How Connecting Digital and the Contact Center Can Boost Your Digital Transformation

We know that the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many consumers to think “digital first.” And, McKinsey reports that 75% of people who used digital channels for the first time during the pandemic indicated they will continue to use them when things return to “normal.”

But even before the pandemic, your customers were comfortable starting their journey on digital channels. That’s a good thing, as digital channels offer improved convenience and security for consumers while cutting costs and boosting efficiency for you. Many businesses have been encouraging customers to go online first for more than a decade.

However, only 16% of organizations say that their digital transformation efforts have improved performance or set them up to sustain changes in the long term.

There’s now a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ramp up your digital transformation efforts and take advantage of increased digital traffic, provide excellent customer service in other channels, and unify omnichannel insights to improve bottom-line results.

To do that (and win!), you’ll need to connect the data across the organization. The connection should start with your customer experience and customer service teams.

Connecting the Data to Break Down Silos

The customer journey spans multiple touchpoints and channels. That means the customer feedback your digital team receives will often differ from the feedback the contact center collects. When the data lives in silos, you risk customer experience blind spots.

So, what does that mean? Simply put, your digital team needs to know about the issues customers experience on digital channels. They can certainly ask customers about their experience directly via digital feedback or survey tools. But while surveys are important feedback tools, they aren’t likely to capture the whole story.

What will most likely happen when your customers can’t complete their tasks online? They will reach out to the contact center for assistance. That means your contact center data has the power to help unlock the whole story about any digital shortcomings.

When the contact center extracts insights from their data and shares them across the organization, the digital team now has the information they need to quickly fix frustrating issues that customers experience online.

OK, But Who Has the Time?

That all sounds like great advice. But, as the Great Resignation continues to hit industries across the board, this seems like a tall order when you’re working with fewer resources than ever before. And, it doesn’t help that customer expectations around self-service, speed, and engagement authenticity get higher all the time. (This widening gap between expectations and results is what is known as the Engagement Capacity Gap.)

That’s where automation comes in. You can tap into solutions such as speech analytics and text analytics to quickly gather insights about the customer experience without any manual work required.

Speech analytics is the process of listening to customer interactions to analyze and pull out insights that might otherwise be lost or missed in manual analysis and random call sampling. With speech analytics, you can:

• understand why customers are calling and identify potential self-service opportunities;
• analyze customer sentiment and understand causes for dissatisfaction; and
• improve compliance, efficiency, and agent performance.

Text analytics is similar in that it pulls out insights from unstructured information contained within text-based documents and interactions across a variety of channels. It can empower you to analyze, report, and act on every spoken and text interaction within your organization. That way you can:

• improve customer insights by understanding sentiment;
• continually improve processes and operational efficiency;
• identify self-service opportunities; 
• optimize customer engagement; and
• evaluate and improve employee performance.

When you can quickly extract insights from your customer experience and customer service data, you can effect real change to improve both customer and employee experiences. Your contact center can share valuable insights with the digital team and vice versa.

That’s how you close any gaps between teams. It’s a win-win for customers and employees.

Customers now have what they need to complete tasks online with lower-cost self-service tools. And calls from frustrated customers are reduced in the contact center, freeing up time for employees to refocus their attention to more important matters.

Look for the Helpers

So, how do you connect the data? Good news—there’s help out there!

First, you’ll need to level up your customer experience management program. Customer experience and customer service data already exist in your organization. Uncovering the power of connecting these interrelated functions becomes possible when you integrate all your data through the right framework.

That may sound intimidating, but a unified and business-wide approach to customer experience simplifies and amplifies your efforts. Simply put, connect the data for maximum opportunity—for both the customer and employee experience.

Download Verint’s “Customer Experience + Customer Service: Breaking Silos to Unify CX” eBook to learn how to build an innovative customer experience management program necessary to compete today.