Customer Engagement Trends

Brands are built on the success of their customer service. Instead of it being a responsive measure to deal with complaints, companies are learning to take personalised, empathetic customer care right to the heart of everything they do. This comes at the right time because customer expectations for hyper-personalised service from businesses continue to increase.

Winning the trust and loyalty of customers depends on how well businesses across every industry utilise their customer data and empower their teams to make every digital and physical engagement matter.

We are here to help you explore the art of customer service and engagement. We understand the importance of creating a more unified, intelligent data ecosystem to spark innovation across customer service teams. As your customers’ needs evolve, we can partner with you to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to delight.

Create outstanding experiences in the moments that matter

Gaining a customer for life happens when organisations make every interaction matter. Whether that is reacting efficiently to a customer query, complaint, or need, or proactively taking steps to offer a new product or service. The key is to personalise the experience. Better understand your customers to create personalised journeys and lasting brand loyalty.

Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper-personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope in which companies can reach customers in new ways.

Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer delight and long-term loyalty? Let us examine this now.

Understand your customers

It takes 12 positive customer experiences to negate the poor impression left behind from a single unpleasant experience. There is no margin for error when it comes to delivering customer care. A crowded marketplace of competitors, coupled with the number of digital channels open to consumers to voice their opinions and experiences with brands (both positive and negative) means that a single missed opportunity to delight a customer can have a significant impact on your brand reputation.

Employees use data to personalise the experience of the customer. The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this is not always achievable due to time and budget constraints.

Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas.

Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas can allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively in order to better align customer treatment strategies.

Embrace omnichannel experiences

The ways that customers engage with your business continue to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.

Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to business personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. Additionally, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.

Make the most of innovation to personalise

AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.

Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.

The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity.

Personalise – but do not overdo it

It can be a fine line to tread between providing a customer with bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy. Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.

At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers about how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.

Do not lose the human touch

The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to developing the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles, and offering bespoke offers and interactions.

However, businesses should not over-rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customers that are personal and valued.

Personalise your customer’s experiences

The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.

We work with customers across industries to implement modular solutions that fit into existing customer service ecosystems to unlock new personalisation capabilities.

Why use Dynamics 365?

Align sales and marketing

Sales and marketing components can work together to help you better understand a customer’s needs and address those needs through the right marketing channels. Some of the ways these two functions can work together to help you are:

• Connecting with buyers at the right time and through their preferred channels
• Determining what types of messages to send to customers and when to deliver them.
• Prioritising and nurturing the right leads, ensuring a smooth hand-off from marketing to sales.

Increase sales productivity

The right CRM software allows your sales team to find, prioritise the right leads, and deliver insights on when and where your sales teams engage with customers. These systems can work together to:

• Predict future sales and budgets so you can plan accordingly.
• Help your agents streamline the sales process—from initial contact to closing the deal.
• Have client data centralised so that agents have access to real-time information and can deliver solutions quicker.
• Offer your sales staff mobility options that work across browsers and devices.

Build better customer relationships

Bringing customer service and sales together helps you determine and predict your customers’ preferences and makes it easier for your buyers to interact and trust doing business with you. When these two solutions combine, they can help you:

• Get insights into your customers’ journey so you can meet their expectations.
• Provide mobile applications for your clients and staff no matter what device they are using.
• Offer customers an easy-to-use, self-service portal so they can be in control of their data and quickly find answers to their questions.

Get an end-to-end view of your customers

Turn data into insights to keep your current customers happy or connect with new prospects. Other benefits include the ability to:

• Track past customer sales and purchase history.
• Offer benefits to loyal customers.
• Identify future leads.

Use a common platform

CRM takes disparate customer relationship software functions and brings them all together for seamless management. Other common platform benefits are:

• Customisable dashboards that offer up-to-date business intelligence.
• Centralised customer data, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
• Options that enable growth into other global markets.
• Easy integration with other software solutions.

Get visibility into customers

The more you know your customer’s preferences, the more likely you are to gain their trust and, eventually, their loyalty. Giving your team visibility into what makes customers tick will give you the inside edge over the competition. Put the customer at the centre of your business with CRM software that helps you:

• Create customised messages for customers according to their needs.
• Set up prompts so agents (in the office and field) know how often a customer has been contacted and what information they have received.
• Learn about how customers prefer to be contacted: social, email, text, or phone.

Offer customer portals

Online self-service portals put customers in control of their data, help them learn about product information, and let them track account activity. Companies have grown to realise that as vital as it is to provide their staff with an online company portal, offering it to clients makes it easier to engage with them as well. Here are three other reasons why customer portals for clients make sense:

• Clients can create and review requests. Whether it is a request for support or order information, you can set up your client portal, so your customers get quick and easy answers. It also cuts down on the number of times that they have to reach out to you to troubleshoot issues.
• Your customers take charge of their data. Put your customers in charge of updating their own information. Not only will their data be more accurate, but you will also be able to take client data management off your staff’s to-do list.
• Automated contact. Contact form information used to be dumped into a database, waiting to be accessed by staff when they needed it. You can now automate contact forms for quick customer response, and to kick off nurture campaigns and workflows, too.

Marketing: Improve your customers’ journey

Generate multichannel marketing campaigns, nurture sales-ready leads, and align your sales and marketing teams with planning and tracking tools that integrate with your existing apps and services.

Top ecommerce trends for 2023

ECommerce is one of the most rapidly evolving industries in the world. In order to remain relevant and competitive, businesses must stay up to date with the latest eCommerce trends as well as the ever-changing expectations of their customers. You risk losing sales if you fall behind.

A revolution has taken place in retail because of e-commerce. With its evolution, online shopping has become easier for modern-day consumers and has met their changing needs.

In its early years, ecommerce had relatively limited capabilities. Those days are over. Whether it is customied products, improved return policies, or improved integration, all these changes (among others) have revolutionized ecommerce. And the ecommerce industry will only continue to evolve in 2023.

In 2023, take advantage of these emerging trends in ecommerce to take your business to the next level.

 10 Tech Trends to Expect in 2023

With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, 2022 was hit hard by the digital revolution. Technology is enabling more people than ever to stay connected both personally and professionally, putting pressure on the global economy to keep up. As we approach 2023, let us take a look at ten trends to keep an eye on.

The Neuroscience of Customer Experience (CX) & Digital Transformation

There is a new CX balancing act—the need for digital and a want for human.

After 15-years of doing retail mystery shops and lecturing Customer Experience (CX) at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), Ian Rheeder shares the human science behind great Customer Experience Management (CEM). In this short article, he shares an avalanche of brain-science that has made the topic of CX easier to understand and implement.

There are just two things that are important to our business—a clear strategy and great customer experience (CX). From advertising to every interaction, CX is the overall customer experience (or accumulative perception) of our company. Service is just part of CX.

Traditionally, Customer Experience Management (CEM) was always designed before Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Senior management was heavily involved in the design of the CX (the customer journey), thereafter, CX was monitored using CRM at all touch-points. This means CX has always lead CRM. So CRM tracked CX and improved CX at every touch-point. However, because of the digital transformation of the hybrid-workplace, this traditional CX process must be challenged. Advanced CRM software now needs to be imbedded into CX from the start. There is a new CX balancing act—the need for digital; and a want for human touch.

So let’s now look at how we can use the below top-10 golden nuggets, spawned by neuroscience, to improve the world of CX.

1. The human brain is not a business organ; it’s a social-organ:

2. Happiness boosts innovation & boosts sales:

3. The Last TouchPoint is Lasting:

4. STOP Trying To Delight Your Customers:

5. Mirror Neurons:

6. Humans are pretty switched off consciously:

7. The opposite emotion of Trust is Disgust:

8. The opposite emotion of love is indifference:

9. We can only do one new thing at a time:

10. Best way to build trust:

To monitor our CX (using CRM), the two best metrics by far are the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Scores (CES). Thereafter Time To Resolution (TTR) or First Time Fix Rates (FTFR).

Ian Rheeder

Ian draws on the practical knowledge of 17-years of training marketing teams, was the founding member of the SA Marketing Association, founding member of CXSA, and was The Past President of the Professional Speakers Association.  Before starting his own marketing consultancy in 2005, Ian was the marketing & sales director of the global zipper giant, YKK. Before that he gained his experience consulting to over 30 international brands.

Digital Transformation & Customer Experience (CX)

Background

In today’s customer-led business world, most businesses are not facing digital disruption –

they’ve already been disrupted by Industry 4.0. In fact, digital tech and customer centricity is not a differentiator anymore, it’s the new foot-in-the-door of survival. In 2022 a massive 28% of consumers are weekly buying groceries online[1].

Bridging the offline-online divide, consumers are walking around with super-computers in their hands (cell phones). With 24% of consumers opening apps when in a store, and 18% taking photos, digital convenience and efficiency has fast become a basic human need[2].

Blinded by their Industry 4.0 Digital Strategy though, many companies are simultaneously losing the human touch, and it’s now Industry 5.0’s challenge to make Industry 4.0 feel more human. Why? Because there’s definitely “The need for Digital” – yet digital must be balanced with “The want for Human” too. But not all businesses are purely on-line. Business-to-business (B2B) sectors are in need of more human than digital—so it’s important to get the balance right for your particular business model.

Would it help if you knew your customers’ deep personal preferences?

To launch an improved customer experience, big-data can be scraped and analysed. In the hope that they will wipe-out your existing business model, this is what new competitors are currently focusing on. As Google Chrome phases out cookies in 2024, collecting first-party data isn’t a maybe, it’s a must to personalise the customer journey.

Using data analytics, businesses can pivot when they have a detailed 360⁰ view of their customers’ recent behaviour. This is especially true when the artificial intelligence (AI) can predict a customer’s next move or request. In this way, customers and companies co-create products and improve touch-points, raising the barrier-to-entry for disruptive new competitors.

Will you be relevant in 3-years from now?

The biggest fear for most CEOs, is remaining relevant in the near future (this includes price relevance). Thankfully, most CEOs also agree that their competitive advantage—or way to customer loyalty—will be based on superior customer experience (CX).

Let’s look at six tried and proven steps to embrace Digital Transformation, whilst improving CX[3].

[1] Hootsuite, 2022

[2] Gartner, 2022

[3] Hernandez, J. and Clamp, A. (2017).  KPMG. Customer First. How to create a customer centric business and compete in the digital age.

Step 1 of 6: Creating a Digital Customer Strategy

The first of the 6-steps are for the EXCO to describe to themselves, what the end Digital Transformation goal should look like.

1. 360° Customer Profile: The goal is a single customer view, allowing you to treat every customer differently. The key is to consolidate all the rich customer data in one single database or place.

2. Merging Data Ecosystems: Social Media data, browsing data, with internal financial data needs to merge. Then get decision engines to model and predict behaviour.

3. Focus on Customer’s Core Issues: Use customer insights—especially their biggest issues—to lead focus-groups, and innovate better solutions, before your competitors do.

4. Support Products with Digital Services: Because more customers are discovering the efficiencies and cost-savings of online, digital is the low-hanging-fruit. Globally, 58% of those aged between 16-64 buy something online weekly; and in South Africa it’s still very impressive at 47%[1]. Entice customers to interact with you on a daily basis, allowing you to collect first-party data, helping you improve on the customer journey.

5. A new Evolved Business Model: The Apple iPhone was successful mainly due to the App Store platform of mind-blowing apps. This “platform” was successful because thousands of app developers designed complimentary products to load onto the iPhone. This is where your ecosystem of “partners” collaborates to deliver your overall value proposition.

[1] Hootsuite, 2022

Step 2 of 6: Creating a Digital Customer Experience (CX) Action Plan

To create a competitive advantage, the fusion-team of leaders (digital & marketing experts) must first define their vision of what the CX journey must look like, and roughly how CX will be measured. A brainstorm is required to discuss how leading, digital-enabled journeys can be applied to the business. The five stages of Design Thinking would have been used to guide the CX process (i.e. Empathise, Design, Ideate, Prototype, Test). A guiding principle is to first get the basics right at every touchpoint, and then only think about the “delight” factors[1]. An overwhelming majority of CEOs agree that the way to customer loyalty will be based on superior digital CX.

1. Define Vision: Unifying vision in line with brand values and company culture. Make sure your company is capable of delivering.

2. Customer Research (voice): Combined operational, social media data, and feedback from (i.e. NPS, CES comments).

3. Balance Return-on Investment: Decide where more will need to be spent and where to cut back on costs. CX is not all about growing sales, but also reducing costs. Because “Consumers punish bad service more readily than they reward delightful service[2].”, focus on getting the basics right.

4. Design Thinking for best CX: Stanford Business School’s Design Thinking Model is critical. The 5-steps are: Empathise (research), Design, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

5. Execute change: Changing the customer journey normally requires a change in business structure (i.e. people structure, operating models, digital processes). This often requires “silo busting” – making sure that all departments work together “digitally” to serve the customer journey.

[1] Dixon, M., Freeman, K. and Toman, N. (2010). STOP Trying to Delight Your Customers, Harvard Business Review, July-August.

[2] Dixon, M., Freeman, K. and Toman, N. (2010:116). STOP Trying to Delight Your Customers, Harvard Business Review, July-August.

Step 3 of 6: Digitise Front Office: Sales, Marketing & Service

Digitising Sales, Marketing & Service (front office’s operations) must operate as an integrated-seamless whole. This is especially important as advertising could have created a “service anticipation gap’. The front office —in real time —must have a view of the end-to-end supply chain, and keep the customer informed of on-time-delivery-in-full (OTDIF). Great selling is service, and vice versa. For instance, if the service is excellent, the customer may easily purchase more. What’s more, the majority of a salesperson’s time today should be spent on other activities (OTDIF); and a service staff’s time may be spent on selling.

1. Human Understanding & Digital Marketing: Do off-line (human) research to understand customers’ needs. Then do your data analytics and find the insights to refine the customer journey.
2. Human & Digital Sales Segments: Buying habits are changing. Get your off-line (human) sales channels (face-to-face segment) perfected whilst also focusing on perfecting your digital sales channels (digital segments). Capture valuable data on your CRM platform.
3. Transform Customer Service: Digitally integrate your service (field service & contact centre) so customers experience a seamless-low-effort experience, no matter who or what channel they contact. As AI advances, use chatbots more.
4. Omni-Channel Integration: Mobile digital channels are most common, but companies must plan around both mobile and natural human language/conversation channels. Most customers attempt self-service first (i.e. AI chatbots/virtual agents), because e-mail response is slow and call centre queues are long. What is crucial here for the CMO, is to blend creativity with data to prescribe new tactics and predict future needs.

Step 4 of 6: Digitally Connect Your Entire Enterprise

Between 1998 to 2019 Apple expanded from 8 to 17 different business units (SBUs), fragmenting the organisation and creating silos.  So Apple’s leaders had to become cross-functional experts, and were forced to deliberately collaborate with other SBUs. They had to be deeply knowledgeable about all SBUs[1]. In short, the EXCO had to be a fusion-team of experts to digitally connect the entire enterprise.

Remember, the main objective of digital transformation is to make more sales through customer centricity. The key is to design a digital system that supports both the employee and the customer. It’s generally accepted that an “outside-in” process is key, where the customer creates the journey. However, the “inside-out” approach is arguably more important today, because this inside, end-to-end value chain, needs to be innovated and supported by employees too. The entire value chain must be connected from back-office (off-stage) to the front-office (on-stage)—all connected using data flow. The Aberdeen Research Group has observed a 270% faster annual growth rate for those companies who have digitally connected a seamless value chain[2]. The advantages are seamless service, responsiveness, OTDIF, agility, efficiency and consistency.  Aberdeen have also cited that 269% higher chance of retention vs. companies with a weak omni-channel strategy. What’s more, the customer lifetime value (CLV) of someone who buys both in-store and online is 30% higher.

1. Analyse The Customer & The Brand: Using your brand positioning strategy, plan consistent pricing and personalised customer experiences at every touch point.
2. Relevant Products & Services: Ensure that the value chain delivers consistently, with special attention to on-time-delivery-in-full and invoiced-correctly (OTDIFIC). Build partnerships with companies in the value chain to increase speed and OTDIFIC.
3. Breakdown Technology Silos for Seamless Service: Use big-data analytics to give a 360⁰ view of the customers, whilst allowing omni-channels to anticipate and interact.
4. Breakdown People Silos for Seamless Service: Work on employee engagement and align all functions to serve each other internally, whilst also serving the customer. Silo busting requires trust[3] (the best money maker on earth), digital data flow, communication, shared goals (KPIs) and incentives.

[1] Podolny, J. M., & Hansen, M. T. (2020). How Apple is organized for innovation. Harvard Business Review, 98(6), 86-95.

[2] KPMG, 2007:23

[3] Haederle, M. (2010). The Best Fiscal Stimulus: Trust. Miller-McCune.

Step 5 of 6: Data Analytics & Insights

The use of predictive analytics is doubling every year, and has become the top area of investment[1]. To improve sales and retention, the CX must be data fed with customer data and market (i.e. competitor) data. Data-driven insights, using complex algorithms embedded at touch-points, will help predict a customer’s next request. 

1. Scope you data analytic strategy: The company’s technology capabilities must be aligned with data and analytics. Of key importance is to align your company’s objectives and KPIs with the data strategy.
2. Technology: Link internal and external data that represents the “voice of the customer” and internal “voice of the value chain”.
3. Data Models & Analytic Engines: Data analysts need to create data models, and then share the data using visualisation tool. Data is scraped from Social Media, ‘Voice of The Employee’ (sales & service) and ‘Voice of The Customer’.
4. Interpret Insights: The company can observe dashboards of key metrics and proactively action system-wide changes to improve the customer journey.

[1] KPMG, 2017:28

Step 6 of 6: Digital Transformation

To improve your business model, the strong forces of technology cannot be ignored anymore. Delivering Digital Transformation has become easier due to IoT, broad bandwidth, the metaverse, cloud computing, social media, the ability to analyse data in real-time and mobile technology. In South Africa, over 80% of Internet is accessed with a cell phone and over 75% of banking is done on a mobile device. To deliver end-to-end digital transformation, consider these steps.

1. Cell Phone Channel is key: Most websites are accessed using a mobile phone, so make sure the user-centric experience (UE) and user interface (UI) reflects perfectly on your platforms.
2. Customer Digital Platforms: Sales, Marketing, Service systems need to scrape data into the cloud. Consider online CRM systems to compliment your cloud-based strategy. This digital transformation should include natural language chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA), virtual reality and augmented reality (i.e. Google Maps, SnapChat).

Don’t forget that humans are 80% emotional and only 20% logical[1]. Which means that you need to empathetically engage all their senses. Secondly, the human brain is more ‘social’ than any other species[2], so the company that thrives at Digital Transformation will connect and socialise better than their rivals. Lastly, the missing link for today’s CX, are highly trained staff, who are not just empathetic, but solve problems fast[3].

[1] Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Putnam.

[2] Gilbert, D.T. (2012). The Science behind the smile. Harvard Business Review. 90, 1/2.

[3] Dixon, M., Ponomareff, L., Turner, S. and DeLisi, R. (2017). Kick-Ass Customer Service. Harvard Business Review. Vol. 95, Issue No.1.

Ian Rheeder

Ian draws on the practical knowledge of 17-years of training marketing teams, was the founding member of the SA Marketing Association, founding member of CXSA, and was The Past President of the Professional Speakers Association.  Before starting his own marketing consultancy in 2005, Ian was the marketing & sales director of the global zipper giant, YKK. Before that he gained his experience consulting to over 30 international brands.