For years, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores have served as a compass for service teams. But most measurement models still focus on human-assisted channels: calls, chats, or emails managed by agents. AI interactions often sit outside that framework — not out of neglect, but because traditional metrics haven’t kept pace with automation.

The challenge is clear: as AI becomes the voice of your brand, your satisfaction measurement must evolve, too.

Rethinking What “Good” Looks Like

Early AI success was defined by efficiency: shorter handle times, higher containment rates, and lower costs. Those remain valuable, but efficiency alone doesn’t equal satisfaction. A chatbot can resolve an issue quickly and still leave a customer feeling unheard or frustrated.

Today’s leaders are broadening their lens. Some are layering sentiment data and post-AI surveys into their analytics. Others use predictive tools like expected NPS (xNPS) or customer success scores to estimate satisfaction in real time. The goal isn’t more data; it’s better context.

Legacy metrics were built for a human-centric era. Measuring AI means expanding the definition of quality to include emotion, effort, and trust. You can’t optimize what you’re not measuring, and you can’t measure AI the same way you measure people.

Why It Matters More Than Ever

In 2023, customers were curious about AI. By 2025, they’re discerning. They know when they’re interacting with a bot, and they have expectations. The first impression your AI makes is the first impression your brand makes. When satisfaction isn’t tracked or understood, missteps can happen fast.

AI’s reputation depends on listening, learning, and iterating with the same rigor you apply to human teams. Our 2025 CX Leaders Trends & Insights: Consumer Edition report, created in partnership with Transcom, revealed that while 78% of consumers now use self-help tools, these rank lowest in satisfaction across all channels, a widening “Experience Gap” between what customers expect and what they receive.

Bridging the Gap

Measuring AI satisfaction isn’t just a tech initiative; it’s a leadership one. It demands collaboration across CX, operations, and technology teams to define success, build new metrics, and ensure back-office systems support the experience AI promises upfront.

Because at the end of the day, customer satisfaction isn’t about checking a box. It’s about proving you care. And that applies whether the “agent” is human or machine.

Want to explore how leading brands are redefining measurement for the AI era? Read the full article Are You Measuring CSAT for AI? in the latest issue of CX Insight magazine.

The post How Satisfied Are Your Customers with AI? appeared first on Execs In The Know.

1. Don’t Overthink or Overspend: Keep Your Focus on What Impacts Customer Loyalty

According to recent Gartner research, a reactive CX strategy focused on “fixing” customer experience issues, or even just refining them, does not lead to increased customer satisfaction rates. So, while you should still look at customer data and survey results, often what seems like a problem is actually negligible in the grand scheme of your customer’s perception of your brand. Instead, focus on where it counts most – and where it can make the most impact.

According to Gartner, that focus is “innovating salient experiences linked to product experience… to achieve true differentiation.”

In other words: updates and upgrades to the way your customers experience your product or service are most impactful when it comes to customer loyalty, accounting for over 36% of increase in loyalty. The bottom line is this: once the basics of your CX program are met, the real focus should be in CX initiatives that enhance the product experience, which will in turn strengthen customer loyalty.

2. Reassess Your KPIs & Rebuild Your Journey Maps

When was the last time you assessed your North Star KPIs or rebuilt your customer journey maps? As consumer habits shift, you need to consistently be re-evaluating your measurement tools and benchmarks. Not only will this ensure you’re meeting the needs of your customers, but it also generates efficiency in how you apply your CX resources.

For example: while you might have historically cracked down on AHT, new data may reveal that more personalized (and longer) interactions with your customers may drive higher levels of satisfaction. Making strategic training investments in this area will then generate higher ROI and better CSAT.

How old are your customer journey maps? Your customers are facing the same economic volatility you are, and the ways in which they engage with your brand – and their needs – may be shifting. As a critical first step to understanding your customers biggest needs and challenges, accurate customer journey (and friction) mapping is essential to triangulating your best-path CX strategy.

3. Get Smart About VoC and Business Intelligence

Capturing, understanding, and acting on customer sentiment is critical to properly understanding your customer journey, and where to focus your CX strategy.

• Reignite Your Voice of Customer (VoC) and Survey Program: For a business to create a successful VoC program that actually tells them something valuable, you’ll need consistent insights coming in through as many channels as possible in order to capture the most data, from the most customer types, at different junctures of their journeys with your brand. While you might already use questionnaires or surveys, consider adding additional elements to your VoC program to create a more robust feedback engine. Consider elements like:
  • SMS Surveys
  • 5-Star Surveys
  • Social media monitoring
  • Text & Sentiment Analytics
  • Email surveys
• Build Better Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence is one of the single most important investments you can make in your CX program – and right now, most of your competitors are probably lacking. That’s why you can’t afford to. In fact, 99% of contact centers don’t think their data intelligence strategy currently meets business needs. By harnessing the power of BI and data analytics, you can see the actual breakpoints and pain points in your customer journey, and it’s the only way to build a truly customer-centric program.

4. Empower The Employee Experience

The Great Resignation hasn’t shown any signs of letting up in 2022 and CX programs will continue to contend with an ongoing war for the best talent in an industry already known for its battles with turnover and attrition. Not to mention, replacing a representative is costly. Gartner research puts the price tag at $14,113 per agent.

Largely, most organizations need to focus on engagement. Gartner research found that only one-third of contact center agents are engaged, and those who are not are 84% more likely to search for another job. A Gallup Poll showed that engagement could improve turnover rates in businesses up to 43%.

So why is engagement so low, and retention following suit? Consider the full employee experience:

• Pay & Benefits: The desire to better their paychecks and benefits package, especially during a period of inflation, could be alluring to your agents. Consider if you are competitively compensating your contact center agents – raising pay and/or providing better agent benefits is likely cheaper than replacing them entirely if they leave.
• Career Advancement: You are more likely to see CX agent retention improve when agents can see a career path in your contact center. CX leaders should consider prioritizing promoting from within. For example, create a portal for agents to apply for internal openings that is separate from the one you use for external hires.
• Assist Technologies: Consider technology additions that will help to ramp your agents quickly, set them up for success, and keep tabs on contact center performance with consistent improvement over time, such as:
  • Training simulators that onboard new agents and upskill existing agents to learn new skills in simulated environments.
  • Personalized coaching technologies to seamlessly track, measure, and act on agent performance needs on an individualized basis and identify personalized KPIs and goals.
  • Gamification solutions that integrate real-time coaching and analytics with gamification and incentives have benefits for agents and supervisors alike. Agents are in it to win it, literally, when they are rewarded for their performance. Supervisors are armed with performance data and more engaged agents.

5. Re-evaluate Your BPO or CX Partner For Agility & Flexibility

If you’re not sure whether your CX outsourcer is delivering the quality and results you need, think about what your new CX goals are, and who might be best poised to help you achieve them. Consider what technologies they have available, who their clients are and what industries they play in, and how their strategies, vision, and values align with your own. Here’s our must-have list for any CX partnership:

• Robust Digital and Omnichannel Support
• The Makeup of Their Agent Workforce (Try to secure a team of digitally-native agents)
• An elite selection of technology tools and offerings
• How flexible a partner can be, and how ready they are to face the unexpected
• The more secure and crisis-ready, the better

As the world shifts into increasing levels of uncertainty, it’s vitally important to start building a CX strategy designed for volatility.  In times of economic uncertainty, sticking to a core focus around what success means to you (your KPIs), who your partners are, and how you’re engaging your customers and employees, is a sure way to keep your program focused and ready to withstand any ups and downs ahead.

Guest blog post written by ibex. To learn more about this topic and others, visit our events page to check out upcoming events.

The post Best Practices for Protecting Your CX Program During Economic Volatility appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Attended automation—artificial intelligence and machine learning used to support live agents, not replace them—delivers ongoing training, real-time workflow guidance and policy enforcement, and noteworthy improvements to KPIs across the board. Agents have more cognitive bandwidth to do the job they were hired to do: provide an empathetic customer care experience.

Support and Guidance: The Key to Better Agents

Attended automation acts like a GPS system for agents, guiding them to pertinent information and suggesting the best course of action while taking care of repetitive or low-value tasks in the background at lightning speed.

Self-service solutions are readily available and widely used. This means most customers won’t contact an agent directly unless they have no choice. These customers often have complex issues and are upset or frustrated. The human element of customer service is especially vital for empathy and nuance in these situations. When helping an upset customer, the last thing an agent needs is navigating multiple programs and complex policies while the customer’s impatience grows.

With attended automation as an agent assist tool, the agent can focus on interacting with the customer and providing outstanding service rather than fumbling around for the right info or keeping a customer on hold for an extended period. Basically, the agent—and, by extension, your brand—gets credit for an amazing customer experience with a little support from some very cool technology.

What Is Attended Automation?

Attended automation leverages AI and machine learning to guide and support human agents by surfacing answers, handling repetitive tasks, and preventing errors. The automation is “attended” by the agent—it does not replace the human. Unlike self-service tools or a chatbot programmed to handle limited tasks or conversations before turning over a customer to a live agent, attended automation works alongside the agent from the very beginning of the call or contact.

Attended automation software sits on an agent’s desktop and has access to the same programs and information the agent does—but it can surface and compile this data faster and more accurately than an agent ever could. The agent monitors the automation and provides the human interaction that’s at the heart of customer service—without the hassle of switching between tabs, screens, or programs. Essentially, attended automation allows agents to work smarter, not harder.

What Can Attended Automation Do for My Contact Center?

If you’re already familiar with the concept of robotic process automation, you probably understand and expect an agent assist tool will be able to:

• Retrieve customer data
• Auto-populate forms
• Present a branded script
• Log basic call details

But here are some things attended automation can do you may not have considered:

• Prevent unintentional overpayments and intentional ones (fraud)
• Enforce policies and approval processes
• Highlight personalized insights
• Draft professional, perfectly on-brand emails
• Decrease ramp time without sacrificing training quality

Attended automation can significantly reduce AHT (average handling time) and ramp time, increase productivity and accuracy, and improve CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores. In short, attended automation in the contact center has the potential to deliver happier agents, happier customers, and, ultimately, a happier bottom line. That’s the contact center of the future.

Guest blog post written by Laivly. To learn more about this topic and others, visit our events page to check out upcoming events.

The post Why Attended Automation Is the Future of Customer Care appeared first on Execs In The Know.

CLV is a great way to keep track of your customers’ overall perception of your brand, but it can also serve to signal gaps in the omnichannel customer experience, revenue you may be leaving on the table, improvements that can be made in marketing, and more. In order for your team to make the most of this valuable metric, you will need to know both what it is and precisely why it should be used.

Customer lifetime value use cases

Customer lifetime value is the kind of metric you should turn to if you are unsure of the cost you would incur in attracting or retaining customers and would like to ground your strategy in the knowledge that your efforts would produce tangible profits. For instance, CLV can clarify how much money you can expect to make from a single customer (or a highlighted group of customers) over a given period of time. This makes adjusting marketing and retention efforts easier as you can avoid overspending for limited ROI.

Another way that you can use CLV to better your business is by dividing your user base into segments and identifying your highest value customers. Once you have identified the customers who represent the bulk of your business’s annual profits, you can better adapt your business practices to favor them instead of engaging in unnecessary spending to attract customers that do not deliver the kind of revenue your company depends on. CLV’s utility extends beyond basic budgeting concerns, though – you can also leverage insights gleaned from your CLV figures to focus on products your customers want most. Consolidating product lines in this way to match the most prominent interests of your customers can make a big difference in your business’s performance.

Why measure customer lifetime value?

CLV may appear to be closely related to other metrics, such as net promoter score (NPS) and CSAT (customer satisfaction), on the surface. However, since it is based on concrete figures and revenue instead of the opinions implied by net promoter scores and CSAT measurements, CLV can contribute precise insights into the real impact different customer segments have on your company’s performance.

CLV can be used to determine not only which customers are creating the most revenue for your business, but also whether the lower value customers cost more to keep or acquire. These details are critical for strategizing your company’s future development.

How to boost customer lifetime value

Driving better CLV results comes down to balancing improvement with customer communication. Customers will respond to well-executed product and service improvements favorably in many cases, so long as you take the time to communicate such improvements to them.

Improvements can be introduced at nearly any stage of the customer journey to boost CLV. For instance, simplifying your returns policy, setting up a rewards program, or even simply keeping in touch with your customers over the long term with relevant offers and upsells can make a noticeable difference in customer lifetime value.

Using customer lifetime value for call centers

CLV has its place in any organization, including within the scope of a call center’s operations. There are numerous facets of a business’s operations that call centers and contact centers support and CLV can be applied across many of these to provide critical insights into the call center’s overall performance. The customer-facing support side of call center operations alone benefits greatly from the use of CLV to help determine whether customers are satisfied with the level of service or quality of the product they have received. For example, high retention costs caused by a multitude of support requests could suggest a change in service or product design is in order.

Customer lifetime value makes keeping track of the total value derived from your current customer base much more straightforward. By using this metric correctly, you can keep your organization on the right track towards sustainable growth, rooted in the interests of your most valuable customers.

Guest blog post written by Callminer. To learn more about this topic and others, visit our events page to check out upcoming events.

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CRS Clearwater was attended by an impassioned and enthusiastic group of some of the customer experience (CX) industry’s best and brightest, and the event featured more than a dozen sessions including keynote presentations, discussion panels, and informative breakout sessions and workshops, as well as ample opportunity for professional networking and socializing.

If you were able to join us for this special event, you know exactly how valuable these sessions were. But if you were not able to attend, now’s your chance to catch up on the conversation with the following keynote session synopses, along with a dozen or so key takeaways.

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How Beachbody Became a Digital-First Company

Presented By: Todd Montgomery, Executive Vice President, The Beachbody Company

Synopsis:

Beginning in 2014, Todd Montgomery and team began a journey of robust transformation. This change has since yielded a more responsive, more consistent customer care experience, along with improved performance across several key metrics like average speed of answer, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). All while lowering costs, improving the agent experience, and creating greater internal accountability.  Not to mention this was all accomplished amid a global pandemic.

Todd’s keynote kickoff told a compelling story about the value of investing in technologies like self-service solutions and better agent tools, while always maintaining a focus on the customer experience. Through thoughtful scaling, careful and ongoing assessment, and a data-driven, results-minded approach, Todd and team are already checking the box on many objectives, while constantly assessing and looking toward what’s next.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize identifying and tackling pain points, focusing on those things that drive the most volume
• Invest in areas that allow you to leverage your program data (including Voice of the Customer) to create more efficient experiences for customers
• Implement and experiment with tools and solutions that can simultaneously automate and improve the customer experience

How Fanatics Activated Its CX Data Superpowers

Presented By: Carolyne Truelove, Head of Global Fan Experience, Fanatics

Synopsis:

As the ultimate one-stop sports fan destination with a database of more than 80 million global customers, the Fanatics brand is working with a wealth of data, and actively using it to field a team of data superheroes. Together, this team is united with a shared goal of improving the customer experience right across the enterprise. Faithfully following where the data leads has already unleashed many performance and cost improvement victories, including steadily decreasing Contacts Per Order, fewer escalations, and lower costs.

By focusing on the right metrics, harnessing data to better understand the customer, and tirelessly championing the cause in a way that informs and unites, a data-driven strategy can produce profound results. By approaching CX with a fan’s passion, Carolyne and team are turning data insights into heroic moments — all in the spirit of a mission to serve.

Key Takeaways:

• Data is a powerful mover of meaningful change when leveraged correctly and consistently, and the data always tells a story when seeking investment and support
• Feedback is a gift that should be both treasured and acted upon
• Strong internal partnerships and centralized metrics are the keys to unlocking support for not only a single powerful superhero, but a powerful super team

Embracing a Commitment to Employee Success

Presented By: Teresa Ignacio, Vice President, Client Care Managed Services, Visa

Presented By: Mike Jones, Senior Director – Customer Care, The Home Depot

Synopsis:

Teresa Ignacio and Mike Jones lit up the stage, evangelizing the critical importance of creating better employee experiences. Although each told a slightly different story, the themes remained the same. The employee experience was nothing short of a rallying point, one for effective deployment of improvement efforts — the type that can have a multiplicative effect. By supporting a drive for greater employee success, each leader demonstrated how their efforts were empowering an ingredient essential in the recipe for customer success.

The world has undergone significant change, and contact center agents have been asked to handle challenges unimaginable only a couple of years ago. While the foundations of the past may have been a good starting point, they weren’t designed to address all the employee needs that have arisen in our new normal. Contact centers have been impacted in ways large and small, and forward-thinking companies have responded with greater flexibility, awareness, and dedication to their most important asset — their people.

Key Takeaways:

• The employee experience is multifaceted … many critical areas need to be addressed like career development, engagement, and work environment
• Investing in employees (and the tools and technologies that support employees) is one of the single best investments that can be made in the CX space
• Leadership approach, processes, and policies must all be flexible enough to change with the times and evolving consumer expectations

CX Transformation Secret Revealed: The Hero Is Your Customer!

Presented By: Jen Johnson, Senior Vice President of Business Transformation, Frontier

Synopsis:

Transformation isn’t easy, but it’s almost always essential. And if done correctly, the rewards go far beyond the bottom line. Frontier has undergone many transformations in its nearly 90-year history. But its most recent transformation has led Frontier toward a path of truly putting the customer first, taking center stage in everything the organization does.

Jen shares her thoughts on the compelling narrative of “the customer as the hero,” and how such an approach inevitably leads to positive experiences for Frontier customers. Naturally, it’s a long-term investment, and not necessarily an easy sell. But with the help of true CX champions, alignment up and down the organization, perseverance, and a common language of “speaking customer,” a cultural shift isn’t only possible, it’s inevitable.

Key Takeaways:

• Every customer is a mighty advocate, just needing the right experience to become activated
• Organizational alignment is a massive enabler in achieving transformational success
• The process is not always easy, and it takes some honest self-reflection to get there

Our Next Event Is Closer Than You Might Think

Catching up on an event by reading these sorts of post-event blog posts might be the next best thing to attending, but it’s a far cry from the experience of attending an Execs In the Know CRS event. That’s why we invite you to consider joining us during our next CRS event, taking place in Coronado, California, October 24–26, 2022.

To learn more about CRS Coronado, or register for this highly anticipated event, take a moment to visit us at the CRS Coronado web page.

The post It’s A Wrap: Insights from Four CRS Clearwater Keynote Presentations appeared first on Execs In The Know.

At its core, AES is an expression of how much effort it takes for an agent to fulfill their role of helping a customer resolve their customer care issue. AES inputs vary by organization, ranging from the highly detailed, like measuring the number of agent clicks and cursor movements to resolve an issue, to broader evaluations like the total number of tools, dashboards, and logins required to help a customer. Regardless of how it is measured, AES is an important metric to track for a number of critical reasons, including:

AES’s Close Correlation to Employee Satisfaction (ESAT)

Like CES is to customer satisfaction (CSAT), AES is closely correlated with ESAT. Agents who have to slog through a lot of complexity and effort to complete an engagement are naturally going to have a less pleasant experience, hence less on the job satisfaction.

Less Agent Effort Means Less Customer Effort

For every minute it takes for an agent to navigate through a myriad of tools to resolve an issue, that’s a minute the customer sits on hold. Let’s not forget that when it comes to the customer and agent experience, time equals effort.

Unnecessary Effort Equates to Poor Efficiency

As indicated above, greater effort requires more time for the same result. When each engagement takes longer, that means each agent, on average, completes fewer engagements. Furthermore, increased effort can dramatically increase the level of difficulty for agents tasked with handling simultaneous engagements across different channels (i.e., working on both a chat and voice engagement at the same time).

Making the Most of Tracking AES

Undoubtedly, AES is a critical measurement that is only going to grow in importance as more and more automated, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, and self-help solutions come online, leaving live agents with only the most complex types of transactions. Whether an organization has a well-established AES metric or is just now exploring the potential benefits of tracking AES, here are four best practices for organizations to consider as they seek to maximize the value of their agents by reducing unnecessary effort.

1. Survey agents like they are customers.

If an organization wants to reduce unnecessary agent effort, why not get some intel straight from the horse’s mouth? Agents are best positioned to speak to what’s working and what could work better. Be sure to include open-ended questions and create a culture that lets agents know they have a vital role to play in helping shape and improve the company’s CX operations.

2. Understand the impact of AES on other critical measurements.

When consistently and routinely measured, AES can provide a great deal of insight when correlated with things like CSAT, ESAT, CES, and even issue resolution rates. As an organization makes changes to reduce its AES, it’s worth assessing how these changes may or may not be influencing other key indicators of CX performance. For instance, some organizations may find that tackling their AES is a more direct route to improving something like ESAT when compared to other, perhaps more expensive, initiatives.

3. Don’t forget about agents when investing in new and better technology.

CX organizations spend a considerable amount of time, money, and focus on the usability of customer-facing technology and solutions. This same level of investment also needs to be paid to agent-facing solutions, especially when considering the impact of agent experience on customer experience. In much the same way a brand might scrutinize every touchpoint of a customer’s service journey, the same should be undertaken from the agent’s perspective, including each and every interface, tool, and process. Invest in replacing those pieces of the journey that create the biggest drag on agent effort.

4. Simplify beyond the agent space.

Added effort doesn’t only come from an agent’s toolbox, workflow, or operational processes. Things like company policies (be they unclear or unfair) or specific types of programs (think loyalty programs or product launches) can be unnecessarily complex, and can even generate handling variations by channel or region. Streamlining beyond the agent space can help reduce effort and complexity, having a major (and positive) impact on AES.

Like CES, AES will continue to grow in importance as a foundational CX measurement. By reducing agent effort, even if incrementally, organizations stand to reap substantial benefits across the organization. Like anything having to do with CX, start small, measure consistently, and do more of what moves the needle the most.

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If you are a senior leader running CX operations on the corporate side and would like to engage with your peers about Agent Effort Score and other CX topics in a private, online community, we invite you to join our KIA online community. You can also find out about everything happening within the Execs In The Know community by joining our mailing list.

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What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a set of tools that uses machine learning and NLP to extract opinions to provide a measure of sentiment (or opinion) of voice, text, and images. Algorithms work behind the scenes to find specific nuances of text to identify consumers’ positive, negative, or neutral attitudes toward a product, brand, or service.

Why is sentiment analysis growing in use?

It is no secret that CX is a competitive differentiator for organizations, and consumers are not shy about voicing their negative opinions about their experiences in very public ways. Eighty-three percent of respondents from the CXMB Series 2020 Consumer Edition indicated as much. When this happens, the domino effect that can occur can be devastating to a brand’s image. Not to mention, consumer needs, expectations, and feelings change rapidly. So, with multiple channels and the sheer volume of data that is available, it is near impossible to effectively mine the data or rely solely on customer surveys or monitoring customer interactions. Customer feedback measurements such as customer satisfaction, NPS, and customer effort are all important measures of satisfaction and loyalty, but the ability to proactively collect and act on nuanced, real-time data will not only improve customer loyalty and retention, but lower costs as well. In short, it can be a game changer.

What are the practical applications of sentiment analysis?

There are several use cases for sentiment analysis. These are some of the most common:

• Brand monitoring / reputation management – This is one of the most common uses of sentiment analysis, allowing organizations to quickly identify negative or harmful comments about their brand online and react quickly before they go viral. Conversely, it can also be used in the event of ‘positive’ mentions – brands can quickly jump in on these conversations and maximize the positive exposure in online forums.
• Marketing and market research – Sentiment analysis helps brands measure performance of campaigns and marketing activities while also providing insights on how marketing messages are perceived. This allows brands to pivot strategies if needed and better personalize messaging for more relevant content. From a market research perspective, sentiment analysis is not the most common tool utilized, but it can be used to gain perspectives from customers AND competitors.
• Product analytics – Using sentiment analysis in the context of product analytics is like brand monitoring. Instead of focusing on brand mentions, it mines comments about specific products. Customer feedback can be categorized for further improvements, which is particularly important in the early stages of product development. As products mature, this data is often combined with brand monitoring in a more multidimensional view. All of this allows brands to understand how products are perceived by various target audiences, their performance in the market, strengths that should be maximized, and areas that need improvement to increase user reception.
• Customer support – Below we will review, in more detail, the specific use cases of sentiment analysis in customer-support operations.

How is sentiment analysis leveraged in customer support?

Sentiment analysis, or text analytics, is not necessarily a new concept for customer-support organizations. However, it can seem a bit of a mystery as a concept, but it has some very real and practical applications.

• Route consumers to the ‘right’ resolution channel – This is perhaps the most common use of sentiment analysis in customer support. Identifying the emotion or tone of the consumer upon contact with customer support allows quick routing of that consumer to a higher place in the queue, or to specialized agents trained and equipped to handle difficult interactions. Similarly, if consumers are interacting with chatbots, upon recognizing a consumer is dissatisfied, the consumer can be routed to a live agent better trained to resolve the issue.
• Identify friction points – By monitoring and collecting data in real-time, in all channels, and on all interactions, the data can be used to identify pain points in the consumer’s journey. Organizations can then utilize this information to remove those barriers and improve the overall experience.
• Uncover agent challenges – Using sentiment analysis to understand how consumers feel when interacting with customer-support agents allows leaders to identify which agents are most successful and those who struggle. It can also uncover gaps in knowledge so training can be modified or created to better equip agents with the tools they need.

Having a pulse on customers’ feelings has never been more important than it is today. The events of 2020 have understandably introduced high levels of stress and strong emotions. So, the ability to recognize negative emotions early in the resolution process and proactively address those concerns before they spiral beyond control can provide a competitive advantage if implemented effectively.

What are the challenges with sentiment analysis tools?

As illustrated above, sentiment analysis is a valuable tool for many applications, including customer support. That said, there are some inherent challenges that should be understood when exploring the use of sentiment analysis.  These include:

• Detecting tone and subjectivity – Detecting tone is generally one of the primary features of these tools, and typically fairly easy for them to determine based on the verbiage, keying off certain words such as “nice” or “horrible.” It becomes more difficult to determine whether the message is objective or subjective.
• Identifying irony and sarcasm – This is reportedly the most difficult of issues for these tools to navigate. In reading a text string at face value, it could easily be mischaracterized as either positive or negative. For example, a customer sarcastically types in a chat, “That’s just GREAT customer service, isn’t it?” A tool might misinterpret that as a positive sentiment, when in fact the customer was being sarcastic. This requires constant training of tools to deliver more accurate results.
• Understanding context – This too can create a real issue for these tools. A human can often quickly understand context. However, an algorithm cannot ‘guess’ what they need to do – they are configured to get to the right answer based on a set of rules. So, the model must include an additional component to get to the heart of the context.
• Changing vocabulary and word ambiguity – Vocabulary is constantly changing, slang is introduced, and even existing words take on new meanings virtually overnight. As a result, again, researchers and systems engineers must continuously work to train these tools for these changes.

Sentiment analysis can be incredibly valuable to organizations, though as with any technology, it is important to understand its capabilities. Its specific application can differ from organization to organization so those who implement and manage this technology must know how to use it, and where to apply it for maximum benefit. Because it can be leveraged by many parts of an organization, its usefulness is maximized if internal departments work together to agree on a common goal, the areas it will be applied, who will mine the data, and how it will be applied.

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If you are a senior leader running CX operations on the corporate side and would like to engage your peers about Customer Sentiment Analysis and many other topics in a private, online community, we invite you to join our KIA online community. You can also find out about everything happening within the Execs In The Know community by joining our mailing list.

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What is personalized service?

Simply put, providing personalized service is tailoring an experience to each individual customer, based on their needs, history, sentiment, and behaviors. The result of a personalized experience is customers feel known, valued, heard, and appreciated because they are treated as individuals.

Personalization can take on a wide range of sophistication. Most organizations offer at least some degree off personalized service whether that is simply personalizing emails to the customer with specific offers (e.g., Amazon), automatically detecting a technology outage and notifying them (or best-case scenario fixing it before they even knew about it), or providing an immersive omnichannel shopping experience (e.g., Sephora).

Much of the personalization we think of feels more like marketing personalization than service personalization, and in many respects that is accurate. But these “marketing” experiences have created expectations of personalized end-to-end experiences beyond the shopping and purchasing touchpoints. This leads us into why personalized service is so important.

Why is personalization so important?

Besides potential reductions in cost, increases in revenue, and improved customer satisfaction, customers are beginning to expect it, even more so because of COVID-19.

There are countless statistics that point to the growing importance of offering personalized experiences, including these from Accenture:

• 33% of customers who abandoned a business relationship did so because personalization was lacking.
• 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.
• 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.

Additionally, a report cited in this Forbes article, speaks to the concept of “lifelong conversations.” This means shifting the way you treat, measure, and interact with customers. Instead of operating in a transactional and reactive mode, consider that you have ONE journey or experience with your customer. Each time you make contact is just an extension of that lifelong conversation.

Imagine the power of this paradigm shift and its potential impact on customer loyalty. In fact, this same report found that:

“84% of customers will go out of their way to spend more money to get a great experience.” 

To deliver on such a concept is, in essence, an ongoing, personal experience.

What is the future of personalized customer care?

McKinsey has looked into the future of personalized care with an eye toward 2025. As headlined in this article, the “hyperpersonalized care” and “care of one” is the ultimate goal in self-service channels, as well as live channels.

Because most organizations are offering some level of personalization, the future is not simply to improve upon the status quo, but to take the status quo to the next level. As McKinsey explains, there are four key components to deliver this concept:

• White-glove customer care for all – This starts with shifting from traditional reactive care to proactive control of the customer relationship by predicting, identifying, and solving customer issues before the customer contacts you. Organizations that succeed will have the ability to bust organizational and data silos, bringing data together to understand behavior patterns, sentiment, and the priorities of each customer. Contact centers will be able to leverage this information to determine the right time to reach out with an offer or when live outreach is required and by which channel. Data from the contact center will ultimately flow to the rest of the organization to drive product, marketing, or policy strategies.
• One company, one voice (omnichannel communication) – Omnichannel strategies have been in our collective vocabulary for years and there are always discussions within organizations to improve consistency, transparency, and ease of navigation across channels. In the next five years, this will become a reality for those that succeed to truly deliver a seamless experience for the journeys that matter most to the customer. With dynamic platforms that collate and visualize all customer interactions and activities across all channels, a detailed and real-time view will allow agents the ability to instantly react to the specific customer situation in a personalized way. Essentially agents and customers will be able to seamlessly communicate and act via different channels without losing context, resulting in a more personalized, efficient, consistent, and satisfying level of service.
• The workstation of the future (digital enablement) – While the nature of their roles will shift due to more “routine” transactions handled via self-service channels, live agents will be more critical than ever to providing customer care. However, technology will facilitate their ability to solve issues more efficiently and in a more personalized way, while also allowing companies to be more targeted in how the workforce is deployed. The ‘care of one’ will be supported by advanced analytics, AI, real-time natural language processing, and other tools that detect customer sentiment and emotion, providing agents with real-time guidance.
• Contact centers: The future talent factory – As customer experience continues to be the great differentiator and as contact center employees’ role in influencing the customer’s lifetime journey with the company grows in importance, employees who are truly customer-centric will become even more critical. Because of this, contact center staff will become a source of long-term organizational talent, forcing customer care organizations to change recruiting, hiring, and training strategies. “Customer service representatives will be supported with digitally enabled in-moment tools and coaching (allowing for successful performance with greater spans of control with supervisors); well-defined career paths; tailored, ongoing training; and upskilling for roles in the contact center and beyond.” By 2025, it is predicted that a high percentage of customer service representatives will be graduates of online high schools and universities, so companies will need to adjust their training and development approach as well.

What does this mean for CX leaders?

The future is now. You do not have to look far to see examples of organizations with their foot on the gas in elevating their personalized care strategies. While personalization is a priority for many organizations, including those in our own EITK community, there are some very real challenges. It starts with ensuring the organization is aligned on the strategy, and organizational/data silos are removed to begin to bring the vision together in a meaningful way. Organizations must start with an understanding of customer needs and expectations (as well as organizational enablers and capabilities) to develop a cohesive and integrated strategy. For many, one of the initial challenges to overcome is not a lack of data — it is how to actually collate the massive amount of data that exists from multiple back-end systems and departments. The next hurdle is then determining what and how to serve up to customers, doing so in a “non-creepy,” yet useful way. The good news is that most organizations are not starting from zero, but those who accelerate their plans to create more personalized experiences will be well-positioned ahead of the competition in the coming years.

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If you are a senior leader running CX operations on the corporate side and would like to engage your peers about Personalization and many other topics in a private, online community, we invite you to join our KIA online community. You can also find out about everything happening within the Execs In The Know community by joining our mailing list.

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By delivering an effective customer experience, a company can improve retention (and long-term revenue) and even attract new customers. However, improving the customer experience requires knowledge, not only about your company’s internal processes and plans, but also about the needs and demands of your customers.

To learn more about the customer experience and how it can be improved through the use of speech analytics, download our white paper, The CX Pro’s Guide to Speech Analytics.

Read on to learn how we define customer experience and how your organization can optimize the experience of its own customers:

Today’s Definition of Customer Experience

Customer experience can be summarized as the overall perception an individual has of your company after having interacted with it. A good customer experience carries positive implications, such as an uncomplicated series of interactions and high-quality products or services.

When your customer experience trends south, it can signal a drop in service quality, failure to recognize pain points your customers are experiencing, and more. Issues that may otherwise go unnoticed can make a serious dent in a customer’s perception of your brand, causing them to choose competitors instead.

Losing customers is costly and can quickly rob an organization of vital revenue. This is what makes understanding, analyzing, and improving customer experience critical to long-term growth.

Customer Experience Strategies

Having a strong customer experience strategy is simply a practical approach to maintaining an optimal customer experience across every part of your company.

In your customer experience strategy, you should carefully consider each of the following facets of your business:

Product and/or Service Design

By designing products and services to benefit the customer from the start, you can create a much stronger offering and positively impact the customer experience across the board.

A simple way to improve products and services as they are developed is to make and use detailed customer profiles or “buyer personas.” These personas should be specific and provide an accurate foundation upon which you can build out your company’s offerings.

By basing design choices on such buyer personas, you can make important decisions about what matters most and what details can be left out. The most important step in using customer profiles is to work with real data to define their traits more accurately. Personas made up on the spot are far more likely to get the important parts wrong and wreck your actual users’ experience down the line.

Omnichannel Customer Service

Where you interact with your customers and how you do so can completely change their perception of your brand. With the rapid adoption of new forms of communication online, it is more important than ever for businesses to make use of the mediums most of their customers prefer to be served in.

Convenience is a defining factor for a positive omnichannel customer experience. If your company can meet its customers where they are online or offline, then it stands a much better chance of satisfying their needs and earning their loyalty.

Surveying Customers

The importance of understanding your customers and their needs is hard to overstate, yet there is no single most-effective route to take to learn more about the people you serve. Many companies have come up with their own approaches to surveying their customers and proven there are numerous paths worth taking. More important than your surveying strategy are the positive results it can produce.

In the case of companies like Virgin Mobile, whose online customer diaries initiative helped them steer clear of what would have been a disastrous service-structuring decision, the surveying method used was far less important than the questions they chose to ask their customers.

When asking your own customers about their experiences with your brand, it is important to ask the right questions – ideally these should tie in directly to your current development plans. Instead of asking how customers rate their experience overall, aim for more specific issues and refine your timing to catch customers when their most recent experiences with your company are still fresh.

Tips to Improve the Customer Experience

If you aim to optimize the customer experience within your organization, the following tips should prove helpful:

• Measure as much as you can. Measuring KPIs of all types can keep you in the loop on lapses in performance and shifting consumer trends before they make dangerous waves in your organization.
• Align products/services with your brand image. When your products fail to match up with customer expectations, they could turn to competitors, leaving you with lost revenue. By keeping your company’s actions in line with its values and brand image, you can keep customers’ confidence more consistently.
• Map out the customer journey. Taking time to map out the path customers take in interacting with your company can provide key insight into their overall experience and potential bottlenecks they regularly encounter.

Improving customer experience should be a top priority for every organization; it’s crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in today’s highly competitive markets. By adopting new initiatives that positively impact the customer experience, you’ll boost customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

How does your company cultivate a positive customer experience?

Guest post written by: Brian LaRoche, Marketing Director, CallMiner

To learn more about this topic, join Brian for his CustomerCONNECT session, “Leveraging Emotion to Improve CX & Elevate Contact Center Performance,” on February 24, 2021 at 10:15 AM PST / 1:15 PM EST.

To attend, please register now for CustomerCONNECT.

The post Tips & Strategies for Improving the Customer Experience appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Although the discussion was wide-ranging, it often turned tactical — focusing on the various changes deployed by the different participating brands since the onset of the pandemic. Many of these changes were brought about to maintain an acceptable level of CX in a time of great challenge and uncertainty. In this post, we spotlight just a few of the changes shared, building context around those changes by highlighting the various benefits and considerations — both for businesses and their customers.

Increased Automation and Greater Reliance on Self-Service

Automation has been on the industry’s radar for a long, long time. But the events of the past year have sped up the timeline of adoption at many organizations. In the early stages of the pandemic, lots of organizations were forced to cut staff, regardless of whether contact volumes were rising or falling. Automation rode to the rescue, acting as a release valve for frontline resources now stretched thin, while scrambling to overcome the new challenges posed by shifting entire operations to working from home.

Many companies used the crisis of the pandemic to show some love to their legacy self-service systems, things like FAQs, Help Centers, and customer-facing knowledge databases. The intent was not only to try and bring down the volumes hitting live channels, but also make information more readily available to customers. The idea is simple enough — by improving access to information, less customer effort would be required to resolve an issue, and retention rates would rise. Of course, this all depends on coming up with simple and effective solutions that customers are willing to use.

Customer Benefit(s):

• • Increased service availability, especially for transactional-type engagements
  • Greater channel options

Business Benefit(s):

• • Lower cost-per-contact
  • Ability to handle more volume with less staff
  • Improved CSAT and CX

Considerations:

Because automated and self-service solutions excel at handling “the easy stuff,” what’s often left over are the more complicated issues. This may call for additional training for agents and managers. It also means Average Handle Time (AHT) is likely to increase, while Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Resolution Rates, and productivity may fall. It should also be noted that some of these shifts are much more adaptable and effective when handling business-to-consumer versus business-to-business engagements. In other words, the type of customer, and types of transactions to be handled, are definitely key considerations.

Become a Better Partner with the Product and Marketing Teams

A lot of “one-and-done” and UX- or process-related customer care issues can be headed off at the pass when internal teams are lockstep and mutually informed on new initiatives. By establishing a closer working relationship with their Product and Marketing Team counterparts, CX leaders can better predict what’s coming, while also having an opportunity to head off contact volume spikes for simple things that easily overlooked when internal visibility is obscured. Things like launches, software updates, product changes, and promotions can create contact volume surprises that are tough (if not impossible) to forecast without the right level of internal transparency and communication.

Customer Benefit(s):

• • Avoidable customer issues, and getting caught up in volume spikes
  • Get a better ownership experience

Business Benefit(s):

• • Avoid costly volume spikes
  • Increase the visibility of company initiatives
  • Promote cultural alignment with the organization
  • Improved CSAT and CX

Considerations:

Building stronger relationships between internal teams is a great way to promote consistency of experience across the organization, something consumers value greatly. A closer working relationship between groups also improves outcomes (for the business and its customers) and increases the successes of other multigroup projects — things like policy reviews and product launches.

Developing the Business Value of Customer Service

The days of old where contact centers were viewed strictly as cost centers are long gone. More and more, CX leaders are talking about Return on Investment (ROI) and revenue generation, as well as the standard talk of CSAT, dissatisfaction (DSAT), loyalty, etc. CX leaders can also take greater business value in their operations beyond up-selling and cross-selling. The contact center is home to a wealth of information, particularly when it comes to Voice of the Customer insights. With the rights tools in place, customer experience data can provide valuable data about what customers like and don’t like, what they want, and what triggers loyalty. All of this information can become incredibly actionable if properly compiled, analyzed, and disseminated.

Customer Benefit(s):

• • Easier entry into the purchase funnel
  • Development of new products and service based on consumer input

Business Benefit(s):

• • Increased revenue
  • Increased customer loyalty
  • Gain a pipeline of insights and ideas for new offerings

Considerations:

Sales takes a particular set of skills, and these skills might not also be organically found in the contact center. For organizations that are serious about viewing every contact as a selling opportunity, specialized training is pretty much a given. Leaders should also make sure agents have all the tools and information they need to create a valuable, positive (even personalized) experience for the customers. In other words, selling in the contact center should first and foremost be about creating a better experience, with the increased revenue acting as the icing on the cake.

Placing Greater Emphasis on Metrics that are Core or Core Metrics to the Customer and the Experience

As the industry’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) continue to evolve, it’s important to understand which indicators matter most to customers. Things like CSAT/DSAT are helpful, but they really measure a moment in time as opposed to the performance of an operation. On the other hand, things like customer effort, NPS, and retention rates are broader measurements that describe how customers experience a process, policy, or particular journey. This also applies to what’s being measured and monitored as a part of a Quality Assurance program. When brands understand what matters most to their customer, and then manage performance against those things, opportunities for improvement become more clear.

Customer Benefit(s):

• • Improved experience based on customer-centric focus
  • Increased retention and loyalty

Business Benefit(s):

• • Repositions time, energy, and resources for the best return
  • Provides a clear roadmap for improving the experience

Considerations:

Along with looking at the right, customer-centric indicators, organizations should also take a close look at the journey itself. Is the journey simple, sensible, quick, and without inefficiencies? Are there common breakdowns or easily resolvable pain points? Understanding the journey from the customer’s perspective is a great way to reassess which metrics are worth prioritizing.

Like so much in CX, whether a major change or minor initiative, everything needs to start with the customer … who they are … what they want … what they need. Time and again, the roundtable conversation was joined by the phrase, “Meet your customer where they are.” This has never been truer. So whether changes are big or small, forced by necessity or a desire to do right by the customer, brands can only improve retention and build greater lifetime value by starting with the customer at the center of everything they do.

Special thanks to ibex’s John Kusak and Emmanuelle Skala from Toast for moderating this special Virtual Executive Roundtable, Driving Customer Retention & Lifetime Value While Experiencing Hyper Growth.

If you are a senior leader running CX operations on the corporate side and would like to engage your peers in a private, online community, we invite you to join our KIA online community. You can also find out about everything happening within the Execs In The Know community by joining our mailing list.

Likewise, if you are a solutions or service provider and would like to lead a future Executive Roundtable or get involved with the Execs In The Know community in other ways, you can reach out to us at info@execsintheknow.com.

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