Here’s an interesting Forbes article on customer experience (CX) by Shep Hyken (@Hyken): Moving from Omni-Channel to a Channel-less Experience. I really like this forward-looking vision of channel-less CX. Right now, companies are scrambling around trying to support and link together customer communications happening in multiple channels, and they typically react to emerging new channels slowly and awkwardly, if at all. This results in a chopped-up customer experience in which frustrated customers have to explain the reason they’re contacting the company over and over again.
But channels are starting to merge more and more — like pairing up a chatbot with browsing a web site or a live phone conversation with filling out a web form — and customers are communicating with brands on several different channels within the same interaction or even multiple channels at the same time. They want to be able to start a conversation on the phone while typing into a laptop, continue on a mobile device on their way to a meeting, have the customer service rep call and/or email them to follow up, and save it all to the cloud in real time. What they really want, Hyken says, is for your business to become channel-less.
Why Your Company Should Embrace a Channel-less CX Future
A channel-less CX strategy offers the supreme benefit of preparing your company for a deeply interconnected digital experience architecture with a central “brain” that can orchestrate customer engagement via artificial intelligence (AI)- or business intelligence (BI)-driven software seamlessly across channels. It should feel effortless and smooth to customers to switch from one channel to the next. They shouldn’t have to worry about what channel they’re on or whether your system and people will remember what has been said and done in the past. In other words, interactions need to be refocused on the customer, not the channels. This can happen if DX systems, including CCM, work together to share data, insights and context in real time.
Topdown is working hard to make INTOUCH®, our new 100% cloud-based CCM solution, flexible and adaptable enough to accommodate the omni-channel strategies of today as well as channel-less strategies in the future. It employs open standards for exceptional interoperability and sharing, plus microservices for developing and delivering content to or receive instructions from an AI or BI engine that operates across the DX architecture. INTOUCH was designed from its inception to connect customer interactions, keep a detailed and accessible history, and contribute to consistent and personalized 360-degree CX.
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