Digital disruption is on many corporate agendas right now, but what is it? Put simply, it’s when an idea or technological process changes the way that things are done. If the change is radical enough it can affect companies and even entire industries. Think of how Kodak once led the market for photographic film, yet didn’t see how digital photographs would change their industry.

Digital disruption divides opinion in the boardroom. Some leaders see the opportunity and some see only threats. The very concept of your entire business model being challenged by disruptive market entrants can lead to decision paralysis because no strategies or options appear to be right.

However, if you plan well and create a vision to manage digital disruption it can be exciting and empowering in the way it can reshape your business. Digital disruption often creates opportunities for companies to engage in a deeper and more meaningful way with their customers.

It’s important to appreciate that in the 21st century business environment it is often your customer that dictates the rate of change – consumer technologies have created enterprise disruption. The growth of multichannel communication between customers and brands is a great example that shows just how quickly customer expectations changed. Any customer who asks a brand a question using Twitter or Facebook today will feel ignored if they don’t get a prompt answer, but a few years ago most brands were still ignoring social networks and expecting customers to call a dedicated customer support phone number.

This is an important dynamic that all executives should appreciate – you can no longer plan your customer engagement strategy entirely in the boardroom. You just need to be flexible enough to adapt to what your customers want. I believe there are a few key areas that all executives need to be thinking of if they want to stay on top of digital disruption:

– Observe and react to your customer preferences. They have existing preferences for digital engagement and communication, but some will be exploring new channels, and any one of these channels could soon become important – just as some of the existing favorites may eventually be irrelevant.

– Plan ahead and consider which parts of your business can be digitally disrupted. Is it just the interaction with customers or is it your entire business? The hotel industry never imagined their main challenger in 2016 would be Airbnb and banks today are competing with apps. Which part of your business could change fundamentally?

– Consider how people are using digital tools today and how this affects your business, for example, are you ignoring opportunities that already exist just because you have not developed your offer? The L’Oreal Makeup Genius app didn’t exist two years ago, yet it’s now responsible for millions of purchases because it lets customers try products virtually, but they can easily buy the real thing direct from the app.

– Never stop exploring the immediate future. Many company leaders don’t know where technologies like Virtual Reality will go at present, yet it is a technology that is real, is available in stores, it is not science fiction. Make sure that you are the company exploring existing disruptors, not your competition.

– Learn from the success and mistakes of others. There is an enormous amount of experience out there. Nobody can predict a future disruption, but you can learn to spot the indicators and be ready for change.

Managers responsible for the customer experience know all of this because customers drive most disruption today. Some companies are truly innovative and far ahead of what customers think they need, but most are changing because their customers want change.

Digital disruption can be scary, but if you are ready for it the business opportunities are immense. Digital disruption is taking place, you can’t avoid it. Those who try to keep on delivering what worked last year will soon find they have no customers left.

I’m talking about this topic on a panel at the Customer Response Summit, on February 24th, in Phoenix, AZ. Please get in touch via my LinkedIn or if you are attending the summit, say hello and ask me about this blog in person!

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I was never an actual member of the armed forces, but my Father was a Lt. Colonel in the Army, so I was “sort of” in the Army too; let’s just say that by the age of 3, in knew what the words “attention” and “at ease” meant. Among the many colorful words and acronyms I needed to understand in order to survive, there was one in particular that proved to be highly valuable, it was “sit rep”. No, that’s not a description of an ab work out, it’s short for Situational Report. When my Dad asked for a sit rep, it meant I needed to state my objective, observe my surroundings, assess my location, determine my operational status, assess any threats, determine a recommended course of action, and communicate all of this as accurately and concisely as possible to my commander. This was particularly useful for a 3 year old when crossing the street.

But the idea of the sit rep is also useful for the savvy business person. In fact it’s something we do rather instinctively, although we sometimes do not deploy a disciplined approach to the task, and for my military Dad, that’s just not up to spec (specifications for you non-military types) and is likely to leave us with a “soup-sandwich”.

So how does all of this relate to my organization’s digital interaction strategy? Well, let’s take a moment and “sit rep” it. Before you start to conduct such an analysis, you’ll need a way to gauge your surroundings and look into the future, and for this purpose I’d like to propose a Digital Channels Maturity Framework.

Using this framework you can:

– understand the current consumer digital interactions landscape

– assess your current state relative to a defined maturity model

– gain insight into what the future holds for digital channels and how you can adapt, or perhaps lead among your competitors

– develop a forward looking capability roadmap

– build a business plan for future investment

There are four maturity levels; Siloed, Distributed, Connected and Federated. There are also three high level focus areas including the consumer’s perspective, the technical landscape, and business value. Let me share a few essential descriptors for each of the levels of maturity in the model.

Level 1 – Siloed: Few channels, consumer initiated, limited availability, not personalized, undetermined value

Level 2 – Distributed: Some channels, initiated by rules, availability inconsistent, not personalized, unclear value

Level 3 – Connected: Many channels, sophisticated targeting, right time, right reason, personalized with journey context, defined value

Level 4 – Federated: All channels, always on, context and personalization is persistent, all text based channels, cross channel / channel pairing, value is determined at journey level

In our engagements with some of the world’s leading consumer brands, we have found that they are in very different positions along the maturity continuum. This often has to do with the speed of change in consumer expectations, fast emerging technologies and disjointed strategies, coupled with reactionary mandates to provide service in new channels. I have also seen companies struggle to organize leadership and budget around a well thought out strategy. But there are more than a few companies who seem to have performed their sit rep, and there is a groundswell of new leadership that are making bold moves to unify their digital channels strategy.

So what’s next? Now that you have a framework for your sit rep, it’s time to act. Brush up on those acronyms, get your war paint on, be ready to be brutally honest with yourself and your team, and most importantly be ready to reshape your thinking.

[24]7 offers a workshop during which we share the 20+ key factors that define your digital maturity. We can help your team develop an understanding of the complete model and facilitate an open dialogue among your team, to develop a path forward. As I sit in my chair at my desk, I can almost hear my Father now with that stern voice saying something like, “Do you know where you are and where you’re going? No? Alright then, I need your sit rep . . . on the double.”

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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Author: Cyndy Edwards, Senior Consultant, COPC Inc. Learn more about COPC Inc. at http://www.copc.com.

Today’s customer fully embraces technology and expects companies to do the same. This is especially true when it comes to providing customer service. Customers are still calling into the contact center to resolve many issues. However, two-thirds of consumers surveyed by Execs In The Know and COPC Inc. utilize multiple channels, including self-service options.

The use of multiple channels is not the whole story. Customers expect an effortless and seamless experience throughout their journey with your organization, with a convenient path to issue resolution. This means that customer engagement must be connected and relevant between your assisted and unassisted (or self-service) channels.

A key component of your self-service channel is having an effective knowledgebase, or the online library that stores and delivers your customer care content. Yes, your self-service program relies on technology to deliver information to your customers. But it is the content, organization, and search functionality within your knowledgebase that will make your self-service program a useful and reliable part of your omnichannel engagement.

Here are seven ways to design, build and maintain a knowledgebase that will meet expectations during any part of the customer journey:

1) Start by establishing a knowledgebase strategy.

If the goal of your knowledgebase is to answer customer questions and help resolve their issues, then you need to make sure you understand your customers’ needs. You can get this information by documenting questions that customers are asking when you are monitoring calls, emails or chats. Make sure to capture questions that customers escalate to Tier 2.

Also, structure your knowledgebase with “simple” in mind. Stick to fewer generalized categories so customers are not confused. Over time as more content is added, there may be opportunities to add section headings or categories. These will become clear as they are needed, so be prepared to grow your knowledgebase organically.

2) Identify and build your knowledgebase team.

While this may seem obvious, an established team with well-defined roles is key to providing relevant content to the knowledgebase, in a timely manner. This team usually includes a content and/or project leader, agents, and content authors. The leader decides how the knowledgebase will be designed and organized, which topics will be covered, and to what extent. Agents can provide suggestions for content development, while authors are those who are both technically competent and in touch with day-to-day customer contact inquiries. Usually a knowledgebase solution takes about three months to implement, after planning is completed, and includes three to four full-time staff.

3) Create an internal and external knowledgebase

Build an external version of your knowledgebase with customer-facing instructions. At the same time, build an internal version with more technical details for use by support staff only. Having two different versions of your knowledgebase allows you to use the internal version to teach new agents how to use the knowledgebase. This training gives them experience with both the detailed internal version, as well as knowing where all the content is located in the external version that the customer is using. In turn, agents can more easily advise customers where to find information in the external version of the knowledgebase.

4) Customers want quick access to information, so provide a robust search capability.

Your knowledgebase should be the fastest customer service channel you manage. Customers want to be in and out and have their solution. Do not require them to register, sign in, or enter a product or case number, as this will slow them down and cause dissatisfaction. Also, your search algorithm should be extremely accurate and automatically provide a few possible answers to each inquiry. Be sure to test your search functionality to ensure key phrases return the correct content. Confusion is one of the major reasons customers abandon and are dissatisfied with a self-service channel, so your top priority is to ensure customers get the right answers to their inquiries.

5) Consider offering a chat option in your knowledgebase.

Chat is a great way to offer on-demand help to your customers. It also provides you an excellent source of valuable feedback regarding both the customer issue and the content they are reading. You should also set up a feedback button on each piece of content for customers to respond whether they found the content useful and/or solved their issue. This information will alert the content owners which articles are helpful and which need to be improved.

6) To increase efficiency, the knowledgebase should be able to learn new questions and answers from the other customer service channels.

To allow customers to ask and suggest new questions, consider connecting your knowledgebase to your multi-channel ticketing software and customer service widgets. Then, once a question is answered by a human, automatically add that question and answer to the knowledgebase. This allows your knowledgebase to provide the same answer automatically to future customers.

7) Analyze usage of the knowledgebase.

This will help identify what customers are using, what they perceive to be the most valuable content, and what content is missing. You can do this by tracking both the most popular pages in the knowledgebase, along with trends in overall usage. You also can review search engine usage. Log all uses of the search engine and generate summary reports that show the most common searches, along with failed search terms. This will tell you both what terms people are using and how your content matches up to their searches.

Not all customer issues can be resolved through a self-service program, but having a robust self-serve system that is continually improving is both cost effective and beneficial to your customer. However, it is essential to have a clear path to issue resolution within your self-service offering and a quick way for a customer to contact a live person if their inquiry is not resolved.

If you would like more information about how to improve the operational performance of both your assisted and self-service channels, go to www.copc.com.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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Today, our customers have everything they need to communicate in the palm of their hand. Mobile brings about a unique and powerful convergence of communication channels — voice, email, chat, social, SMS — in one very portable device. This has a profound impact on how our customers communicate with each other, with the world, and with brands. It creates new challenges for brands to adjust to the protocols, cadence and sheer scale for customer support.

We’ve learned, in the digital age, that it’s no longer enough to publish a toll free number and staff a call center during business hours to provide for the needs of our customers. There are many new communication channels we’ve had to embrace and new skills we’ve had to learn to provide for the needs of our customers, in a social, mobile, 24×7 global marketplace.

At Freshdesk, we look at customer engagement through the lens of what we call The Great Pyramid of Customer Support.

This framework, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, provides a structure to help organizations assess their support capabilities and determine what to prioritize. It can be particularly useful for determining how to address a new channel. Here we will apply it to mobile support and engagement:

Chaos to Control — When you enter a new channel it’s usually chaos. There is a learning curve on how to best communicate within a channel and how to engage.  The first order of business is usually controlling the chaos: tracking and managing tickets, and delivering a consistent and effective customer experience in the channel. The reality is though that mobile is not really a new channel. It’s a new environment, but it encompasses most of the channels you’re already using. So the key for starting to support mobile is to not treat it as a separate engagement environment. You can start out by continuing to use the channels you support today. Just be present and listen. More important than adding new channels and capabilities is to maintain a single system of record across mobile and any other channels you support, to ensure you have a single view of the customer.

Reactive to Proactive — The newest channels for support have changed the paradigm. For a long time customer support has been a one-to-one interaction. With social media, conversations have moved from one-to-one– email, phone, chat – to many-to-many. On social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook your customers are announcing their desires or problems to the world. Support is no longer about reacting – waiting for the phone to ring. Your customers are taking to social, whether you want to be there or not. Similarly, being proactive in mobile means being there, delivering a native experience. It’s not just about providing access to existing tools like your knowledge base or email. You need to consider the unique qualities of mobile platforms and the habits of mobile users, to make it easy for them to get what they need, at the time and place they need it. This is also where you can insert proactive messaging in your apps to avert issues you know are likely.

Scale — As you learn the rules and idiosyncrasies of a new channel the next challenge is scale. You need to be able to extend the level of support you have on your best channels to the new channels. And, of course, you want to do this without having to hire a large new team. Technology can help here. The caveat is to leverage technology to enhance the experience rather than put more layers between you and your customer. Knowledge bases will enable your customers to find answers themselves, if you make them easy to access. Channels like in-app messaging that feel native to mobile and allow agents to handle multiple tickets at once work well here. And automations can help those agents manage that workload.

Aligning With Business — Once you’ve gotten your tools and processes in place and your mobile support is humming, then you can begin to think more broadly about making an impact across your company. Is your support organization aligned with the goals of your customers and your business? Great customer service has the ability to do much more than solve customer problems. If done right, it can extend the value of the brand and create brand advocates. It can also be your best channel to provide feedback and insights to help guide your company’s plans. Be sure to collect data and setup a feedback loop in line with other support channels, and ensure the connections with other critical parts of your organization. This is also where you should be making sure that the systems and tools in place are working for your team and that they are engaged and happy.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post Mobile Customer Support and Engagement – Where to Start? appeared first on Execs In The Know.

This is a guest blog written by Dan Gordon, SVP Strategy & Development, West Interactive Services. Learn more about West on their website. 

You’re gearing up for Super Bowl 50 this weekend, right? Imagine if you were settling in with your Best Buds (“King of Beers,” pun definitely intended) and discovered that it was aired via Pay-Per-View (PPV)…

Okay, don’t fret—this isn’t the case—but there are plenty of big TV events that are PPV-only throughout the year.

One leading cable/satellite company seized the opportunity for PPV viewership using proactive communications to promote an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event that would likely pique the interest of many subscribers.

It worked.

This client’s goal was to increase self-service to improve the customer experience – and capitalize on automation to increase revenue. Our expert data analysts helped them achieve both by drawing parallels between customers’ behaviors and their likelihood to purchase UFC PPV fights. Informed by that data, subscribers received proactive notifications two days prior to the event that gave them the option to purchase the fight right then and there.  

Predicting which customers would most likely purchase the next fight, and prescribing how to deliver an individualized, attention-grabbing message to them at the perfect time resulted in a 40 percent increase in revenue compared to previous efforts.

Analyzing customer data is the key to getting into the mind of your audience and taking their experience to the next level.

Here are some quick tips to help pull data off the bench and into your customer experience improvement strategy:

1. Determine who is performing a particular action? (Purchasing UFC fights.)
2. Pinpoint when, specifically, these customers are acting? (Day of program? Day before?)
3. Identify what other paths these customers are taking consistently? (Other programs/ sports packages purchases.)

Deep exploration of customer and market data is an asset in creating a more intuitive cross-channel customer experience. Identifying each customers’ needs and tendencies helps brands create a journey that feels personal and empowering, regardless of the channels they choose.

(Watch this video to see what we mean!)

Isn’t it comforting to know that if the Super Bowl ever were PPV, business analytics would help cable/satellite companies ensure the big game stays more about spiked footballs than spiked remote controls?

To hear more about this topic and others like it, from West and our other subject matter experts, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23rd-25th, 2016.

The post Data Can Be Your Customer Experience MVP appeared first on Execs In The Know.

PHOENIX, AZ and WINTER PARK, FL — January 22,  2016 – Execs In The Know, a global network of customer management professionals, and COPC Inc., a leader in customer experience operations, have announced an Executive Summary release for the 2015 Corporate Edition of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark (CXMB) Series.

The 2015 Corporate Edition is the seventh report in the CXMB Series and extends trend lines revealed in past editions, including specific data comparisons with the 2015 Consumer Edition.

“While the gulf between corporate and consumer perception has narrowed, the divide shows us that there’s still work to be done,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “The strength of our reports lie not only in the data points that trend year-over-year, but also in the direct comparison between the corporate and consumer perspective. We hope that the information can be used to assist corporations in identifying, prioritizing, and addressing the needs, wants and expectations of their consumers.”

The complete Corporate Edition of the CXMB survey will be released at the Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016. COPC Inc. will lead a panel of executives who will explore the findings of the report in greater detail.

“The 2015 Corporate Edition of the CXMB Series tells the other side of the customer experience story, from the company’s perspective,” said Cliff Moore, chairman of COPC Inc. “Delivering an exceptional and consistent experience across channels is the only true differentiator in today’s competitive environment. The brands that do this best are the ones that are succeeding in building customer loyalty. This report will be a valuable resource for our clients as they build and manage their customer experience operations.”

The CXMB Series has been providing customer experience insights since 2012. Each year the survey offers a consumer version that is released in the fall and a corporate version that is released in the winter.

To download the 2015 Corporate Edition Executive Summary, visit http://ow.ly/Xi6lg. To download past editions from the CXMB Series, visit https://execsintheknow.com/resources/cxmb-series/.

About Execs in the Know

For over 15 years, Execs In The Know has built a reputation of excellence in the Customer Management Industry and a worldwide community of over 50,000 Customer Experience Professionals. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking, and industry employment opportunities. Examples of this can be seen at their Customer Response Summit events, roadshows, webinars, workshops, Blog Talk Radio segments, Industry Benchmarking Series, blogs, thought papers, and social communities.

To learn more about Execs In The Know, visit www.execsintheknow.com. For more information on their Customer Management Recruitment Solutions, visit www.justcareers.com.

About COPC Inc.

COPC Inc. is an innovative global leader that empowers organizations to manage complex customer journeys. With a focus on driving improvement, the company provides consulting, training and certification for operations that support the customer experience. Founded in 1996, COPC Inc. began by developing the COPC® Family of Standards and helping call centers increase their performance. Today the company works with hundreds of leading brands worldwide to optimize key customer touch points and deliver a seamless experience across channels. COPC Inc. is privately held with headquarters in Winter Park, Florida, U.S., and with operations in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, India and Japan. To learn more about COPC Inc., visit www.copc.com.

Media Contacts

Alyssa Pitura
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info@execsintheknow.com
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Lezli Harrell
Vice President, Marketing
COPC Inc.
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