In the financial world, a Triple A, or AAA, rating means a company or country has been given the highest level of credibility. In simple terms, a credit rating is the measure of how well an entity—whether it’s a country, company or individual—can pay back the money it has borrowed. In other words, the rating explains that entity’s credit worthiness.

In the world of customer experience, you could look at a company and determine how much credit it gets from its customers. Can a company deliver on the brand promise (the payback) to the customers that purchase their goods, become members or use their services?

Delivering on the brand promise is becoming increasingly difficult today. Consumers expectations continue to rise, driven by how they communicate in their personal lives—through social media, messaging applications and perhaps more traditional media like email, chat, and phone. Brands are expected to keep pace with the high-velocity customer.

To determine if you can deliver Triple A customer experiences, we need to break down the three As:

1. Assisted Interactions

Assisted interactions are human-powered interactions. The customer interacts with someone in your organization to answer their questions, resolve their problems or complete their transaction. The form factor or technology used for this conversation typically is the phone, email, web chat and messaging apps.

2. Automated Interactions

To drive down costs and enable the 24/7 business, customers self-serve through the web, mobile apps, and bots. Self-service over the web or mobile applications have greatly increased the complexity of tasks that can be automated. Most of the process is automated, but sometimes human assistance is required.

3. Autonomous Interactions

Autonomous interactions are mostly indirect or unattended business processes, CRM cases, marketing automation and smart devices. To the customer, most, if not all, activity is invisible. The outcome (success or failure); however, still affects the customer experience. It can trigger assisted or automated interactions.

Your customers interact with your brand, directly or indirectly, using one of these methods. To deliver a Triple A customer experience, you need to engage with them—consistently and successfully—every time.

 

Build a Customer Engagement Engine That Delivers

A single, monolithic technology approach to each of these three interactions, or worse—disconnected technologies with each—is not a sustainable enterprise architecture strategy.

Organizations that are serious about delivering on the brand promise and see customer experience as a competitive currency already architect the engagement engine of the future.

The customer engagement engine of the future is a platform that can monitor and manage each of these three interaction types holistically; it takes into account the customer life cycle, customer context and behavior, as well as your business objectives—reduce costs, increase sales and drive customer loyalty. This platform sits at the heart of your enterprise architecture and orchestrates each individual customer experience in real time to deliver desired business outcomes.

To deliver on this promise, the customer engagement engine must possess on the following design principles:

  • Apply a single rule set to all customer interactions across all touchpoints and channels.
  • Leverage enterprise data from all your business information systems and applications.
  • Preserve and use customer profiles, channel context and behavior data.
  • Design and manage the customer journey.
  • Have visibility into the skills and presence of your enterprise workforce.
  • Route customer interactions and work items in real time.
  • Use analytics and machine learning to predict the best path to deliver on the desired business outcome (next best action).
  • Provide insights into customer satisfaction and employee engagement, and act on those insights.

The only way to deliver a Triple-A Customer Experience and deliver on the brand promise is by architecting such customer engagement engine.

To learn more about this topic, watch the replay of a webinar I hosted recently called Architecting the Omnichannel Engagement Engine of the Future with guest speaker Bern Elliot, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner.