Overview
Customer acquisition and retention strategies and capabilities, and the quality of customer interactions can make it or break it for a company to be successful. Customer relationship management is a complex task, but the latest technological developments can help companies to make it easier and smoother, no matter whether they target B2C or B2B customers.
During their interactions, customers demand an end-to-end experience across all channels, to initiate, modify or complete a purchase, a service process or to track an order. Based on customer experiences during a complex journey, brand preferences can change quickly.
Need-based customer engagement solutions enable companies to identify capability gaps, and to design and orchestrate essential customer journeys. They allow organizations to address engagement pain points, offer a smooth, personalized, and contextual customer experience across all channels, and achieve engagement targets quickly.
To address all these areas in one powerful solution, Etiya created a Customer Engagement Solution package, that covers every angle of customer relationships and interactions throughout the entire customer lifetime:
- getting to know customer needs – both based on in-house customer data and social media interactions,
- generating offers and personalized recommendations, and communicating it to customers,
- customer acquisition, customer handling and loyalty management with the help of a 360-degree CRM system, Campaign Management, and powerful Customer Service tools, including CSM and Chatbot.
Our modules are supported by AI, and the solution package includes Data and Analytics tools and Digital Interaction Management to help companies improve their activities and interactions constantly. Last, but not least, OmniChannel Digital Frontend ensures, that customers can have the same experience on all channels, any time, through any device.
With the recent rapid growth of e-commerce, and the changing consumer expectations, digitalization of processes and interactions became inevitable for CSPs.
An increasing amount of customer interactions is taking place on digital channels: customers expect to be able to access personalized products and services online, they want to have self-service customer care functions available on their devices, and want to be able to switch between channels as and when they need it, without losing their interaction history.
Digitalized and personalized customer interactions will support business growth in two ways:
- AI can help companies to better understand their customers, therefore, to improve targeting and personalization in offer creation (more than 30%). Need-based customer engagement solutions will result in better customer experiences, improved NPS scores and – on a longer term - better brand preference results.
Improved customer retention and better customer acquisition figures will have an impact both on the immediate bottom line of a business, and will also support long-term strategic objectives in terms of how companies want to grow and service their customer base.
- Digital customer engagement will also result in better operational efficiencies. Fully digitalized processes, that require no manual effort at all, will reduce human errors, and with automation, both process speed and employee productivity will increase significantly. AI helps capture customer intent, personalize offers and services, and it also supports delivery automation. AI-supported systems will enable employees to use their time more efficiently, and this could increase productivity by up to 40%. Targeting at least 75% of transactions digitalized and automated, employees can focus on complex customer issues, that need personal attention, and highly tailored solutions. An OmniChannel approach with seamless customer journeys will result in increased sales closing rates, less abandoned baskets, and smoother and faster case resolutions.
With more sales and care functionalities available online, Digital Interaction Share is expected to grow rapidly, that will result in reduced operational costs in traditional, offline channels and new revenue-generating opportunities in digital customer engagements, like personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers.
In certain sectors the success rate of chatbot interactions could reach up to 70-90%, that will free up considerable human resources and result in significant operational cost savings, as also a potential for talent management optimization.
Digital systems also allow businesses to adapt quickly when it comes to future challenges and novel business models. Catalog-based processes support a high degree of flexibility and configurability, providing better for customer and partner requirements, therefore improving customer experiences.
Flexibility will also mean faster time-to-market – reduced from months to days -, even with complex products or sales conditions, and this will provide a real competitive advantage to the organization.
Without digitalization and the necessary IT background not even the best business strategies could succeed. Business needs Technology to support them in their endeavors to meet new customer needs. In old legacy systems, the inflexibility in adding new functionalities, the growing maintenance costs and the unavailability of software updates can constitute a risk for businesses, and an obstacle to future growth.
A modular system, that is flexible, scalable to the organization’s specific needs, and easy to integrate with other products in an existing IT portfolio can remove such technological risks and obstacles, and enable the company to take advantage of new business opportunities, while future system developments are also made quicker and easier by open APIs and microservices.
Instead of hard-coding, our solution offers flexibility in configuration, therefore handles complexities better, and offers shorter time-to-market, without the need for a lengthy development process.
Maintenance of multiple systems operating in silos is always a costly exercise. As a result of introducing new digital technologies, and integrating previously separated systems, maintenance will be both easier and less expensive.
A higher rate of customer interactions on digital channels will reduce costs not only on the business side, but also on the technology side – eg. the costs of maintenance and development of call center and retail infrastructure will be reduced, IT manpower can be used more efficiently and more focused on servicing new needs and enabling new functionalities.
OmniChannel e-commerce and self-service functionalities will reduce the burden on traditional personal channels, that is, number of calls to CC, and visits to physical stores. As functionalities are available online, within a short time you’ll be able to see Digital Interaction Shares and Online Conversion figures going up, and Customer Effort Scores going down.
Providing the Business side with the necessary IT framework and capabilities will support reaching overall business KPIs, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value, helping the company achieve its aggregated business outcomes.
