Digital Disruption and the Digitally Savvy Workforce
In my last blog, I described the two-sided challenge for organizations of rapidly evolving technology and constantly increasing customer expectations for a simple, virtually painless experience—no matter their chosen touch point. And, it’s not just customers who are becoming more demanding.
It’s also your employees.
Today’s next-generation employees have become accustomed to unprecedented speed and information access, thus demanding the same in their work environments to enable their ability to meet these same demands from customers.
As digital disruption has affected the way customers conduct business and their lives, it has had the same effect on the workforce. Particularly with millennials, who make up the majority of contact center employees and want access to information and user interfaces similar to what they use personally.
This digitally savvy workforce is more comfortable operating in a multichannel environment, thereby fostering the need for organizations to optimize and empower their next-generation employee workforce to be responsive to customer demands.
Organizations that enable an engaged workforce empower employees to do their best for continuous improvement and inspired customer interactions. This directly impacts greater customer loyalty and overall business performance. Culturally, it is important to let employees know they are customer champions and play a role driving great experiences that lead to brand satisfaction.
More than ever, engaged employees are key to driving customer engagement and the customer experience. As such, organizations need to give employees access to the data and solutions they need to be champions for their customers, and help ensure that employees are comfortable leveraging technology to support customer engagement in order to drive better customer experiences.
Successful organizations are empowering employees with data and analytics to help decrease customer effort and help support all aspects of customer engagement. This can include insights into customer journeys or perhaps access to analytics-driven data that can help employees ease customer effort and improve experiences in real time.
In fact, access to analytics will continue to drive areas such as self-service, social and mobile customer engagement, as well as direct digital interactions across channels such as chat and video.
Providing employees with tools to make interaction more personal and productive often involves taking the context of previous interactions and providing actionable recommendations to the agent. This context may exist in many places within the organization, but the information needs to be readily available, despite its location or age.
After all, customers know the context of their interactions and expect the companies they engage with to know it too.
One element of this dynamic is the importance of integrating system information to be readily available to the agent. For example, systems of record containing billing and shipping data may be on legacy technology, and need to be woven into current channels of engagement and available on the employee desktop. Luckily, because digitization is happening across the organization, if someone purchased an item back in 1988, the record will easily be available to the agent as part of the customer’s journey.
No matter how long ago the customer journey began, making sure your customer continues to take it with your organization is what really matters.
The post Digital Disruption and the Digitally Savvy Workforce appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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