Depending on your organisation’s data and automation roadmap, choosing the right technology partner is extremely important as it will make a big difference to your operation. A comprehensive CX program encompasses a variety of systems and issues that can oftentimes not be handled in siloes. Some leading organisation builds their own system from the ground up, but other customer services industries require a technology partner.
So what aspects should you keep in mind when selecting a technology partner?
When considering a technology partner, take the following facts into decision making.
Today’s customer wants to see value from your business proposition - a partnership, a relationship with the brand, and subsequent results. The technology solution should be part of your brand differentiation and eco-system, allowing customers to contribute towards value creation and driving effective change. This interaction, the customer contributions, is important raw data. The more you allow to gather, the richer and more insightful it becomes. As such, your VoC technology partner shouldn’t be limited by a technology platform that simply automates, but should support an exceptionally customer-centric listening approach.
a) Advanced data analytics capabilities
Effective customer experience depends on the data gathered from different sources. As data provides a quantitive and quantitative view of business insights, enterprises can pull out information that will benefit their customers' behaviours and deliver personalized, on-demand offerings via better products, services, and operation activities.
In an era of digital transformation, many companies now look through customer profiles with thousands of data points about each individual, including every search, voice command, and significant purchase regardless of their professional and private activity. CX innovators value unifying data from various sources such as websites, in-app, marketing interaction, and social support. The focus becomes more personalization at various customer touchpoints. Your VoC technology partners must have the capability to respond to customer inquires using natural language and text analytics to achieve greater accuracy thus allowing deeper machine learning. Text analytics also includes sentiment detection and traditional relationship context, including psychographic and demographic data, that help deliver outstanding CX.
b) Predictive analytics capabilities
Predictive analytics solutions enable an organisation to forecast risks and opportunities, by preparing a response proactively to get ahead of that risk. Moreover, the prediction identifies trends and new customer buying behaviour patterns. In this way, many digital-driven organisations use predictive analytics in their e-commerce unit and provide revenue-generating opportunities. When leveraging technology, it is important to look for a technology partner who shares numerical insights via reports and dashboards and supports a self-service analytics tool for sales and service teams to provide a unified view of customer data at a deeper level.
c) Data Integration capabilities
Nowadays, many companies evaluate how technological advancement and cloud-based operation can connect the unknown dots when fixing siloed customer experiences. They don’t depend on a single system for the entire business to improve ROI for marketing, grow sales, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. Thus, try finding a technology partner who can crossreference customer databases from various sources, including multiple CRMs, social media platforms, market mapping, financial data, competitor footprint.
d) Flexible
It also needs the technology partner’s agility to customize the system with progressive, systematic proficiencies that help deliver speed to insight. Because a change program is complex, the maze of employees, partners, and top to bottom needs to be the direction of constant improvement. They should be flexible enough to handle changes in a feedback mechanism that includes various stakeholders, through different channels and achieve the desired result without additional cost and time.
e) Strategic VoC partner
The final step is a practical examination of how to move to a more strategic customer experience. When evaluating different technology partners, there are further questions that need to be covered. Does the solution:
· Offer a variety of social listening methods (voice, video, behaviour)
· Have a logical-based text analytics explanation personalized to CX
· Leverage forward-thinking predictive analytics to ascertain risks
· Have the ability to create customised reports and dashboards
· Integrate different sources at a considerable scale to draw complete insights
· Have a flexible data architecture to provide sustenance around the complex business structure
· Have the expertise to lead tactically towards an explanation for altering customer prospects
f) Red Flags to look out for when deciding on your VoC technology partner
You should be concerned about the choice of technology partner when there is:
· No variation from multichannel feedback techniques: text, video, voice, digital activity
· Inflexible terms and lack of continuous implementation approach
· Natural Language Processing (NLP) does not integrate with machine-learning text analytics
· Big data predictive analytics not supported
· Strict and complex multi-brand, multi-level hierarchy and unsupported insightful reporting structure
· Limited data conception skills
· No social support and specialist care
· No engagement and training
· No continuous dedicated support team
· Non- comprehensive and inflexible pricing structure and packaging
Next: Customer Experience Live Intelligence Report 2022
