The future of customer experience is achieving a single view of customer
The competition for customers is getting as intense as ever. But the new battleground isn’t product or price or even brand—it’s customer experience. This competition is more pronounced after the recent pandemic outbreak that plunged the economy into a recession-like situation.
Like in all industries, digital technology has fundamentally transformed how the financial services industry deals with customers.
Challenges of understanding diverse and constantly changing customer expectations
Today’s digital age customer demands a faster and more convenient buying experience. Financial service companies are coming under intense pressure to make changes to the way they manage customer experience.
Ask any financial service company what their biggest challenge is; most of them mention understanding diverse and constantly changing customer expectations. This challenge only increases with the sharp growth of digital disruption options that provide a level of flexibility and reliability that would have been unheard of only a few years ago.
Customer experience challenges in a digital-first world
As digitalization takes center stage, more and more businesses find themselves in a digital-first world. Customer experience in digital age should be heavily customized and consistent across all channels. In the race to adopt digitalization and stay relevant in the technology, organizations might take the easy path of making surface-level changes to interfaces and processes. However, it is important to realize that these half-measures are not sustainable in the long run.
As such, these measures may represent a logical first step towards digitalization. However, organizations are beginning to realize that these measures are far from enough to make sense of all customer data coming from digital channels is becoming more digital. For that to happen, companies need to take a deeper look at their information architectures. And get a holistic 360-degree view of their customers.
Don’t let a lack of unified customer view hold back your business
Customer service agents hold a lack of 360-degree view of customer data and low-value of work as a barrier to delivering a compelling customer experience when it comes to customer experience.
Legacy processes can leave both customer support teams and customers frustrated
Customer experience should be the fuel for business growth. Unfortunately, customer agents spend most of their time wrangling poorly integrated customer information and history. This is before they can get on with customer data analysis. As a result, manually navigating applications and disparate databases can leave both customer support teams and customers frustrated and disengaged. And that means organizations can’t respond quickly enough to new opportunities to delight customers and handle threats.
Challenges of legacy customer data management
The current customer information-gathering process is fraught with challenges. As a result, the customer faces a lot of trouble. Simply put, they are bombarded with inquiries, questionnaires, and surveys that gather information about them. To make matters worse, the same process is repeated over and over. In fact what is worse is that, the data gathered from the process is never put to good use and will be left to gather dust.
Achieving a single view of the customer can’t be successful with half-baked solutions and measures
For a long time, customer contact centers have been attempting to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer. However, data trapped in disparate siloed systems and the continued existence of point solutions have proved to be standing in the way of delivering a great customer experience. This means that, building out a single customer view can’t be successful with half-baked solutions and measures in today’s hyper-connected age.
Why single customer view projects are under-performing
Another key point to remember is that, several organizations have embarked on single customer view initiatives by implementing newer technologies and tools. The digital marketer report states that investments in creating a complete customer view are under performing due to various factors ranging from the inability to link different technologies to siloed departments.
Find out why only a handful of organizations are successful at achieving a single customer view
One approach to tackling the complex unified view of customer efforts demanded by organizations is Appian Cloud. It unifies disparate systems and delivers a single unified platform for customer support operations.
Beyond just the ability to build a next-generation solution that enables them to set up solutions quickly and respond to their dynamic environments, the Appian solution backed by the Appian Intelligent Contact Center can transform how organizations engage with customers and deliver customer experience.
Appian streamlines customer self-service by connecting a low-code development platform to customer portals (via Web APIs). It is important to realize that, this connection enables customers to do business without involving the customer contact center. As a result, it leads to increased service delivery speed for both customers and the organization.
As your company navigates through the single detailed view of the customer journey. It is important that you must consider how to adapt your strategy to managing data quality and siloed departments. However, despite the intense focus on 360-degree view efforts. It is important to note that many organizations do not believe their programs are fully effective. Fortunately, this is easy to achieve with the right set of expertise, platform tools, and strategy.
