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Outsourcing is a sure bet for financial services in 2023

Today’s business climate is creating a difficult balancing act for CX leaders. On one hand, they’re looking to provide customers with excellent service while providing omnichannel engagement in customers’ preferred channels. On the other hand, hiring skilled labor and retaining a trained workforce continues to be challenging in the current market. These opposing criteria can strain contact center operations and effect their ability to provide customer service at the desired level.

A recent poll suggests that financial services leaders see several items as the top CX issues facing the industry. Opinions show four areas of concern: high call volumes, long wait times, talent retention, overall CX costs. After considering the results, it may seem prudent to keep to the status quo until economic conditions improve. But, is that good strategy to meet the current moment and prepare for 2023?

This is a question posed to two of TTEC’s banking and insurance experts —Group Vice President Kristen Hein and Vice President JoVanna Dukes during a recent LinkedIn LIVE webinar. Here are some highlights of the conversation.

A domino effect is hitting CX

Staffing issues are the biggest issue affecting many firms’ ability to provide quality customer experience, both Hein and Dukes agree. Companies unable to fully staff their contact centers are realizing higher call volumes and longer wait times, resulting in a lower level of customer care. In turn, this can increase stress for contact center associates. Many end up leaving their jobs. A cycle is created.

“The CX industry has struggled to retain talent,” says Dukes. “We’ve seen a lot of attrition and turnover and it leads to longer hold times and less capacity within your contact center operations.” Even if the is not an increase in call volume, she says, fewer employees mean capacity to volume will be higher.

Outsourcing can be an effective solution

Hein sees the situation as good opportunities for companies looking to get creative with their solutions. Don’t be afraid to outsource as a way to be flexible and provide expert service, she says.

“Outsourcing has matured beyond cost reduction,” says Hein. “It’s really a way for firms to be better and to access talent and capabilities. It gives flexibility and drives innovation in a space where you can partner with someone, especially someone who has experience in financial services.”

Personalization important for impactful CX

According to Hein, one study shows that 78% of Americans prefer to do their banking digitally. “The financial services industries are dealing with a different engagement level. They need to up their digital game,” she says.

Upping their digital game does not stop at providing a choice of digital channels, from voice, chat, apps, and websites, Hein says. It’s also about making sure CX associates have the right training in these channels and can still provide a personalized customer service.

It’s important to not take personalization out of the digital engagement, Hein adds. In today’s digital environment, employees need innovative training so they can provide a high-level of personalization and expertise. “Whether they’re handling that engagement over the phone or through a digital channel, personalization has to resonate with your customers.” It’s a level of customer experience that calls back to the days of branch banking when customer service was an important part of employee training.

EX will be key for 2023

The ‘Flex EX’ model of employee work is a becoming a trend and helping companies to find a magic equation in their overall CX services, Hein says. A mix of part-time, full-time, and floater employees working with dynamic schedules can bring in diverse, multigenerational talent with experience (and certifications) required in financial services fields, creating a deep-bench that can be ramped up during peak times or used to cover a lag in staffing.

Dukes suggests firms need to look at their overall ecosystem, from employee to tech, as the first place to measure how well a contact center is operating. “Look at every aspect of the agent experience: Is it working or not? How is it helping your agent support your contact center operations and your customers?” She says first call resolution is a great metric, but if the tools, staff, and training are not in place then this is not a meaningful, nor achievable, goal.

“Too often brands don’t think about the employee side of CX as a place to start or where to really make sure they’re delivering a great customer experience,” says Dukes. It’s about setting up an employee experience that agents want and provide them training they need so the call center team can grow and mature, Duke adds.

Whether your contact center operations are struggling with CX or EX or both, Hein and Dukes both say collaborating with an experienced partner is a great place to start.

“It’s really impossible for one party to accomplish all the things – staffing and support – on their own,” says Dukes. Don’t be afraid to bring in a partner.

To dive into Hein and Dukes’ analysis and solutions, watch their full 20 minute webinar Financial Services CX Now and What’s Ahead in 2023.

Want to reach more customers? Start (or get better at) texting them

Text messaging is quickly becoming customers’ preferred way of connecting with brands because it’s fast, easy, and convenient. But new research shows customers don’t just want to receive messages from brands, they want to be able to text back and have two-way communication, which presents new opportunities and challenges.

In 2022, 70% of consumers opted in to receive texts from businesses, according to SimpleTexting’s 2022 Texting & SMS Marketing Report, yet just 55% of business owners and digital marketers texted their customers. While that second figure marks a 27% jump in SMS adoption over the previous year, there’s still great opportunity for brands to capitalize on this growing channel.

Your customers are texting – a lot

Texting has become a huge part of consumers’ daily lives, especially among younger customers, which is why savvy brands are tapping into it for marketing and sales purposes. It’s a great way to engage with customers, particularly at those crucial moments when they’re ready to buy.

Consider these stats from SimpleTexting, which surveyed more than 1,300 consumers, business owners, and digital marketers to gauge how they view texting and SMS marketing:

  • One-third of consumers check their text notifications within one minute of a receiving a text
  • 51% of consumers reply to a text message within 1-2 minutes
  • 53% of consumers check their text messages at least 11 times a day
  • On an average day, consumers check their text messages more than nay other app on their phones

“Most consumers want quick, two-way communication with brands,” said SimpleTexting Marketing Director Adam Coppelman.

Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder the study found that 60% of business owners who already text their customers plan to increase their SMS marketing budget this year. Those investing messaging said they like its ease of use, the large mobile audience it taps into, it’s real-time reach, and other benefits.

But are companies using the channel to listen to their customers?

Make it a two-way conversation

It’s important to embrace messaging if you’re not already, but it’s not enough merely to send messages to customers, SimpleTexing found. More than half of consumers (61%) want the ability to text companies back, especially when it comes to things like appointment reminders, customer service, and shipment tracking.

This is a shift brands should be paying attention to, said Coppelman.

“Most marketers and business owners know that they need to personalize their messages, but the research in this report highlights the fact that consumers don’t just want personalized one-way messages,” he said. “They want you to send highly relevant messages and give them the opportunity to respond.”

Most businesses report SMS click-through rates of between 20-35%, SimpleTexting found. By comparison, most of the survey respondents said their average click-through rate on marketing emails was between 1 and 10%.”

“Does this mean that you shouldn’t send emails? Not at all,” said Coppelman. “We still believe email is an effective channel for certain messages, but if you want to get more eyes on important messages, add SMS to your omnichannel approach to customer experience.”

Have a messaging strategy

To achieve messaging success, brands need to do more than merely adopt the right technology (though that’s a big piece of the puzzle). They also need to make sure they have the right people in place to realize that technology’s full potential.

Associates who are great at offering voice support won’t necessarily thrive on the messaging channel. Messaging requires a different set of skills, such as handling multiple customer inquiries concurrently and being able to show empathy and understanding on a digital channel.

Companies will see better results – and deliver better experiences for customers and associates alike – if associates assigned to messaging are trained specifically in that area. Working with an experienced partner can help avoid common missteps and maximize best practices.

Brands that devote the time and resources to do messaging right will see great returns on their investment: shorter handle times, better customer experience, and ultimately increased sales.

3 ways to (finally) realize AI’s full potential

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades but its promises – a deeper understanding of customer intent, and better and faster experiences for customers and associates alike – continue to go largely unrealized.

In the experience economy, where consumers are drawn to brands as much for the experiences they offer as their products and services, AI has the potential to transform customer experience (CX), remove friction from customer journeys, and enable the personalized experiences consumers want. In reality, though, it falls short. Despite all of AI’s hype and promise, CSAT for chatbots and other AI-powered self-service tools significantly lags that of the associated-led phone channel.

So, what’s the disconnect? Why isn’t AI elevating customer experience?

AI isn’t a tool that can merely be turned on and forgotten about. To realize its true power, brands need to invest in the tools and people necessary to understand the intent-driven journey and the friction points along the way. That’s the only way to design workflows and back-end system integrations that will produce a return on the AI investment.

Here are three keys to realizing AI’s full potential:

1. Make the most of data

Data is the engine of successful AI. Too often, brands think they are data-driven organizations but lack customer insights beyond disposition reports. To really get to the point where AI can transform the customer and associate experience, brands need to understand frequent and emerging topics (and their subtopics) and be able to analyze sentiment and complexity by call type. Data is at the heart of all this.

Each time a customer interacts with a brand, valuable data points are generated. When used effectively, that data can provide actionable insights, in real time, to improve the customer journey, ease pain points and ultimately drive sales and grow loyalty. Brands that aren’t harnessing the power of their data will lose customers to competitors that better understand the customer journey.

Don’t be afraid to start small. Begin by focusing on high sentiment/low complexity intents to build a foundation of small wins; those will quickly accelerate into more-complex use cases that organizations can scale. Working with an experienced CX partner that has data and analytics expertise can help.

Data can have a powerful impact not only on CX but on bottom lines, too. TTEC client experience shows that companies using AI and automation technologies can expect to grow their workforce capacity by 30-50% without needing to hire additional employees.

2. Involve associates in the process

Associates are the front line of any brand, so it’s essential to include them as part of the team. They can’t be expected to use AI capabilities to their fullest if they don’t know how or why they’re fitting into their day-to-day work. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is not including associates in the design of the workflow.

To ensure AI tools are used for maximum impact, involve associates in their design, build, and operations. Then, make sure associates receive the proper training to understand the tools and when to use them. Consider making this training asynchronous, giving associates the option to train during their downtime or at home.

One of AI’s main benefits is it helps associates perform their jobs better, empowering them to deliver better experiences to customers. For instance, when TTEC helped a global property and infrastructure group deploy an AI-powered bot to handle inbound requests from customers, the company saw an 86% reduction in the number of basic inquiries handled by associates and a 30% increase in digital conversions. When simple tasks are handled through AI, it frees associates up to focus on more complex inquiries.

It makes no sense to exclude associates from the AI conversation and implementation; they bring a unique and important perspective. There are also great opportunities to incorporate AI into associate training.

3. Keep optimizing

AI is not a “set it and forget it” tool; it takes continual assessing and optimizing to ensure brands are reaping all its benefits. In their quest to really understand the intent-driven customer journey, companies must keep evaluating what’s working and what’s not.

For many brands, AI brings with it many new expectations and opportunities that can be difficult to navigate. When gauging a program’s success, it can be tempting to focus mainly on cost, but don’t. Take the overall customer experience, and NPS in particular, into account when determining what’s working. Then use those learnings to inform decision making and associate training.

To help make AI efforts successful, avoid the common pitfall of putting them in a silo. For AI investments to pay off, they must be coordinated among a wide variety of stakeholders, including business units, process experts, IT, and operations. Without buy-in from the entire organization, AI will keep falling short of expectations.

As consumers increasingly seek digital and self-service interactions, there’s never been a better time for brands to harness the power of AI. When done well, AI can reduce handle times, orchestrate individualized experiences, and make interactions more seamless for associates and customers alike – all while cutting costs. With the right people and technology behind it, AI can help take CX to the next level.

Customer intent is a treasure trove of actionable data hiding in plain sight

Customer intent is a treasure trove of actionable data hiding in plain sight

Every time customers interact with a customer service representative, do a keyword search, click through a brand’s website, or engage other touchpoints, they’re giving hints about their interests and intentions. The companies that understand customer intent—the purpose or reason behind a customer’s behavior—are better positioned to give customers want they want and outperform competitors.

Insights into what customers want and need are more important than ever as the economy and market conditions change. Businesses are eager to unlock insights that can help them adapt to change and reengage customers.
 
According to IDC analysts, businesses were estimated to have spent $215 billion in 2021 on big data and business analytics solutions, a 10% increase over 2020. By 2025, smart workflows and seamless interactions among humans and machines will be as standard as the corporate balance sheet, and most employees will use data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work, predicts McKinsey & Company. At the same time, data models for understanding customer intent and other insights are not infallible; even data-driven companies are a constant work in progress.
 
What is customer intent?
Customer intent is defined as the reason or purpose behind a customer’s actions or behavior towards a brand. It looks beyond the superficial factors such as what customers are requesting or where they are requesting it and focuses on the customers’ true goals for the interaction. Detecting and understanding customer intent can give brands clarity into what a customer is trying to do beyond what they are saying or clicking on, whether it’s an upsell opportunity, a chance to deepen the customer relationship, increase customer retention, enhance a product or service, or something else.
 
“Oftentimes, the user experience developed by a company for its customers overlooks critical components of the underlying intents the customer wants resolved through their customer experience (CX),” says Ravi Bharadwaj, executive director of corporate strategy at TTEC. “By looking at the CX lifecycle though granular intents, companies can 1) benchmark where they are strong/blemished, 2) identify where a human touch in a contact center helps/over-indexes the needs of a customer, and 3) solve for customers’ CX needs with surgical precision.”
 
For example, based on millions of customer interactions (contact center inquiries over calls, chats, bots, searches, etc.), TTEC identified the top reasons (intents) customers contact companies across different industries for customer support.
 
What the company found was that refund and replacement inquiries were most common among industries such as retail, public sector, automotive, and manufacturing. And inquiries about loyalty rewards were common across nearly all industries — retail, public sector, automotive and manufacturing, travel and tourism, insurance, finance. .
 
These insights can help companies better train their customer support teams and ensure they’re equipped with the right information to meet customer needs. Having the right information on hand also reduces wait times, costs to serve, and increases customer satisfaction.

Better insights = happy customers
Luke Lee, CEO of PalaLeather, a fashion company and retailer, agrees that customer insights are essential. “Businesses will be able to foster customer-centric innovations once they truly understand their audience’ wants and needs,” he says. “In doing so, companies must work backward to solve their customers’ pain points, then move forward with technological innovations that are in tune with the changing times.”
 
One of the ways that his company is improving its customer experience, particularly in the digital space, is by providing greater personalization through automation and marketing analytics, according to Lee. The company is “utilizing software that documents the customer or audience journey on our website and we continuously work on tweaking our processes with the help of our customers in shortening the marketing funnel and maximizing conversions,” he says. The company is also using digital marketing strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing to strengthen its brand. “Businesses can capture a wider range of audiences if they work on putting a more personal touch side by side with automation and predictive analytics today,” Lee says.

The value of transparency
Numerous industries benefit from insights into customer intent and preferences. Apparel companies Stitch Fix and ThirdLove are two examples of companies that tout their use of data analytics and artificial intelligence in their services.
 
“Our business model enables unprecedented data science, not only in recommendation systems, but also in human computation, resource management, inventory management, algorithmic fashion design, and many other areas. Experimentation and algorithm development is deeply engrained in everything that Stitch Fix does,” according to the company’s website.  

ThirdLove, an intimate apparel company, makes a similar claim about using data to “inform any decisions we make, from the images we use in marketing campaigns to the colors we offer in new product lines.”
 
But even companies that develop a system for collecting, parsing, analyzing, and visualizing data, may find that the data is not enough. Before customers receive clothing from Stitch Fix, the company sends an email with a preview of the box’s contents that customers can curate. RetailDive reports that the preview email is generated by an algorithm, although customers are under the impression that the clothing was selected by human stylists. If customers complain about the selection, the stylists are directed to take the blame for the errors, according to RetailDive (Stitch Fix did not immediately respond to a request for comment).  

Even data-driven approaches have flaws and it would behoove companies to be transparent about potential shortcomings. “Data leaders appreciate that the data journey is a transformation effort that unfolds over time,” writes Randy Bean, author of “Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI” in Harvard Business Review. “Data-driven companies recognize that success is achieved iteratively…successful organizations expect to be at this for a while.”
 
While companies face pressure from investors, customers, and other stakeholders to deliver the right product or service every time, transparency and managing expectations are important for the success of any long-term initiative.
  
A work in progress
Customers have long told businesses what they need in their actions (or inactions). Companies have an opportunity to truly listen to their customers and better engage. Understanding and leveraging customer intent is part of a data-driven culture that can foster continuous improvements to create differentiated customer and employee experiences—if companies are ready to let their customers lead. 

3 ways retailers are combatting holiday season challenges this summer

Summer may be just around the corner, but retailers are already preparing for the biggest shopping period of the year – the winter holiday season. While supply chain issues, labor shortages, inflation, and a potential COVID-19 resurgence continue to complicate operations and business decisions, companies are charging ahead with plans for a busy season. Here’s what retailers are doing to get ahead of numerous challenges and maximize the holidays.

Personalized customer support

Today’s consumers shop across a variety of channels, platforms, and devices. To stand out during the competitive holiday season, retailers must deliver tailored experiences throughout the customer journey. According to the 2022 Retail Personalization Index, 71% of consumers will shop more often with brands or retailers that personalize their communications. And while 71% of retailers think they excel in personalization, only 34% of consumers agree.

What are retailers missing? Stephen Light, co-owner and CEO of Nolah Mattress, sees an opportunity to deliver more personalized and empathetic customer support. “We’re going to see businesses taking steps to build their services to the next level in preparation for the busy holiday season as they attempt to capture as much of the market share as they can,” Light says.

Like other online mattress companies, Nolah Mattress’ customers can’t go to a physical store to try out its products. Online guides and customer care associates are key sources of information for customers seeking a mattress that meets their specific needs and preferences. “With customers demanding an increasingly personalized experience, we’re empowering our service agents through a revamped training program, better data management, new performance feedback channels, and support tools,” Light continues. The customer care team is also using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can recognize customer emotions “through tone and content” to “help diffuse difficult situations.”

In addition to providing employees with the right training and tools to provide expert advice, communicating with customers through their preferred channel is critical, he adds, which is why his company is adding conversational apps to its marketing and customer support strategy.

Especially during a busy time like Black Friday, “customers expect quick answers through the communication channels of their choice, and with conversational apps like WhatsApp, we can connect with our customers in a way that’s most convenient for them,” Light says.

Reducing customer effort

At the onset of the pandemic, many retailers quickly shifted to accommodate customers’ new needs. Retailers embraced last-mile delivery innovations such as crowdsourcing deliveries and invested in urban warehouses to enable rapid deliveries. Buy online, pick up in-store and curbside pickup became the norm—all in the name of meeting customer expectations and reducing customer effort.

Expect to see a continued focus on reducing customer effort. “Customer effort is the strongest driver of customer loyalty — or disloyalty,” according to Gartner research. “96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. Indicators of high-effort experiences include channel switching, repetition of information, generic service, transfers, and repeat interaction.”

Get the full story at the Customer Strategist Journal

Forrester CX conference recap: Digital-first falls flat, virtual employees cultivate culture

This year’s Forrester CX conference served as a backdrop for a deeper look at Forrester’s CX Index for 2022, which revealed that CX quality dropped for nearly 20% of brands, the highest proportion of brands to fall in one year since the survey began. Many companies are struggling to sustain growth and momentum without a clear customer and employee roadmap.

With executives searching for answers, the event focused on providing insight and tactics to help customer experience leaders understand more about what customers and employees want and how to deliver quality interactions in this unique, uncertain climate. Here are a few highlights:

Customer expectations raise the stakes for digital CX

One of the effects of the pandemic has been the consumer shift toward digital channels. From online deliveries to online banking, brands rushed to provide digital options that were adopted even by technology-averse consumers. But a just-in-time experience is one thing—consumers have higher expectations when it comes to services used over the long-term.

In a breakout session, Forrester Senior Analyst Anjali Lai and Principal Analyst Sara Watson noted that while there is much discussion about which digital behaviors will last, it’s equally important to improve the quality of these services.

“When you look deep into the data…the reality is consumers have struggled to integrate digital into their physical world,” said Lai. “Over one-fifth of consumers tried online groceries but 41% said they won’t continue with it because of frustrations with the experience. It’s the quality that will impact preference and behaviors moving forward.”

Watson agreed. Digital experiences have been “fluid in the sense that they’ve been volatile,” she said. Consumers are “looking for digital fluidity to be graceful and smooth.” Lai and Watson gave these tips for transforming ad hoc services into optimal, sustainable services:

  1. Understand the customer – Brands should use their robust customer data to build an understanding of not only what kinds of things customers expect, but also why they do what they do.
  2. Use a map – Revisit journey mapping efforts and sync them with consumer context and behavior.
  3. Dissolve unnecessary silos – Integrate digital infrastructure across the business to enable a fluid experience.

Virtual employees go the distance to cultivate culture

In her session, Forrester Principal Analyst Katy Tynan busted the myth that on-site employees create a better culture than virtual employees. She explained that every large company was already operating with a “virtual” culture before the pandemic, even if all employees were physically in the office.

When organizations grow to more than 150, it’s nearly impossible for everyone to have direct relationships and cultivate an in-person culture with everyone else. So while leaders play a critical role in setting the tone of the organization and modeling value-driven behavior for all employees, front-line managers have the biggest influence on culture because they connect with smaller teams to create their great employee experiences. And, Tynan said, most organizations are not paying enough attention to them as a lever.

“Values are what we say we do. Culture is what we actually do. What’s the distance between the two,” she asked the audience. She cited Forrester research ranking the importance of three types of employee distance and their impact on positive employee engagement and culture:

  • Physical distance – This literal measure of distance is a common reference point in culture conversations, but research shows it has the least impact on key resources for organizational success. Collaborative technology, tools, and business activities designed for remote employees have evolved to break physical distance barriers to success.
  • Operational distance – How hard is it to get decisions made, get access to resources, get to people who have knowledge, etc. Think of it as the numbers of layers and levels in an organization. The more operational distance, the more organizational siloes. This leads to conflicting cultures and disparate interpretations of an organization’s values.
  • Relational distance – The concept measures how in sync employees are with one another in their beliefs. Is there a common vision? Do employees care about the same things? The further the distance, the more disjointed an organization’s culture.

Rather than try to entice employees with in-office perks or incentives to build a strong culture, Tynan gave examples of companies like IBM, Patagonia, and Buffer, which all try to decrease operational and relational distance among employees, especially new ones.

IBM uses authentic leadership and abides by a work-from-home pledge. Patagonia goes to great lengths to reinforce to employees its mission and vision, so employees know “why we’re here.”

And at productivity software firm Buffer, each new hire is paired with peers who serve as a role buddy and a culture buddy to help them navigate how to do their job and get oriented with how the job gets done. “The longer it takes to figure out culture as a new hire, the less it feels like you belong,” Tynan said. “And belonging is an important metric for [culture and] performance.”

Send-off in style

The event, held in Nashville, also served as a celebration of Forrester’s Principal Analyst and CX guru Harley Manning, who announced his retirement. We wish Harley a wonderful next chapter and thank him for all he’s done to advance CX strategy in the business world.

5 keys to putting a Total Experience into action

A woman looking at a white board with notes

This article first appeared in the Customer Strategist

There’s a fundamental shift happening when it comes to customer experience, both in expectations and capabilities, but too many brands aren’t prepared to meet the moment.

Until now, it’s been enough for brands to eliminate friction and deliver seamless customer interactions. But not anymore. To truly stand apart from competitors and be something customers want to keep coming back to, brands must embrace the Total Experience – a more holistic, unified experience for everyone who engages with a brand (employees, customers, partners, and other key stakeholders).

But many organizations have responded to changing consumer behaviors by implementing rapid, disparate, find-and-fix solutions. They may intend to improve experiences, but this approach actually has the opposite effect. It has created a set of fragmented experiences for customers that are far from the consistent, dependable, predictable, and brand-aligned characteristics representative of a true Total Experience.

Today’s consumers expect seamless, consistent, proactive, predictive, and dependable interactions – within and across every interaction channel, platform, and business function throughout the entire customer journey. They want a Total Experience, and they want it from the moment they become aware of a brand throughout their entire customer lifecycle.

So, how can brands embrace the Total Experience? Here are five ways to get started:

1. Meet people’s emotional needs

Anyone who engages with a brand wants their interactions to get the job done as efficiently and effectively as possible.  But today’s employees and customers also want an emotional connection with brands.

With so much technology at our fingertips to make processes and interactions easier, it can be easy to overlook the emotional aspects of business. But at the crux of every organization are people – the customers, employees, and partners that make it all work.

People want to engage with brands where they feel a connection. Focus on people’s emotional motivation and triggers, then balance those with their functional needs. Getting to the heart of how people feel before and when they interact with your brand will provide meaningful and actionable insights.

Total experience in action: Earlier this year, Disney earned the top ranking in MBLM’s Brand Intimacy Study, which means more consumers have a stronger emotional connection to Disney than any other brand. Consumers in general are connecting more deeply with brands since the pandemic began, and “intimate brands” outperform other companies when it comes to profits and the stock market, the report found.

2. Anticipate what customers want

Savvy brands know that being proactive is key to delivering seamless experiences. It’s not enough to respond the best way possible once a customer contacts you; companies need to be proactive, not reactive.

Invest the time and resources to design experiences that proactively move and motivate customers to the next best step by orchestrating a cohesive journey – not only within channels, but across them.

One key aspect of this is incorporating a “human” touch wherever possible. Design a Total Experience were the digital touchpoints feels like a more personal set of meaningful moments within the journey. Sophisticated automation and artificial intelligence can move the needle in this important aspect.

Total Experience in action: When a telecommunications provider wanted to reduce customer churn, proactive solutions helped. Associates quickly presented offers tailored to each customer and proactively contacted high-value and at-risk accounts before their contracts expired – leading to a 20% increase in sales win rates, and 56% of customers becoming more likely to upgrade their service at the company.
 
3. Make things personal

Use hyper-personalization to make every touchpoint more impactful. If personalization is the first step toward creating more meaningful interactions, then hyper-personalization takes it a step further by recognizing people’s unique needs and preferences – even within the smallest moments along their journey with a brand.

Don’t forget about employees when it comes to getting personal. It’s important to personalize customer experiences but equally critical to make sure employees feel like the brand truly knows them as well. Crafting an employee experience that resonates with workers on a personal level will make them more connected to their work, more loyal to their employer, and more empowered to generate strong CX.

Total Experience in action: Wanting to deliver more meaningful customer experiences, quick-service restaurant chain Chipotle began using Microsoft Customer Insights to learn about existing and potential customers. Through merging more than 400 million records, the company projects a 34% increase in new customers and cross-sales opportunities, potentially leading to $280 million in annual sales.

4. Do an honest assessment of the customer experience operating model

Evaluate your current operating model with brutal honesty. Even if you have deep investments – monetary and otherwise – in the current way things are done, it’s crucial to take a hard look at whether the processes, technology, and people you have are what’s needed to achieve the total experience of the future.

Similarly, perform due diligence on your current technology stack. A Total Experience is impossible without the right technology, so it’s important to optimize a brand’s technology ecosystem by focusing on cross-platform integration, collaboration, utilization, and custom technology creation.
When implemented well, the right mix of technology tools, processes, and people makes it easier for companies to deliver a Total Experience across all channels.

Total Experience in action: As it moved toward a Total Experience, Schwan’s Home Delivery, a pioneer in frozen food delivery, developed a comprehensive working knowledge of the current state of its customer experience. This included journey mapping, persona development, a review of objectives and insights, and more. Visits to distribution centers, employee interviews, and ride-alongs with sales representatives were all parts of the process.

5. Align with broader goals

There are so many components to consider when it comes to the Total Experience, brands can easily get lost in the minutiae. But Total Experience won’t work if it’s not aligned with broader business objectives, so be sure to take a step back to look at the bigger picture.

Investing in best-in-class tools and people won’t help if there’s not a consistent buy-in from the top down, throughout the organization. Everyone – each team, every business unit, the IT department – needs to share the same mindset and believe in the value of a Total Experience.

When everyone shares the same vision and goal, they’ll be more inclined to adopt the potential new lexicon of terms, tools, and methods that will lead to success.

Total Experience in action: Once Schwan’s Home Delivery had a complete sense of what its customer experience was really like, it developed a detailed plan for achieving a Total Experience transformation by focusing on what was needed to reach the goal and workshopping ways to get there. All departments, including marketing, operations, e-commerce, IT, and finance were involved in the process.

The right partner can help

The benefits of a Total Experience approach are clear: increased loyalty, improved brand reputation, more engaged customers and employees, and higher revenue.

Learn more in the Total Experience Playbook, a comprehensive guide showing what a Total Experience approach means, how it benefits brands, and how to achieve it.

Happy customers are closer than they appear

Smiley face on rearview mirror

This article first appeared in the Customer Strategist

The automotive industry has been on a roller coaster ride of profit and loss in recent years. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, automotive sales tumbled in 2020 before surging demand and a global chip shortage sent prices skyrocketing in 2021. The ongoing chip shortage as well as major supply chain disruptions, however, have led to delays and inventory shortages that continue to upend new and used car markets.

There’s very little that automotive groups and dealerships can do about these global conditions. Areas that they can control are the customer experience and their brand reputation. In its latest Automotive Industry report, Reputation, an online reputation management provider, analyzed online reviews from more than 20,000 automotive bands and dealerships in the United States and Canada and 15,000 more across Europe and ranked the automotive brands, dealer groups, and dealerships based on their response rate to negative feedback, engagement scores, average scores across dealerships, and other criteria.  

For the third year in a row, Hendrick Automotive Group was the top overall ranked public or private dealer group for online reputation in addition to earning the highest sentiment and visibility score among all private and public automotive groups. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Hendrick Automotive Group represents 130 franchises across more than a dozen states and employs about 11,000 people. We spoke with Brian Johnson, vice president of marketing at Hendrick Automotive Group, about the company’s customer strategy, the evolution of how car buyers shop, and the connection between the employee and customer experience.    
 
Customer Strategist: What is Hendrick’s approach to the brand experience and customer experience and how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Brian Johnson: While they [our competitors] are certainly worthy competition and doing a tremendous job, we just stay focused on ourselves. We really start with our people. And that’s Mr. Hendrick’s philosophy. I know that’s a little bit of an odd approach, but it works really well. We just feel if we take care of our people, our people will take care of our customers. You can provide an excellent customer experience and be focused on that, but we choose to focus on providing an excellent experience for our teammates and when they’re happy, our customers are happy. Our approach is leaning into our culture and our core values of prioritizing people first.

Even during the pandemic, we didn’t lay anyone off. We guaranteed everyone’s salary at 80%. A lot of these folks are commission-based folks. And I think we were able to bounce back much quicker because we still had our team intact and our folks have really taken care of our customers.
 
CS: Can you give me an example of how you took care of your employees even before COVID?

BJ: Yeah, we have all kinds of tremendous programs here. We’ve got some of the best facilities in the automotive industry that our teammates get to work in. We provide free healthcare to our teammates. We provide scholarship programs. We provide onsite free training for our technicians. We offer supplemental learning classes through our partners to be able to stay up to date on your certifications.

And we do that across all departments, whether that’s marketing or technicians or sales. We also have finance classes and sales seminars to help people stay as sharp as they can on their skills. We’re constantly giving reviews, and constantly having one-on-ones with our teammates so they feel connected with their leadership and they feel connected with the organization. And it’s just a part of what we do. It’s part of what we ask our store leadership to do. So we feel pretty good about all the things we were doing even before the pandemic, and it just really reinforced that we were doing the right things to start with.
 
CS: Let’s talk about Hendrick winning the highest sentiment and visibility score. Could you give me an example of how you did that? How did you take a customer insight from a sentiment analysis tool and act on it?

BJ: During the pandemic, if it was about a store not having masks available—we have stores in 14 different states and every regulation is different—we were always monitoring that very closely and we used those type of insights to be able to arm our stores with what our customers needed. And we still do it today.

You know, inventory availability is a big thing right now in the automotive space. We’re used to having a couple hundred vehicles to sell on average at every one of our lots. And right now, if you see five or 10 available, that’s a lot. So, we’re constantly using sentiment tools to monitor our business and see what we can improve. I don’t think there’s any secret sauce to this other than we want to pay attention and be the best.
 
CS: How often do you monitor customer sentiment and other scores?

BJ: For us, it’s a daily, weekly, monthly measurement. Some look at it every day. Our leadership looks at it every week and Mr. Hendrick looks at it once a month. It’s a core tenant of who we are, just like, did we hit our sales objectives? Did we hit our service objectives? Did we hit the manufacturer objectives? All of the different things that we measure, including these reputation scores, are a part of that.
 
CS: What types of things have you done to raise your visibility score?

BJ: The [Reputation] platform itself will give you some insights, like, “Hey, you need to focus on Google reviews or Facebook reviews or diversify on different channels, especially in the automotive space.” But again, I think it just comes back to us paying attention. If we get a negative customer review, our general managers who lead the store have to deal with it. It’s not something that just gets handed off to a marketing person or a guest services person.

And most of the time it’s just a communication error. Maybe a car part wasn’t ready, or your car took longer in service, or your sales experience took a little longer than normal. The tool gives us the insights on what to do there. But again, we deal with very few negative reviews and the ones we do get, we require our leadership to handle them, as they should.
 
CS: Would you say that the majority of your customers come to you through an online channel first?

BJ: Yeah, I mean, look that’s the world that we live in today. And I think it’s why we put a tremendous amount of focus on it. I believe that it’s a major piece of the consideration when customers are considering where they’re going to go, what dealership are they going to do business with. They look at those reviews across Google, the social channels, etc., to see what type of experience others have had.

I wouldn’t say that every customer experience starts with an online channel. You know, the touchpoints are anywhere from 30 to 50 different touchpoints before a customer even shows up at our store or contacts the store. But most of it is through an online presence to start.

The days of, let’s hop in the car on a Saturday and go visit four or five car dealerships and find the one we want, you know, those days are long past. People are looking at manufacturer websites. They’re looking at our websites, they’re looking at competitor websites, they’re looking at auto traders of the world. And then once they zero in on a car, you know, we’ve got to nail that experience and we’ve got to get it right. Because they have a lot of information at that point. They understand what it is they want, what they’re looking for, and if we can deliver on that expectation, it’ll be a world class experience. And we do that more often than not.
 
CS: What other challenges has the company had to overcome to maintain these high scores? Do you find that customers are comparing your experience to an experience they might have received from another industry?

BJ: I think every customer does that in my opinion. If you’re doing to go to a restaurant that you’ve never been to before, you’re probably going to look at the reviews and see what others have thought about it. And I think people do the same thing when they visit a car dealership.

But when you visit a dealership to purchase a car, this is something you’re doing once every three to five years. So these reviews are critically important. It is important that people see that others have had tremendously positive experiences when they’re making that decision, especially if, you know, we’re new franchise dealers. We’re selling BMWs and Chevrolets and Hondas, just like the other BMW and Chevrolet and Honda stores are. We have the same products and the manufacturers tell us what the price is going to be. So, our niche and our advantage is to provide that great experience.
 
CS: What advice do you have for other companies on how to maintain customer loyalty?

BJ: I don’t mean to sound redundant but take care of your people and they’ll take care of your customers. It’s been successful for Mr. Hendrick, so it should be successful for any industry out there.
 
CS: When it comes to taking care of your employees, are you doing anything differently? For example, are more employees asking for hybrid schedules or an opportunity to also work from home?

BJ: We have certainly adjusted our workforce to meet that when possible, but you know, our core business is retail operations, and we have to be available when the customers are available. And a lot of times, holidays are big for us. Memorial Day weekend is a big weekend for us.

Sometimes it means working the day after Christmas or on Christmas Eve. But we do try to meet our teammates’ needs wherever possible. We are in the retail business, but we have adjusted, and we will continue to look at it and do what it takes to be competitive and to keep our teammates.

Business intelligence vs. predictive analytics: Turn key differences into advantages

Employee studying data on computer screens

Think fast: What is the difference between business intelligence and predictive analytics and why does it matter? While many companies use these tools to better utilize the big data at their disposal, a quick Google search shows that these are still common questions.

Business intelligence and predictive analytics are often used interchangeably to describe tools and methods for utilizing data to make informed decisions. And in this digital age, using so many tools and techniques can be confusing. Read on for an explanation of the major differences between business intelligence and predictive analytics so that you can choose the right approach for your business needs.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence or BI is comprised of procedures and infrastructure for collecting, storing, analyzing, and interpreting data that is produced by a company. It encompasses data mining, data visualization, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics—techniques for parsing data to generate reports, performance measures and trends to reveal insights and make better business decisions.

Business intelligence answers the questions, “who are our most valuable/least valuable customers?”, “when is the best time reach out to our customers?”, “when do callers experience the longest wait times?” and much more.

What is predictive analytics?

While business intelligence focuses on what happened in the past, predictive analytics answers the question, “what is most likely to happen?” It is a form of data analytics that estimates future performance using historical and current data. Predictive analytics utilizes data modeling and statistical algorithms to determine the probability of future outcomes.

It provides forecasts based on data science and often algorithms that make use of multiple data sets. Uses of predictive analytics include workforce forecasting, sales forecasting, and brands’ suggestions for what customers may want to purchase next.

What are the benefits of business intelligence?

Virtually every area of any business would benefit from turning raw data into meaningful and useful insights. Business intelligence supports numerous functions across an organization from recruitment and hiring to training and compliance, as well as marketing and sales.

For instance, by providing faster, more accurate reporting and analysis, a BI tool could identify bottlenecks in a contact center and help refine operational processes to improve customer support. BI can also reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve employee satisfaction.

What are the benefits of predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics are particularly helpful for planning purposes. For instance, staffing contact centers with the right number of associates is difficult, especially during dynamic markets. By analyzing current call patterns, along with data from past periods and economic factors, predictive analytics can help by using regression models to predict how much call volume a contact center should expect on a particular time of day or week. This insight can help managers determine how many associates they’ll need to ramp up or down.

Regression models are also commonly used to anticipate customer buying patterns – what product a customer will buy, when, and through what channel. Marketing organizations apply these models to target the right customer at the right time with the right message.

Another type of predictive modelling—an outlier model— can identify unusual increases in customer support calls or product returns in a short period of time, as a red flag for a larger problem, such as a product failure. An outlier model can also be used to predict fraud by highlighting outliers in financial transactions or insurance claims.

A brave new data world

Meaningful insights can be found nearly anywhere—if companies know where to look. Business intelligence and predictive analytics are some of the most effective tools for optimizing and improving business operations and other functions. And understanding the nuances between these tools makes all the difference in positioning a business to succeed both now, and in the future.

Learn more about business intelligence and predictive analytics.

Three Data Innovations Changing the Pace of Business – Not only is BI technology changing rapidly, but the techniques that are used to extract value from data are evolving as well.

Intelligent Automation Tools: Optimize your Contact Center with Intelligent Automation Software – Let’s explore how intelligent automation technologies can accelerate your brand’s digital transformation.

Crystal Ball, No – Predictive Analytics, Yes – Our client was transitioning from a product-led culture to one designed around service.

Marrying Predictive Analytics with Sales for Greater ROI – sales teams need to gain a real-time understanding of the conditions driving sales data and to act on that knowledge in the most efficient way possible.

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