2017 report, There is great momentum in the speech analytics market. However, the market is also highly competitive, with many vendors fighting to win new customers and seats. More broadly, in 2018 companies will be increasingly interested in enriching their analytics solutions with the latest in speech analytics, omnichannel analytics (chat, , surveys, social media, etc.), desktop analytics, and adaptive analytics. Integrating an in-depth analysis of agent activity and metadata, on the one hand, and customer interactions, on the other, increases the value of each and provides insights that were previously inaccessible. 5

5 The ultimate goal of applied analytics at the experience center is, of course, providing customers with the best possible experience through personalization and engagement. This is what the trend toward adaptive analytics is all about. In large part, a better customer experience is actually dependent on a better understanding of our employees and their motivations. In-house performance data, speech analytics, desktop analytics and feedback provide the necessary insight that allows us to match them with specific customers for optimal outcomes. In addition, comprehensive analytics gives supervisors real-time visibility into employee, team and overall center performance for each channel, and across channels. They can track, manage and report on the overall workflow more comprehensively and accurately, which can in turn influence workforce coaching and process optimization. Shaping the Journey Connecting the dots of customer interaction analytics, contact circumstances (such as online, transaction, social media, search and CRM data), and desktop analytics at each touchpoint and over time paints an omnichannel picture of entire customer journeys. The accuracy of performance metrics (such as an employee s skill-versus-will rating, process cycle times, and first touch resolution rates) increases, the event triggers and root causes of certain behaviors are revealed, and predictive modeling becomes far more valuable. More robust business-critical insights can be drawn from customer journey analytics for application in role-specific charts, reports, alerts and dashboards, as well. The most powerful customer journey analytics, drawing on historical and deep-dive rootcause analysis of collated data, provides real-time guidance for experience center agents and identifies trends over time for preemptive strategic action. An increasing emphasis on shaping the journey in these ways can be expected in 2018, as a more holistic view of customer interactions becomes commonplace. Evidence-based what-if scenarios, predictive analytics, and the like will become integral to enhanced personalization and efficiency in future customer journeys for the benefit of both customers and service providers. Empowering Analytics: Leadership for 2018 The final question, as we look ahead into 2018, is: What type of analytics solutions will provide the holistic, journey-wide and comprehensive approach to service that customers expect? The Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Analytics Visioning Platforms, Q report provides the following answer: Vendors that take a technology-agnostic approach to integration can deliver insights at speed across all permutations of journeys. And measuring business impact can help companies drive business results and CX differentiation. Vendors that take a technologyagnostic approach to integration can deliver insights at speed across all permutations of journeys The NICE Customer Journey Analytics solution was cited by Forrester Research in a sector report for the ability to support enterprise-wide journey analytics programs and for its scalability across channels. As Forrester observes, The [NICE] platform lets users slice and dice journey data to visualize moments of truth, pain points, and KPI changes. 6

6 It also lets users observe multiple journeys for a single customer. The platform is unique in connecting journeys to agent performance (using speech and text analytics) and employee metrics. The Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Analytics Visioning Platforms, Q and The Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Analytics Orchestration Platforms, Q reports gave NICE s solutions top scores for journey design and planning, as well as services, client experience and usability criteria. This is a result of the NICE Customer Journey Analytics platform empowering companies with total visibility into the customer journey, including the paths traveled, real-time bottlenecks, efficiency opportunities, and the voice of the customer. Contributing to the leading position NICE holds is its scalable, integrated and omnichannel speech analytics technology with Nexidia Analytics. As a comprehensive solution, the analyzed interaction data is drawn from phone calls, web chats, customer surveys and more to generate faster and more accurate customer insights. Underpinning the next-generation analytics is an artificial intelligence technology that leverages neural networks and natural language processing, becoming progressively more capable of identifying the drivers of customer satisfaction. As a result, as noted in DMG Consulting s Speech Analytics Product and Market Report, NICE Nexidia speech analytics solutions accounted for a clearly dominant share of the market (over 45 percent in 2017). The recognition of NICE leadership in the customer journey and speech analytics markets in 2017 highlights the coming trends, innovations and challenges of 2018 and what will be needed to meet them. Copyright , Nexidia Inc. All rights reserved. This manual and any software described herein, in whole or in part may not be reproduced, translated or modified in any manner, without the prior written approval of Nexidia Inc. Any documentation that is made available by Nexidia Inc. is the copyrighted work of Nexidia Inc. or its licensors and is owned by Nexidia Inc. or its licensors. This document contains information that may be protected by one or more U.S. patents, foreign patents or pending applications. Nexidia, Nexidia Interaction Analytics, the Nexidia logo, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Nexidia Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other product names and brands mentioned in this manual may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby acknowledged. Nexidia Headquarters +1 (866) Piedmont Road NE, Building Two, Suite 400, Atlanta, GA 30305, USA Nexidia UK +44 (0) Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BF, United Kingdom 2018 Nexidia, Inc. All rights reserved. NEXIDIA and NEXIDIA INTERACTION ANALYTICS are registered trademarks of Nexidia, Inc. The Nexidia logo, ((!)) bug logo and NEURAL PHONETIC SPEECH ANALYTICS are trademarks of Nexidia, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The Nexidia products and services described in these materials may be covered by Nexidia s United States patents and/or other patents pending. nexidia.com