Digital and data: powering the next level of CX

The modern, technology-savvy customer is happy to give their data to a company: their contact details, social media information and email address, their buying habits and preferences. This is because they want the brands they shop with to understand them.

Research has shown that 61% of U.S. consumers say they will share more data with a company to get customized communications and a personalized service from them, and 48% of UK consumers say the same thing. Furthermore, 80% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

When Orange engages with a customer on a CX project, we set out to gather all the data they have available, analyze it, and convert it into valuable insights that will enhance their business offerings. Our ultimate goal is to help customers design a strategy and set up the tools to deliver a personalized experience to their own customers.

For customers today, personalization is paramount, but there are still issues around data privacy and regulation, like GDPR. Personalization carries challenges around use of non-personal data, like anonymized information or aggregate behavior data, and we know how to help companies overcome them effectively.

Creating a data-driven CX

Building a data-driven CX operation puts data and analytics at the front of your business strategy and ensures that it runs through every level of your organization. If your data-driven activities are siloed, then you will have gaps in your customer journey.

Our role is to help you use data intelligently to differentiate your company’s offerings from your competitors. It’s about taking information and turning it into value.

Maximizing your digital assets

Valuable data is available from a wide range of “digital assets” within your CX network. They include physical stores, point-of-sale (POS) systems, social media channels and web presence. In addition, your digital assets comprise your CRM and ERP systems along with information from your partners in your business ecosystem. So, too, the data generated by your apps and your connected Internet of Things (IoT) objects.

For example, if you have physical stores, then you can use your IoT-connected CCTV cameras in and outside stores to create useful insights: how many customers are in your stores at a given moment? How long do they spend in there? Do they have to queue to get into your stores in the current climate? This level of detail can be crucial in improving your CX incrementally into a greatly enhanced offering.

Maximizing data means the right tools and partner

Making the most of your data requires having the right tools to analyze it effectively. And that is best achieved by working with the right partner who understands CX, digital, and integrating tools fully across your organization.

Automation can enhance your CX by taking routine work out of the hands of human agents and having it done by chatbots or cobots or robotic process automation (RPA). But it is a continuous process, because just as automation frees up human agents to perform more complex tasks and gives customers a speedier automated answer to a query, it too generates useful data. This can then be used for marketing, which can further enhance CX.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are central to data in CX. They can understand unstructured information in similar ways to humans but can process vast amounts of data at far higher speeds. Machine learning also learns from interactions and can take that intelligence to plug gaps in your CX offering with meaningful, actionable analysis.

Married to human knowledge which adds context, AI enables smarter, faster decision-making. For example, AI can analyze the time customers spend on your website or the time they spend engaging with you by email or other channels and optimize any interactions. Doing this enables you to join up all your channels and share data across your whole company. Integration is essential to ensure it’s all seamless and you don’t miss any data throughout the journey.

Getting the customer view is essential

Data visibility is essential to designing and delivering great CX. Orange works with you across four defined steps to cover quality, accuracy, governance and security. These four elements help make up what we call the customer view.

The customer view is about analyzing customer behavior and habits to identify usable patterns. It starts with what your customer is doing, what they are buying, what they might have bought previously and so on. It covers how much time they are spending browsing your website or engaging with your contact center agents or chatbots. It incorporates products or services you might have previously offered to the customer.

The customer view extends to quality of data, too. We ensure you only put the appropriate data into your CX system to drive business results.

The interconnected data future of CX

Personalization is going to be a key driver of business success from your CX. Customers today expect it. Businesses that don’t offer it are going to lose customers. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience. Further research has shown that 92% of marketers say they use personalization techniques in their marketing, yet 55% of them also say they don’t feel they have sufficient customer data to implement effective personalization.

Data is what powers personalization. With that in mind, you have to make sure you have interconnection throughout your company, sharing all data and insights across all your business areas, all your contact center agents, every touchpoint, to ensure your customers get that seamless, personalized journey.

Data is the lifeblood of CX and you need the right strategy, tools and partner to ensure you stay ahead of the competition.