Delivering Empathy in ActionTM is about a business putting themselves in the “shoes” of their customers and employees and creating highly personalized customer and employee experiences. The assessment evaluates the ability of an organization to orchestrate these experiences at scale, resulting in their trust and loyalty.
The assessment has evaluated how empathetic your organization is toward customers and employees, as well as the strength of the five systems (Listening, Understanding and Prediction, Action, Learning and Success) that contribute to your score.
This level is company-centric and focused on cutting costs. Your systems for listening to customers are insufficient for gathering the insights you need to understand their behaviors, learn and change actions accordingly.
At this level, your company is actively listening, but in few channels. You lack the broader understanding needed to optimize experiences from end to end — so actions are siloed and learning is limited.
Now you’re introducing some elements of customer-centricity. You’re listening across more channels and manually clarifying for understanding. You can react with targeted actions. Learning is still manual, rather than driven by technology on a continuous basis.
In this new paradigm, you’re customer- and employee-centric. You’re listening systematically and holistically. You have automation in place to clarify understanding and predicting. Your actions are proactive, predictive and prescriptive. AI drives learning and there are continuous improvements.
Delivering Empathy in Action requires advanced technical capabilities and people-centric business practices. These five systems capture what it takes and provide insight into your organization’s readiness in critical areas.
Systems of Listening collect information about who your customer is, where they’ve been and what’s happening to them now. AI-enhanced data capture includes the ability to track interaction data as a customer navigates your website, selects an IVR option or shares input from an internet of things device.
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There may be opportunities to harness more data about your customers and employees to know them better. This is a key focus area for organizations because this data also serves as the foundation for Systems of Understanding and Prediction, Systems of Action, and Systems of Learning.
Companies with advanced Systems of Listening use AI-enhanced technology to develop a deep understanding of their customers and employees.
Leaders in this category maximize opportunities to connect customer and employee data across channels and touchpoints. This goes beyond simple information like names, phone numbers and interaction histories — extending to customer demographics, psychographics, behaviors and preferences, web activity and conversation history, sentiment, and loyalty levels.
This results in a 360-degree view of customers that can be shared across the organization. And organizations that can act on this information in real time increase personalization for better self-service experiences, reduced handle times, increased outbound connection rates and higher customer satisfaction.
Congratulations! Your strong Systems of Listening serve as the foundation you need to deliver truly personalized and empathetic experiences.
Systems of Understanding and Prediction transform the data layer across your organization into meaningful information. This includes the ability to segment, cluster and enrich customer event data with AI to understand intent, predict potential outcomes and recommend next-best steps.
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Organizations capture loads of customer and employee experience data. The challenge lies in making it accessible and useful in real time, so you can make customers feel known, heard and understood in every interaction.
People-centered organizations prioritize personalized customer and employee experiences. Leaders recognize that AI is fundamental to dynamic personalization across channels and touchpoints — and they have a clear plan to achieve their business outcomes.
With strong Systems of Understanding and Prediction, leaders use AI to enrich all the data and context they’ve gathered to proactively discover and anticipate customer needs, rather than to just respond.
When you can acknowledge that a customer has an open order, is looking for a status update or needs to change an existing appointment, it feels like you know what they need before they even ask.
Leaders can do this with virtual assistants, using bots to triage and qualify customer intent and trigger the next-best action. This could mean resolving the customer issue within the bot interaction. Or it might mean recognizing that the customer needs a specialized resource or employee and then routing that customer appropriately.
And to be sure the best-fit employee is available, leaders leverage AI-driven platforms to model demand, generate forecasts and create schedules to match.
Systems of Action equip you to engage at the right moment, in the right way, with the right context. This includes the ability to route engagements across any channel to the best resource for the situation — whether that’s a self-service tool, bot or employee. For employee-driven engagements, surface dynamic knowledge as the conversation unfolds to help employees confidently guide customers to a resolution.
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This is all about delivering in the moment of truth. The first two system categories are largely invisible to your customers. But when a customer hesitates on your website, starts a conversation with your bot or calls into your contact center — your Systems of Action are on full display. Advancing in this category enhances your engagements.
Leaders in this category masterfully balance cost-effective digital engagement with easy paths to employee-led support. They recognize that their digital channels, virtual assistants and frontline employees work together to represent their brand — and that requires seamless coordination.
As companies mature, so do their virtual assistants. Advanced bots can proactively engage users and use customer data to personalize the experience. Equipped with natural language understanding, these bots can address simple customer inquiries and triage more complex ones.
When human assistance is needed, leading organizations ensure a seamless handoff from bot to employee. Leaders gather data attributes from individual customers and employees. And they use AI to match each customer-employee interaction based on the highest probability for a successful business outcome.
Frontline employees are equipped with a clear picture of the customer’s intent, sentiment and needs — available through a single cloud-based desktop. From here, the employee can engage with confidence and empathy. Contextual knowledge assistance is surfaced during the conversation and process automation offloads repetitive, low-value tasks.
It sounds like you empower customer-facing employees by connecting them with the right customer and the relevant context, powered by AI. Congratulations! You’re a leader in this category.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
Systems of Learning capture and monitor the outcomes of interactions for continuous improvement. This includes voice of the customer and voice of the employee data as well as progress toward your business goals. With the help of AI, you can gauge success, discover what works best and learn how to adjust for better results next time.
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As you transform to a people-centric organization, one truth becomes very apparent: People change. You need ways to systemically and continuously assess where you’re meeting those expectations and where you have gaps. This category evaluates your current ability to capture and interpret feedback and make necessary changes.
Strong Systems of Learning illuminate how your customers view your brand and how your employees view and contribute to your organization.
Leaders in this category capture customer sentiment and feedback at varying levels, during interactions and after. They can also determine underlying causes for changes in customer sentiment along a journey. And they have developed a culture of continuous improvement so they can act on the findings.
Managers use insights from customer feedback and employee performance data to create personalized assessments and targeted training programs. With a granular understanding of what drives employee performance, leading organizations can engage employees through custom career development and motivate teams through shared goals and gamification.
If you’re capturing customer sentiment and feedback during interactions and after — and you can determine the underlying causes for fluctuation in customer sentiment along a journey — congratulations! You’re a leader in this category.
Systems of Success evaluate your organization’s commitment to a people-centric approach and readiness to execute on your vision. They focus on people and processes from both a business and technology perspective — how you set your strategy, architect your solutions and achieve your goals. And they evaluate how your organization responds to challenges, innovates, manages change and validates results.
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Several factors go into this category ranking. As you assessed your organization on factors like your leadership strategy, current technology infrastructure and change management approach, you might have felt you’re more advanced in some areas than others. That’s normal. Compare your personalized recommendations with what leaders in this category are doing for additional guidance.
Leading organizations recognize that true transformation comes from the top. Their highest levels of leadership are dedicated to the vision and committed to an enterprise strategy focused on customer and employee experiences.
To help their organization make this transformation, leaders prioritize change management. They demonstrate empathy, communicate clearly, create focused initiatives and invest where needed.
This typically means advancing their technology infrastructure. Ultimately, leading organizations choose platforms and partners that can connect their customer and employee data, engagement channels and intelligence. They also look to simplify their technology footprint and administration — and free up IT resources for more strategic initiatives.
As they experiment, leaders use advanced listening capabilities and computational analysis to identify connections between experiences and results. They encourage a cross-functional and agile approach to testing and optimization.
If you put people at the center of every experience; have composed a tech stack that allows you to dynamically personalize experiences; and developed formal processes for listening, learning and optimizing on a consistent basis — congratulations! You’re a leader in this category.