The following is a guest blog post from Ted Hunting, VP North America Marketing at Genesys. 

Next month, Execs In The Know will bring together service leaders from many of the largest global brands to advance the conversation on creating great customer experiences.  From past experience, it’s a very tight-knit group of CX leaders sharing best practices and ideas around omni-channel customer engagement, across all channels, and empowering employees to deliver great customer experiences.  This community is one of my favorites as the people are super-smart and passionate leaders who openly share their challenges, advice, and ideas –  it’s all about candid discussions and one-on-one engagement and networking.

As a member of the Execs In The Know CX Partner Advisory Board, on behalf of Genesys, I am excited to again join this group and will be leading an educational session with group brainstorming on “Journey Analytics and Effortless/Personal Keys for the Next Era of CX” on September 20th. The session will discuss how you can use journey analytics and new digital approaches to orchestrate an “outside in” customer journey that is more personal and predictive, while reducing effort. We will also share best practice use cases where AI, bots, digital self-service, and humans can work hand-in-hand. Join us to discuss and learn about this new era of effortless, personal omni-channel CX where old and new emerging channels come together and robots and humans work as one.

I highly recommend brands who truly understand the importance of customer experience to their business success and survival to join this group.  Execs In The Know is a well-respected organization that people turn to for advice and it’s unlike other similar events in the CX industry, due to the level of attendees and openness in communication. In attendance will be leading financial services firms, retailers, healthcare companies, hi-tech firms, hospitality companies, and utilities from across North America – both traditional leaders, but also some of the new disruptors changing business today. To learn more about joining visit https://execsintheknow.com/events/crs-chicago/ and follow @execsintheknow. And to learn more about Genesys, the industry’s #1 customer experience platform and recognized leader per Gartner and others, please visit http://www.genesys.com/about.  Or checkout some really awesome customer stories from CX leaders like Sabre.

Execs In The Know would like to thank Genesys who have been a long time supporter of the Customer Response Summit event, continue to be involved and valuable to our community of CX professionals, and truly care about seeing progression and enhancement in our industry. 

The post Customer Experience Leaders Share Innovative Ideas for the Next Era of CX: Customer Response Summit Chicago, September 19-21 appeared first on Execs In The Know.

PHOENIX, AZ. – (July 26, 2017) – Execs In The Know, advocates for the Customer Experience Executive and hosts of leading customer experience conference – Customer Response Summit, have announced the formation of a CX Partner Advisory Board. The 2017 Board includes seven member organizations committed to improving the customer service experience and advancing the care industry as a whole. The organizations represented include Interactions LLC, Teleperformance, Genesys, Gladly, COPC, Retailpivot Consulting LLC., and Modern Contact Consulting, Inc.

The Execs In The Know CX Partner Advisory Board will provide industry knowledge, advice, guidance, and recommendations to the EITK community. The Board representatives will use their knowledge of innovations, developments, and customer behaviors to deliver thought leadership, educational content, and direction.

“We are lucky to have the opportunity to work with so many talented, reputable, and knowledgeable subject matter experts in our community,” said Chad McDaniel, President of Execs In The Know. “The creation of our CX Partner Advisory Board brings together seven individuals excelling in the customer experience industry and delivering customer success for their brands and their customers. They are a vital piece of the Execs In The Know community and will strengthen it further through their involvement in our events, webinars, content pieces, philanthropic activities, and meetings.”

Board Members:

Jay Wolcott, VP Social Product, Interactions LLC
Amit Shankardass, Executive Vice President, Teleperformance
Ted Hunting, Vice President, North America Marketing, Genesys
Joseph Ansanelli, CEO & Co-Founder, Gladly
Judi Brenstein, Vice President, COPC
Kathryn McGavick, President, Modern Contact Consulting, Inc.
Razia Richter, CEO, Retailpivot Consulting LLC.

To learn more about the Execs In The Know CX Partner Advisory Board, visit https://execsintheknow.com/about-us/advisory-board/

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, dedicated to enhancing the customer service industry. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking, and industry employment opportunities. Their largest event, Customer Response Summit, takes place twice a year, uniting executives from many of today’s leading brands, to create impactful connections and share actionable insights.

Learn more at www.execsintheknow.com.

Media Contact
Alyssa Pitura
info@execsintheknow.com

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The following is a guest blog from Ted Hunting, Vice President, North America Marketing at Genesys. For more information about Genesys, visit their website. 

During the Customer Response Summit (CRS) last week in Austin, I shared my perspective on customer expectations of seamless, personalized omnichannel journeys with customer service executives from some of the world’s greatest brands. It was a rare opportunity to exchange ideas on digital innovation in customer experience (CX) with such a group.

To set the stage for brainstorming sessions on digital innovation, I talked about the prediction that by 2020, more than 90% of customer engagements will begin online, and what that means to CX innovation.

Currently in many customer service environments, organizational silos remain across channels, including web, voice, callback, mobile app, text, email, social, and video. In spite of initial interactions occurring on the web, customers nonetheless expect the effortless, personalized omnichannel journey that results from integrated communication channels. We explored some examples of businesses successfully integrating voice and digital channels to improve CX.

We looked at CX from the business perspective, examining aspects of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, including:

– An omnichannel desktop that displays every step in the customer journey, across every channel

– Enterprise-wide reporting and analytics dashboard for overall view of CX and NPS

What did this group identify as key future trends? The internet of things (IoT), personalization through big data, and emerging self-service models such as chat and voice bots, led to brainstorming on digital innovation in the CX world.

Here’s what this group of CX leaders expects to see emerging in digital innovation:

Personalized customer journeys

Customer journeys will be increasingly personalized, leveraging big data and business rules to predict customer needs and deliver better CX.

– Visibility into the customer journey will continue to evolve so companies can provide proactive recommendations and communications for front- and back-office functions across the company, not just for the contact center.

– We’ll improve on how we identify and measure journey success so that we can replicate the successful CX across the business.

– We’ll use customer journey analytics for predictive routing of customers.

– We’ll personalize routing based on business rules and customer data.

Customer preferences driving experience

Customers prefer to authenticate once, and effortlessly, in a journey. Adoption of verification methods like biometrics (voice biometrics or eye or fingerprint sensors on mobile phones) will grow, with verification becoming increasingly passive from the customer point of view, without reliance on interrogatory techniques.

– Customers will be better informed—proactively—using notifications tied to their channel preferences.

– Customers will choose channel preference based type of interaction. For example, they’ll be able to select a text message for doctor appointment reminder, but a personal call from their doctor for test results.

– With increased personalization, customers will need to supply personal information. To address privacy concerns, they’ll need to “opt-in” to such personalization efforts. Business will find ways to encourage participation, even if it’s only making sure the customer understands through clear communication that they’ll benefit from a better CX.

CX enhanced through collaborative business culture

– When CX leaders foster a culture of collaborative discussions across departments and the organization, they can uncover CX issues that persist in a siloed culture

Incorporating social channels into the customer journey

– Expect chat to be transformed with chat bots and other forms of artificial intelligence.

– Integrate social media into journey management to put agents with the right skills in place to respond through social channels.

– Peer networks in some industries can provide service. These can be enhanced by use of social media and “ambassadors” to assist customers.

– Agents can use information from social channels to assist customers. For example, they can use YouTube or other external content on how customers are using a product or solving a problem.

Taking steps to deliver omnichannel CX

– Serve customers better by arming agents with a unified omnichannel desktop.

– Use recording and speech and text analytics to discover gaps in agent knowledge, whether they’re participating in voice, chat, email. Use it to better train agents.

– Move to modern self-service options instead of old school, high-effort, impersonal IVR. Instead, offer the option to get wait times for channels from voice, text, email, web chat, to video chat and let customers choose self-service channels based on their preference. For example, give them the choice of chatting now or waiting 20 minutes for a call back.

CR Summit Austin was an opportunity to share information, and gratifying because I heard clearly that so much of what Genesys is working with partners and customers to achieve is of great interest to global leaders in CX.

Interested in where your company stand in CX innovation? Check out The Omnichannel Customer Engagement Playbook.

The post Leaders Speak on Digital Innovations for Customer Experience appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Ted Hunting, Senior Director, North America Marketing and Global Demand Generation, at Genesys. Learn more about Genesys by visiting their website.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Seattle, September 28-30th, 2015.

Gartner’s CEO has proclaimed that Digital Business is Upon Us. Companies that think they are not digital businesses will be out of business and the companies that will win in this era of digital transformation are those companies that make the most of every business moment. What Gartner is proclaiming is key to every company in every industry is essentially “customer care for the connected consumer” – the key topic of the Customer Response Summit Seattle. It’s also why I encourage customer care and CX leaders to attend what I have found in the past to be an extremely enlightening event, attended by smart, energized customer care executives and luminaries. From speakers, to networking, to innovative new ideas in the “Idea Lab”, it will be a fun few days of learning and “eureka” moments.

As CX and contact center leaders in our companies, we are now squarely in a position to help our companies make the most of every business moment and create the connected customer. The business moment occurs via customers hitting web chat, social channels, webpages, IVRs, mobile apps, text messages, and of course good old fashioned phones and email. These business moments, which historically started with the phone, have now changed 180 degrees with digital being the first and preferred communication channels for today’s connected consumer.

Companies like Uber and AirBnB have already started transforming the transportation and hospitality industries through new digital models, yet this is only the beginning of the larger transformations that will hit every industry, from financial services, to retail, to technology. Yet when I have asked CX leaders this year how many can see their entire customers journeys from webchat, to tweets, to IVR, to mobile, to even an in-store visit, 11% has been the highest number among leading companies, in cities across North America. We clearly have a huge gap when it comes to the connected consumer and creating great, seamless, omnichannel journeys. I see great progress, but I also see many companies failing to deliver.

Many companies talk about “omnichannel” but what is really offered as the norm are fragmented conversations, in siloed channels, versus continuous, unified conversations, across channels. Join me in the Idea Lab where we will share a glimpse of a NextGen Contact Center for the Digital Age. Two nextgen ideas will be shared: 1) Using Journey Dashboards with a true omnichannel view, across all channels, to power a great omnichanel customer journey. 2) Innovative new digital approaches for a nextgen customer experience – combining web, voice, mobile, and the Internet of Things.

Digital business and the connected consumer is upon us. For us in the CX industry it’s a golden opportunity to help our companies win like never before. As a CX leader are you and your company ready to play? Or perhaps more importantly…are you ready to win? Come to Seattle and get in the game.

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