Four Tips for Enhancing Customer Engagement in Today’s Digital World

Have you embraced customer engagement optimization as a strategy to differentiate your organization, enrich your customer interactions, improve business processes and optimize your workforce? And have you looked at the implications employee engagement can have in the customer service equation? As you prepare to do so, don’t forget a critical element that can make a great difference—collecting, analyzing and using actual feedback from your customers and employees to drive better experiences, engagement and loyalty.

Weaving insight from the voice of the customer into your customer engagement optimization strategy can be challenging, particularly given the sheer amount of customer data and feedback pouring in from different communications channels and areas of your business. Here are a few best practices that can help you capture and reflect customers’ expectations and preferences:

1. Develop a Strategy Before You Get Started.

Successful customer engagement optimization strategies require strategic planning and measures to drive change and future success. Executive teams that initiate such programs have already established their commitment to the idea. By then engaging a cross-functional group and establishing a governance system, organizations can bring it to life with a framework that helps align goals and groups across the business, identify and capitalize on opportunities, and detect and resolve systematic issues. In addition to ongoing executive involvement, you’ll require leadership to oversee the program and champion a consistent experience throughout the organization.

2. Think Beyond the Contact Center.

Responsibility for customer engagement optimization extends far beyond the contact center or customer engagement center. Since different departments may have competing objectives, metrics and motivations that impact the customer experience, collaboration and teamwork across functional areas of the organization are essential for success. Encourage your customer experience teams to connect disparate data and map the customer’s end-to-end journey. Empower your staff to investigate issues, then propose and implement changes. In these cases, the customer experience team can serve as a facilitator, sharing customer insights to help uncover root causes and develop appropriate solutions and action plans.

3. Educate and Engage Employees.

All employees need feedback about how the work they perform can impact the customer. To that end, it’s helpful for frontline staff to be able to review customer interactions to understand the customer’s perspective, requirements and expectations, and to recognize areas for improvement. But don’t make this a one-way process. It’s a golden opportunity to ask employees for their recommendations on how to enhance the customer experience and make it easier to build relationships. Using this approach, organizations can view the voice of the customer through the lens of the staff that serve them. By encouraging this level of employee engagement, you can gain detailed feedback that fosters development, empowerment, and a customer-centric culture.

4. Convert Customer Feedback into Action.

Unstructured feedback is abundant in today’s digital world, since customers communicate in so many ways, and through so many different devices and channels. By combining and analyzing their feedback from various channels, you can gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment. That’s why standardizing on a single set of processes and technology for sharing and acting on customer feedback is so important. If every department uses different approaches and systems, you’ll have a much harder time aggregating intelligence across the business and drawing actionable conclusions from it.

Verint® Systems offers a portfolio of customer engagement optimization solutions that can help you take this important step. Designed specifically for today’s omnichannel service environment, Verint solutions can help you capture, visualize, analyze, manage, and improve the consistency, completeness, and context of customer interactions across various modes of communication.

Verint’s portfolio includes customer analytics, engagement management and workforce optimization solutions that can help you drive smarter engagement with your customers and your employees. These solutions can deliver real-time guidance to help employees determine the next best actions for delivering service, enhance the customer experience and improve employee productivity. Together, they can help you consistently deliver personalized experiences that count, no matter which channels customers use to engage.

Verint. Powering Actionable Intelligence^®.

Verint^® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence^® solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries use Verint solutions to improve enterprise performance and make the world a safer place.

1-800-4VERINT

www.verint.com