‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,’ once said Benjamin Franklin. Without proper strategic planning, companies can’t prioritize which resources they must gather and how they should be allocated to achieve their goals. Unpredictable market conditions make this difficult — hence, quarterly and annual plans companies build and execute must be agile enough to adapt to changes impacting company activities.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has impacted organizations of all sizes and within all industries. While pandemics are rather rare events, companies are often impacted by many other change factors, including new regulations, change in customer preferences, and natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes and earthquakes). In many ways, COVID-19 was a wake-up call reminding CX and other business leaders that while planning is important, equally important is the agility to quickly revise and update plans to maximize the likelihood of achieving business objectives.
In May 2020, Aberdeen surveyed 420 CX leaders (service, marketing, sales, and commerce) around the world to study the impact of business resiliency in addressing the effects of COVID-19. Figure 1 shows that companies have been impacted by the pandemic-related events in different ways. Fifty-six percent (56%) of organizations reported a negative impact on their activities, while 29% reported a positive impact.
Figure 1: COVID-19 Had Varying Impact on Customer Demand Across Organizations
Organizations in industries such as retail, hospitality and airlines were more likely to report a negative impact on customer demand while e-commerce, healthcare, government, and public sector institutions reported an increase. Since change affects organizations in different ways and different scales, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach companies can use to respond to change impacting their activities. Rather, each organization must assess the unique changes impacting their activities in order to recalibrate their plans to achieve their goals.
Visibility into Customer Insights
To understand the changes impacting customer behavior, companies must establish timely, unified and accurate visibility into customer interactions across all channels and business departments. Doing so allows firms to rapidly identify potential gaps in customer behavior they need to address to ensure customer satisfaction.
Findings from Aberdeen’s May 2020 Business Resiliency study validated the importance of establishing contextual insights. Figure 2 shows that the top strategy companies use to guide their contact center activities to manage the impact of COVID-19 is establishing better visibility into all customer interactions.
Figure 2: Top Five Post-COVID Priorities for Contact Center Leaders
Empowered with contextual insights into customer behavior and expectations, CX leaders can utilize power of agility. Specifically, they can gauge what adjustments they need to make to their CX plans and strategies in light of the changes affecting business activities. To navigate this process successfully, CX leaders must first ensure that the data used to establish contextual insights into customer behavior is unified across all relevant data sources (e.g., CRM, contact center, e-commerce, voice of the customer, back-office, billing).
To make contextual customer insights more actionable, CX leaders must use them to build and manage customer journey maps. Journey maps allow CX leaders with more granular visibility into changes in customer behavior across various stages of interactions with the company. These maps can also be tailored to specific segments to uncover how disrupting events such as natural disasters or COVID-19 are affecting the expectations of customer in each segment.
Savvy CX leaders use analytics to uncover hidden insights within the contextual data they gather across all channels. In fact, data from Aberdeen’s June 2020 The Intelligent Contact Center survey shows that Best-in-Class contact centers are 29% more likely to use analytics to continuously analyze changes in CX results to uncover improvement opportunities.
Data also shows that top performing contact centers are increasingly turning to AI-capabilities such as machine learning to improve their agility in quickly and effectively analyzing contextual customer insights. Specifically, Best-in-Class firms are 81% more likely to use machine learning capabilities to analyze customer data and reveal hidden trends impacting their activities.
Using AI-enabled analytics allows firms to determine how specific activities influence results by identifying inflection points along the customer journey. Specifically, this refers to leveraging machine learning algorithms to automatically analyze behavioral and sentiment data to reveal the root-causes of positive results. This, in turn, allows firms to repeat activities that positively impact CX results along the customer journey and improve those that don’t. AI-enabled analytics is supported not only by journey analytics, but also through tools such as desktop analytics and speech analytics. For example, firms using desktop analytics observe how activities through the agent desktop influence interaction results such as average handle times and first contact resolution rates. By doing so, they determine which activities / knowledgebase articles are most likely to lead to positive outcomes when managing customer journeys.
Turning Insights into Hyper-personalized Experiences
For firms to truly benefit from insights gleaned through increased visibility, they must leverage them for hyper-personalization activities. In our June 2019 The Role of Hyper-Personalization in Today's Customer Service study, we defined hyper-personalization as an organizational activity in which companies customize customer conversations taking place across all channels based on various elements such as customer personality, cross-channel journey activity, and past behavior. We found that firms hyper-personalizing their CX activities retain 55% more of their clientele, compared to those that don’t.
It’s important to keep in mind that it’s the employees who use agile insights to address customer needs. Considering the growing use of remote work across many organizations, it’s vital for CX leaders to make sure that employees can access contextual insights and execute on them, regardless of their physical location. Firms with such agility in empowering their employees were able to adapt to the changes brought by COVID-related lockdowns far faster and easier, compared to firms that don’t.
Key Takeaways
Strategic planning is essential for success, but equally essential is the agility needed to update plans when companies face disruption. The capabilities outlined in this article provide CX leaders a repeatable framework they can use to rapidly and more effectively update their plans when facing disruptive events. To ensure that these changes produce desired results, CX leaders must rely on AI and analytics to measure how changes to their activities influence their performance results across the objectives they aim to achieve.
Change in business activities and market conditions is inevitable — but, with the right plans and capabilities in place, it’s manageable. In fact, when managed effectively, it provides companies with opportunities they can use to excel against their competitors. Seizing these opportunities requires becoming more agile. If you’re not yet using agile insights to drive hyper-personalized customer experiences, we highly recommend you do so to turn times of change into times of opportunity.
