CX Trends for 2022

By Tony Ayaz, CEO, Scuba Analytics

Maintaining wallet share in an increasingly noisy digital marketplace requires real-time intelligence as a top priority.

At the height of the global pandemic, brick-and-mortars closed down, supply chains were disrupted, and life changed as we knew it. Our ability to interact with businesses to conduct our day-to-day lives changed overnight. As a result, we saw a sweeping transition into a digital-first world, for just about everything.

Research by McKinsey shows the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitization of customer interactions by several years, with more than 80% of all customer interactions currently occurring digitally versus face-to-face or over the phone.

As consumers increased their dependence on digital interactions with brands, their expectations for online experiences became more stringent as well. In response, organizations are increasing their focus on exceptional, personalized experiences for their customers in order to drive growth and improve retention.

A survey conducted by SuperOffice, showed that nearly 50% of respondents said improving CX was their top business priority, and research by Walker validates the statement, showing that by the end of 2020, customer experience overtook price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Embracing End-to-End Customer Experience Intelligence

With a changing tide of adapting a customer-centric approach, the ways in which we collect and organize customer’s digital interactions needs to evolve at the same break-neck pace.

Historically, digital initiatives to improve the customer journey has meant adopting new components of technology or adding new integrations to existing technology. These changes, usually led by a single business unit or function (such as marketing or customer service),
can leave critical business data in a silo, difficult to access, and often only representing one part of the customer experience, resulting in short-sighted CX changes.

Take, for example, deploying customer satisfaction surveys. Integrating surveys into a workflow can be a powerful tool, but without behavioral analytics for broader context, these insights are more of a time capsule of how the customer felt about the experience or relationship at the time they were surveyed. Without analyzing this data in conjunction with other digital touchpoints connected to time-series data and user events, companies can’t identify what a customer actually did, or how they were positively or negatively influenced by specific elements of the experience.

Research by McKinsey indicates that organizations who rely solely on survey-based CX measurements are often unimpressed by the clarity surveys bring to an organization, with only 16% of organizations feeling confident that surveys address the root causes of poor performance.

Customer-centricity requires a holistic assessment to address problems and unmet needs. When customer data can’t be mined effectively across all functions of an organization to make connections between all customer interactions, we are only able to look at a fragment of the scenario. Thus, the ability to analyze data across silos and disparate sources has become a critical capability in creating the complete end-to-end picture of the customer experience.

Dynamic Data Exploration Across Functions Provides Different Perspectives

As customer experience and customer empathy have become a north star for companies, innovation of technology platforms to orchestrate and manage end-to-end customer data is a top priority.

Organizations that can analyze data holistically have more visibility into what happens across touchpoints and insights can be derived beyond “what happened” to “why” to help identify opportunities for improvement, as well as innovation.

Take, for example, sports news publication, Bleacher Report, which earns advertising dollars from its high performing owned and operated (O&O) audience, and social reach.

When Bleacher Report began noticing dips in user engagement and retention, the organization needed to take a cross-departmental approach to improving the CX experience in order to protect its bottom line.

The first step for Bleacher Report was to streamline the analytics process by retiring several expensive and niche solutions and replacing their ‘Frankenstack’ with a single tool that offered
real-time visibility into customer data. The adjustment to a single tool allowed Bleacher Report
to reduce time-to-insights from months to weeks.

By analyzing data inside a single pane of glass, Bleacher Report could more easily see friction points along the customer journey. For example, when users onboarded with the app, those who selected two sports teams to follow were more likely to churn than those who selected four sports teams to follow. And, with more accessible and reliable data, they could easily create function-specific dashboards to increase collaboration between content, sales, and business development teams to better plan and prioritize new content, which led to even more increased user retention. (Learn more!)

Real-time Insights Drive Competitive Advantage

More than just having access to customer data is the importance of data quality, and one of the key factors in data analysis is the age of the data.

It generally takes somewhere from one to three weeks to build a new data pipeline (if it’s the sole responsibility of a data engineer). However, competing priorities contribute to the inability to build new pipelines quickly, and can delay when data becomes usable for decision making.

This lack of bandwidth often means that data is weeks or months old by the time the average organization builds, analyzes, and then can take action on insights, which puts a company in a reactive position.

When teams are able to navigate across silos and in real-time with no dependence on other departments to access it, they realize a much quicker time-to-value with their data, and improve the customer experience more accurately.

Take, for example, when a company launches a new product or service. As soon as a launch occurs, your organization will begin collecting product usage data detailing everything from engagement to conversion rates to product utilization. Companies that can monitor these trends in real-time will be far more successful in bridging the gaps in communications and experience, while also identifying immediate opportunities to iterate on new product features and services based on real-time adoption, engagement, and utilization.

Empowered Employees Equals Business Success

When your employees are empowered to gather, analyze, and share customer insights, they often feel far more connected to their employer, knowing that their contributions are creating a positive impact with customers and with the business as a whole.

Without equipping your team with the proper tools, CX is out of their hands.

Imagine reaching out to a call center to resolve a product or service issue only to have the customer service representative only be able to see one part of the customer experience. This is incredibly frustrating for the customer, and for your employees.

Unless your employees can see and contribute to the end-to-end customer experience, they also are unempowered to help solve these problems, identify unmet needs, or have behavioral context as to what the customer was actually experiencing. By being able to document and view the complete records of a customer in conjunction with the actions that contributed to the experience, an employee will have contextual relevance and be able to effectively serve the customer, while sharing those insights across the organization.

Comcast, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, is a great example of how reimagining customer experience analytics can empower employees and improve the overall brand experience.

Comcast wanted to dramatically improve their customer experience, but like many other global companies, the mass amount of customer data was difficult to parse through and analyze. They had over 70 channels of data to navigate from over 30 million external customers. Comcast needed to make it easier to analyze data across multiple silos and navigate not just within a single customer event but at an aggregate level to identify if its negative NPS scores were a part of a larger trend (such as inefficiencies with their platform’s messaging tool or service truck logistics) to correlate the impact of a solution. By streamlining data and more easily drawing patterns from its event data, Comcast found a way to decrease support calls by more than 11.3 million, protect its bottom line, and empower more of its staff. Read more about how Comcast saved millions of dollars by streamlining CX operations and empowering its staff.

Streamlined and real-time insights make data more visible for your entire organization, while also enabling employees to go deeper and ask more complex questions of your data, setting them up to become heroes for your organization.

Driving Innovation with Your Data

Innovation is not limited to companies with R&D labs. Any company has the potential to build a culture of innovation that can result in finding immediate wins. By creating an environment that thrives on making data-informed decisions, the intelligence of its employees and its data can be effectively leveraged to identify opportunities to innovate.

We have come a long way in ensuring that we collect the right data, now we need to capitalize on it to drive innovation and a better end-to-end customer experience.

Tony Ayaz Chief Executive Officer Scuba Analytics

About the Author: Tony Ayaz is the CEO and a Board Member at Scuba Analytics. Tony has more than 20 years of experience in data analytics, infrastructure, and security. Tony has held the titles of founder, investor, and executive, and has helped build global GTM strategies at companies such as Splunk (21st employee), Zoomdata (Logi Analytics), Gemini Data, and more. scuba.io

sources:

1. https://blog.scuba.io/blog/behavioral-analytics-cybersecurity-threats
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever
3. https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/
4. https://walkerinfo.com/cxleader/customers-2020-a-progress-report/
5. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/prediction-the-future-of-cx
6. https://info.scuba.io/en-us/execs-in-the-know-bleacher-report
7. https://info.scuba.io/en-us/execs-in-the-know-comcast