Using IA and CJA to Improve CX
During the past few months, we’ve published a series of newsletter blogs, columns and white papers to help executives and contact center leaders manage through the coronavirus pandemic. This month, we’re addressing an issue that will return to importance, once economies reopen and the business world returns to what many are calling the “new normal.” If you have questions and issues you’d like us to assist you with, please send an email to me at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com, and we’ll be happy to help.
The digital transformation that is underway throughout the world has ushered in a new era of omni-channel service. As a result, enterprises need to be able to analyze customer interactions that occur at all enterprise touchpoints and channels, and standardize the findings. Speech and text analytics solutions, collectively known as interaction analytics (IA), provide a comprehensive, unfiltered view of all activity that occurs between customers and an organization. However, companies need to go much deeper. Customer journey analytics (CJA) can help by leveraging insights and intelligence from interaction analytics with data from other enterprise touchpoints and systems to deliver personalized communications and recommendations that enhance the customer experience.
IA solutions have come a long way in the past few years. On a stand-alone basis, IA solutions are highly valuable because they can convert unstructured interactions into transcripts and derive meaningful insights. These solutions detect patterns by individual customer or agent and by department, and for the enterprise overall. When applied on an omni-channel basis, they can identify trends and opportunities regardless of the department where they occur. The sentiment and intent analysis capabilities of the more advanced solutions increase the benefits for enterprises.
The challenge is to share the findings from IA across the enterprise, and this is where CJA comes in. CJA is the broadest and most client-centric enterprise servicing strategy to emerge in the past 30 years. Its purpose is to glean insights from all touchpoints and channels in order to provide a comprehensive view into customer interactions and to identify opportunities for improving the customer journey. CJA is enabled by powerful and fast servers that can analyze vast quantities of data in near-real time. These solutions gather information from all customer-facing solutions and deliver it in an appropriate format for each unique group of users or departments; they must produce dashboards and reports geared to the specific needs of various departments or individuals who can apply the findings to effect positive change in operations and customer satisfaction.
As companies search for ways to improve the customer experience, demand continues to grow for contact center analytics solutions that provide insights into customer activities at all touchpoints. Enterprises are also striving to identify departmental and enterprise trends and challenges. Additionally, the digital transformation has driven demand for solutions that enhance omni-channel servicing. Interaction analytics and CJA address all of these needs.
DMG expects historical and real-time IA to continue to pick up momentum during the next few years, although the momentum is likely to be slowed by the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Sales will include new sites and many replacements, driven by substantial innovation in many areas, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, scalability, and processing speed and processors. Because of the huge potential benefits of CJA, DMG expects to see substantial investments in this emerging sector, and these solutions will continue to be delivered and improved. Though still in its infancy, the CJA market is expected to grow at a slow but steady pace for the next few years.
DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing in unified communications, contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. Learn more at www.dmgconsult.com.