Looking beyond 'experience'

An ongoing dialogue with customers that engender familiarity and emotional attachment to a brand, product, or service can lead to long-term loyalty

Many organisations view customer service as an important way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. However, as the number of communication channels and devices increase, so do the challenges of engaging consumers effectively and delivering consistent, contextual, and personalised service to them. The most effective method of ensuring loyal and engaged customers is through the process known as customer engagement optimisation.

At present there is a lot of confusion in the understanding of customer experience and customer engagement. Customer engagement encompasses an ongoing relationship with a product or brand, as opposed to an experience at a single point in time. Customer engagement is a more proactive approach. Companies don't have to wait for a customer to act before they engage - they can reach out to consumers to inspire purchases, build brand recognition, solicit feedback and gather information. The idea is to build an ongoing dialogue with customers that engender familiarity and some level of emotional attachment to a brand, product, or service.

Customer engagement describes the level of interaction that individual consumers have, either directly or indirectly, with a particular company or brand over time. The term includes all the interactions that occur along the customer journey, whether those "touches" happen before, during, or after a transaction, and whether they occur by phone, online, or in person. It can also include customer interactions that may be independent of specific transactions, such as general endorsements or criticisms in social media or comments posted on review sites.

Customer engagement optimisation can be predicated on three fundamental requirements:

• Consistency: Each communications channel that the organisation supports should be consistent in appearance, style, messaging, and experience. The goal is to deliver the same level of feeling, responsiveness, and knowledge in each channel and provide consistent answers across channels. This means all channels must draw on the same knowledge base and customer profiles.
   
• Continuity: Customers should be able to continue a process seamlessly across devices and channels, without having to start over again if they transition from one to another. Increasingly, customers expect this kind of connection across devices and channels.
   
• Customisation: The one-size-fits-all approach to customer service might seem convenient and cost-effective for a business but ultimately it may not be the most effective.

Customers expect organisations to understand their needs and personalise their interactions. Ultimately, the best channels and approaches for engagement are not necessarily the ones that are the cheapest, but those that deliver the necessary information to the customer when and where he/she is seeking it, and are the ones that customers prefer.

Organisations need skilled and empowered employees who can deliver high quality personalised customer experiences along with executive champions to support and drive change, along with a strategy design that is built with customers in mind. The idea is to identify the different journeys that customers take and deliver tailored experiences along the way by providing relevant context. To help execute on this strategy, organisations need technology that can show who is doing what, when, and how in their day-to-day operations. This information can help organisations drive operational efficiencies, meet service goals, and improve processing quality and effectiveness across the entire operation - from online, mobile, and social channels to branches and stores, and all the way through to back-office operations. This is what customer engagement optimisation does.

Business intelligence teams can engage employees across the organisation by providing them with clearer information that can drive a better understanding of consumer needs now, with more accurate forecasting to meet their needs in the future; IT teams can leverage existing systems to provide extended capabilities to meet business challenges; marketing teams can engage customers using the channels they prefer, when they prefer, helping to increase loyalty and retention while driving revenue; operations teams can engage employees by providing them with the ability to see a single view of the customer and work collaboratively to make every interaction count; strategy teams can engage employees by presenting a single view of the customer for driving revenue opportunities, plans for products and services, and process enhancements that align customer needs with company goals and product development teams can engage customers, capture preferences about product features and capabilities, and then funnel that information into research and development staff.

Customer engagement optimisation exists in a spectrum of experiences and is truly customer driven. It helps organisations transform the customer experience by delivering consistent, contextual, and personalised experiences that count, no matter which channels customers use to engage. It helps them broaden their focus from delivering single-point-in-time customer experiences to driving customer engagement, loyalty - and ultimately - revenue. Decision makers today need to clearly differentiate between customer engagement optimisation and customer experience. Companies need to embrace this through the effective use of analytics to ensure success and growth.

Anil Chawla
managing director, EIS, Verint Systems India