I rarely speak to human assistants for routine matters when I interact with an organization. Most of the information I need is at my fingertips — or a voicebot retrieves the information for me when I call a customer service provider.

When I do speak to a contact center agent, I expect the same type of customer service I get from a bot — fast, accurate and relevant. And I’m delighted if I don’t have to wait in a queue and if the agent resolves my question or issue quickly and empathetically.

Your customers expect the same.

How customers interact with companies — and what they expect from those interactions — has greatly evolved. Increasingly, customers expect the brands they do business with to offer no-frill, highly personalized and instant experiences on their terms. For example, I use virtual assistants to help me manage my energy consumption, turn on the heated seats in my car, receive useful alerts from various subscription services, trade stocks and more.

Truly Understanding Your Customers’ Expectations

One of the critical characteristics most businesses lack in the contact center is a joined-up view of their customer. This would be a single pane of glass that enables them to discover, visualize and understand the needs, wants and preferences of their target customer segments at an individual and holistic level.

Before any business can strategize, they need to synthesize and analyze their customers’ combined voices and behaviors. Understanding customer demand is the starting point of any customer, contact or channel strategy. However, most businesses still struggle with this.

Historically, data needed for a single version of the truth has been difficult to access. Investments in point-based solutions have created unnecessary silos, the use of legacy technologies, and a lack of data and analytics skills.

It’s unsurprising that business leaders jump for joy when they can finally visualize their customers’ end-to-end journeys — its causes, performance and probable endpoints.

For businesses to truly thrive, not just survive, they need the ability to orchestrate voice and digital experiences — or human and non-human experiences — without worrying about their underlying contact center technology infrastructure. And they need those technologies to easily integrate with other systems in use.

The always-on nature of cloud-based services that are intelligent, relevant and capable of processing hundreds of data points almost instantly is allowing organizations across industries to give customers the experiences they demand.

An all-in-one customer experience (CX) platform allows organizations to deliver those empathetic and highly personalized experiences. It allows businesses to listen to customers’ evolving needs and expectations, understand and predict intent, and then offer a proactive response — no matter which channel the customer uses.

Digging Into Customer Satisfaction

Delivering a product or service and supporting your customers is great, but it isn’t enough. You need to think differently about how you measure success.

Eighty-one percent of executives surveyed in “Beyond NPS: Customer experience reimaged,” noted that being able to measure the customer experience along key points of the customer journey is important to their organizations’ business strategy.

Acting on the Data

To deliver on these priorities, it’s imperative to refocus energies and investments. Consider holding a “self-reflection event,” where you invite key stakeholders to review business goals, the experience you deliver to customers and organizational priorities.

In this exercise, point out everything that’s core and non-core to your corporate, business and operational strategies. For example, when reviewing capabilities that enable your business to deliver and support goods and services to target markets, classify any capability that prevents you from delivering empathetic experiences to their customers and employees as non-core.

Next, adopt a technology strategy and roadmap that enables you to replace these non-core capabilities with ones that strengthen your ability to deliver highly personalized and empathetic experiences to customers and employees — at scale — on any channel or touchpoint.

After all, giving customers the experiences that they want — no matter which channel they use — makes good business sense. Loyal, happy customers can create more of the same. According to “The state of customer experience” report, 40% of consumers say they’re likely to share a great customer experience on social media; 30% will share an exceptional effort by an agent.

Find out how Genesys Strategic Business Consulting can support you in your customer experience personalization journey. And take our quick online assessment to see how your company scores in offering empathetic experiences.