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The concept of the customer journey has fundamentally changed and with it, the rules of engagement. A new form of customer engagement has emerged and fundamental shifts are under way in how businesses are engaging with connected customers and prospects. It’s more than just an interesting shift. Keeping on top of megatrends can help you prioritize projects and budgets to support the demands of next-gen customer experience.
What’s a Customer Experience Megatrend?
Trends are emerging patterns of change that are likely to impact us, while a megatrend is a large change driven by many factors, and it’s slow to form. Once in place, megatrends influence a wide range of activities, processes, systems and perceptions—possibly for decades. They are the underlying forces that drive trends and impact customers and companies alike.
Here are three megatrends that have been a long time coming, and they are directly impacting customer experience:
1. Digital Transformation
Digital transformation has been trending for years. We’ve all experienced the digitalization of banking and retail shopping. Digital interactions account for 92% of all interactions with web, mobile, and social becoming top channel choices, according to the 2016 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report.
Until recently, immature technology and outdated business models limited true digital transformation. Recent breakthroughs in omnichannel routing, for example, have eliminated the slowdowns of queue-based routing. Digital transformation as a megatrend has several facets:
2. Automation
With major advances in automation technology, simple requests will be done via self-service. And voice will continue as a critical point of escalation. In fact, automation is turning speech into the new currency for consumers with the growth of smart assistants. Chatbots have become a cost-effective complement to what’s in place today. They manage simple interactions and allow agents to step in at the right time to add a human touch.
The best chatbots stand out for their image, speech, and emotion recognition that operationalizes it. For example, many chatbots only respond to requests and questions, but also recognize when the customer is confused. At that point, they seamlessly hand off the conversation to a live customer support rep.
3. Predictive Everything
The Internet of Things (IoT), or digitalization of assets, is a balancing act today between focusing on internal and external use cases. In 2016, most businesses focused on internal initiatives. They started with simple use cases such as optimizing internal workflow management, and enabling smart connected products to send data to the enterprise. This is changing already with more externally focused use cases around customer engagement and retention.
IoT opens completely new business opportunities in utility companies. This industry is rapidly moving beyond capturing operational efficiencies to more directly enable strategic digital transformation, as they become platform providers for the energy-sharing economy.
Car manufacturers already capture data for predictive maintenance. Now they are exploring a completely new business model of engagement. This model moves from the sale of cars to business provisioning. As a result, it will eliminate the car sale as the terminal stage of the customer journey. Full lifecycle servicing of customers requires robust omnichannel capabilities to get that contextual insight into customers.
As businesses examine where to focus resources on IoT development, it’s important to address key issues of architecture, integration, and security. But the opportunities are worth it.
Unlike trends that may come and go, megatrends are the way of the future. While they introduce disruption to businesses, they also open doors. They can engage digital consumers, engage the digital employee, and optimize digital business for the best customer experience possible.
View the on-demand webinar, The Uncomfortable Truth About the State of Customer Experience Transformation for a deeper look at the 2017 Dimension Data Benchmarking Report.
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