Interaction analytics and better customer experience
We have been talking about how CX or customer experience holds the key to business growth and reputation for quite some time. There is no doubt that happy customers are likely to be recurring and will most probably recommend your brand to anyone seeking similar products or services. Despite this awareness, the majority of companies are still grappling around when it comes to improving their customer experience and generating meaningful insights and analytics. The reason why the struggle continues for most businesses is that the ways of measuring customer experience (CX) are inefficient and often inaccurate. This is where using cutting-edge technology and real-time metrics is a better way of quantifying CX than the manual processes, which can produce skewed data.
Why measuring CX is difficult for businesses
Let’s say you book a cab through an aggregator app, and at the end of your trip, there is this rating system. The 5-star rating might not actually be an accurate reflection of the CX, and the customer is likely to move to any other provider if their service is perceived as better. Therefore, if you need to qualitatively quantify the customer experience, the journey-related data has to be integrated in a real-time, behaviour-driven manner, and the analytics should be used to shape the future CX of your organization. A large number of companies, especially smartphone apps, are now relying on surveys to generate data which is then analyzed to improve their CX. Such a hard numerical score or data based on parameters such as revenue is unlikely to yield insights into the finer points of interaction which could actually be making customers unhappy over the course of their journey.
Measuring Customer Experience through Journey Analytics
Instead of the conventional method of focusing on improvements at specific touchpoints, the best practice to improve customer experience is to monitor the entire interaction and identify the real pain points. This can be done by analyzing customer behaviour throughout the journey. This is where modern AI-driven Customer Journey Analytics tools are delivering the quantitative and qualitative data that can actually help businesses transform their CX. Let’s take a look at some of the points that are of critical importance here.
Quantifying the real value additions
Advanced customer journey analytics systems will help you identify the precise reasons that positively or negatively impact CX, even though the conventional touchpoints-based feedback might not reflect those. This awareness of KPIs will define the journey of a happy customer and differentiate it from others even though they both go through the same touchpoints.
Spot and eliminate the obstacles
Seemingly minor things such as slow website loading, few minutes of downtime or ‘transaction timed out’ things might not be reflected in the conventional feedback mechanism. However, they can drive away revenue worth millions of dollars for major firms. Journey analytics is going to deliver insights on the potential customer churn and help you eliminate the obstacles. The changes will plug the gap to stop others from going away.
Prioritizing the changes based on their revenue impact
CX has become a well-known and sought-after area of focus, but to satisfy customer demands, businesses can sometimes focus on areas with little financial value. Hence, even when you are making efforts, you don’t see much change in the actual revenue growth. The solution lies in prioritizing improvements in proportion to the financial impact. Fix the ‘transaction failed’ first or the ‘call hang-ups’ before focusing on revising your welcome message.
Use the right technology
Financial institutions, telecom service providers and other businesses with a large number of customers realized that deploying manual customer representatives to answer every call and respond to every chat/email query becomes difficult. It also gets extremely resource intensive over a period of time. Subsequently, IVR systems were introduced, which allowed the segregation of customer calls based on the nature of service required and improved the ease and efficiency of customer service operations. However, now the ideal way to go forward is rapidly changing to the integration of AI-driven voice assistance and analytics tools.
Instead of a typical IVR message, you are greeted by a human-like voice, and as per your concern, the voice assistant redirects your call to the right department/person. This makes the experience more pleasant and efficient. Another key aspect of the tech-driven change is that the conversation is analyzed for recognition of voice patterns and behaviour analytics. The AI-powered journey analytics system generates data on whether a customer sounded happy, annoyed or hurried. It also generates real-time insights into what made the customer happier or dissatisfied, which is then analyzed to improve the CX and generate better revenues.
Future forward
Customer experience is no longer about specific numbers but rather the holistic feel that a customer gets throughout their interaction with a brand on all platforms and assets. Hence, a holistic, unified and technology-driven system to link CX with quantitative metrics and analytics like Mihup Interaction Analytics will help your brand undertake the real CX transformation and gain an edge in today’s competitive business landscape.