The best thing about working in the customer experience industry is that it never stands still - changing technologies, behaviours and expectations have always been the norm. At the moment though, things seem to be developing even more quickly, as mature digital touchpoints (predominantly web, mobile and email) are being supplemented with a much broader range of technologies.

Many of these nascent technologies have gone through a rapid maturity cycle, where the initial experiments had limited success, but have since evolved to the point where customers find them genuinely useful. The conditions are now ripe for much broader adoption, and the impetus to build underlying services (APIs) that can support these touchpoints has become imperative.

Companies looking to compete on customer experience will need to contend with these new technologies and touchpoints if they want to remain relevant. For example:

• Chatbots have improved by leaps and bounds, to the point where customers are increasingly expecting them to be personalised. In my previous role, the one we helped build for Qantas (which sits across web, mobile app and Facebook) manages a hand-off between bot and human in a way that gives the customer context, control and high availability - it’s been very popular and saved them a fortune in call centre costs while actually increasing customer satisfaction.
• There are plenty of Voice Assistants on shelves and pockets (and some are even being bundled with groceries free of charge!), but how are they being used? The emerging consensus is that most activity is utilitarian rather than commercial. For example, people use their Google Home for setting timers and providing weather reports, whereas voice queries sent via phones (often while driving) tend to focus either on the destination / route, or on controlling audio entertainment. There isn’t much room to drive a commercial edge, especially when this functionality would need to be downloaded, taught and invoked each time. Nonetheless, for companies which are large enough, with features used frequently in a voice context, a high-quality voice app can sometimes be justified.
• Call centres have long been a challenge for companies, adding significant legacy cost but often with limited revenue attached. However, recent activity in this space (especially with products like Amazon Connect) can provide much cheaper services driven by voicebots. For the customer, the downside of removing the human interaction can be more than offset by higher availability and more rapid assessment of data to drive relevance via CRM integration. This is particularly interesting for companies who experience large spikes in call traffic, which can now scale as needed, as well as those exploring out of office support. And the new services can effectively augment the existing service, rather than replacing it, offering a low cost way to experiment.
• Facial recognition is also providing some interesting use cases, particularly for field workers when it comes to logging time. A recent project conducted for an education institution recorded attendance and sentiment across the classroom, providing the teacher and school with useful data to drive better outcomes. Of course, facial recognition comes with legitimate privacy concerns - not the first time an emerging technology has had to deal with these! - and the next few years will explore the tradeoffs between privacy and utility in a myriad of different contexts.
• While Personalisation is a theme that still has traction, especially when it comes to the big experience platforms such as Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager, some of the shine has come off. Only about 40% of customers have implemented personalisation, despite it being one of the key differentiating features of the platform. I believe we’re now on the slope of enlightenment, with shared industry knowledge about the tradeoffs between managing cost and benefit, and this also takes into account deeper integration with CRM systems and the need to consider all the above technologies when it comes to personalisation - not just the web site. Tighter strategic focus is required. The mobile app has taken centre stage in terms of the experience for current customers, and often this is where personalisation effort is better directed.
  
  

Depending on the context, a coordinated customer journey should arguably take account of all-of-the-above, and more. The tools and techniques for planning and defining a great customer experience aren’t too far removed from where we were 10 years ago (think: research techniques, customer journeys and the like). But we can now modernise to account for the change in landscape.

One point that’s hard to overstate: the potential complexity of the emerging CX landscape can have significant data and technology implications that need to be considered during the design process. Failure to do so will typically result in a data platform which is incapable of supporting the needs of the business, especially when it comes to automation, reporting and compliance. Or a build cost that blows the budget out of the water.

Here at PragmaTech we’ve given considerable thought as to how companies can exploit these new opportunities. If you’d like to know more, get in touch!