The competitive race to deliver on escalating customer experience demands is nothing less than a war.
A war whose ‘weapons’ have become standardized, Persona Models, Audience Definitions, Customer Journey Maps, Customer Experience Blueprints, Roadmaps, Metrics such as NPS and Customer Effort Score and good old CSAT.
Enabled by an increasingly ‘Digital First But Not Digital Only Multichannel’ Digital Customer Operating Model.
All businesses are rushing to adopt these tools and techniques; end clients, consulting companies, systems integrators, creative agencies, CX specialists, independent consultants and we see a growing number of VP CX, Director CX and even Chief Experience Officers and Digital Customer Transformation Officers being appointed.
But the requirements of CX management have become more complex. Just recently we saw multi layered, hierarchal persona models with over 250 segments defined and 1000 sub-segment / audience definitions. Journey maps with journeys of 500 touchpoints, 150 moments of truth and 100 painpoints are not uncommon. Aligned with 150 products and 100+ organizational units. CX improvement programs with 20-30 metrics spread across 25 different organizational units delivering incentive bonuses across 10,000 employees. Digital analytics from 3m+ website, mobile app, social media visits per month. 1m contact center inbound calls per month and over 1.5m outbound messages by email, sms text and social media post a week.
It is all too complicated for humans alone to handle, no matter how valiant. So what’s next ? how do you win this war?
The answer is CXSWAT teams – Teams of highly skilled professionals, armed with the latest and greatest ‘CX software weapons’.
- Software to aid the insight to, understanding of and design of customer experiences (Persona models and Journey Maps).
- Software to integrate those ‘designs’ with the ‘execution touchpoint platforms’ supporting web, mobile, social, messaging, contact centers, kiosks. Stores and IOT devices and sensors.
- Software to take customer feedback via email surveys, social media surveys, sms surveys, phone surveys and ‘in app’ and ‘in web’ surveys.
- Software to take analytics data from those ‘execution touchpoint platforms’ and feed it back into the designs to validate, update and improve them and clarifying as per Mark Twain analogy “I ain’t what you know that will kill you, it ain’t what you don’t know, it’s what you know that ain’t so”
- Software to include Semantic Analysis and even Cognitive Sensing to further embellish your understanding of your customer’s needs, wants and expectations.
- And then Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Prescriptive and Predictive Analytics to recommend what action you should take next to deliver the most effective, easy and emotionally resonant experiences, even before they know what they want or need.
The number of software platforms rushing to help you with this is exploding. Software platforms and software and services outsourcers from Satmetrix, Medallia, MaritzCX, Inquba, Peoplemetrics, CXGroup, CXWorkout, Onepointglobal, UXPressia, Qualtrics, , Qrvey and even good old SurveyMonkey among many others. These have recently been complemented by the emergence of ‘CX Design’ platforms from Digital Experience leaders like Adobe and Pega. We are sure that Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAP etc al will not be far behind as will the contact center centric platform providers Verint, Nice, Nuance, Cisco and Genesys.
We have seen this movie before. Only Software enabled CX professionals are going to be able to meet this momentous challenge. Choose your tools carefully, apply them aggressively with the most capable CX professionals you can get, take that hill before your competition can figure out how to defend themselves.
CXSWAT is the only winning formula.
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