To shape the customer journey as described, the customer engagement platform must satisfy five criteria.
1. Span the customer lifecycle. Customer experience is not just about customer service. To truly engage with prospects and customers, the journey needs to be shaped seamlessly across marketing, sales, and services. To the customer, all these are simply perceived, and judged, as a single brand experience.
2. Have a view on all customer interactions. Think of the customer engagement platform as a system that’s connected to every customer touchpoint—the website, mobile application, IVR, corporate Twitter account, contact center, back office, business partners, etc. Each receives real-time events from every touchpoint to gather as much information as possible—in real time—and process that information through a set of business rules to determine what the next best action is for each individual interaction.
3. Connect to your enterprise architecture. By connecting to other applications and data sources in your enterprise architecture, such as your CRM system, marketing automation, HRM, and sales and billing systems, the customer engagement platform enriches the information for each interaction. This improves the quality of each decision and prediction And making better decisions typically means you’ll see better outcomes.
4. Know your people. The customer engagement platform is also aware of the presence, skills and business performance of everyone in your workforce. As employees help customers solve their issues—answering their questions and selling them new or more products and services—machine learning algorithms continuously unveil correlations between all data points. And then they can predict the best next action or the best employee to route a task to.
5. Support for Blended AI. As the number of total interactions continues to grow, it’s unavoidable to apply automation in the form of IVR systems, chatbots, and virtual assistants to scale your operation. Doubling your workforce is simply too expensive. The ability to seamlessly blend between artificial intelligence (AI) driven self-service capabilities and real-life employees is vital.
A customer engagement platform that operates in real time, applies intelligence in the moment and is supported by AI shapes each customer journey—in real time. To learn more, check out the Journey Mapping eBook: An Outside-in Approach to Delivering Great Customer Experiences.
Source: Genesys
