Winning and Retaining the

Modern Customer
Develop a Robust CX Strategy to Reach Today’s
Hard-to-Impress Buyers

Sponsored by NICE
 Understanding Who Your
Customers Really Are
A strong understanding of who your customers are, what they want
and how much they’re worth is essential to meeting their needs. Insights
into the mind of individuals and the broader customer base are critical
to this understanding, but surveys are increasingly ineffective because
they’re too coarse and customers view them as a waste of time.

But customers are telling you more than they’re saying, even if they
don’t realize it. It is possible, broadly speaking, to know more about what
customers want and need than they know themselves. To access these
insights and encourage long-term loyalty, organizations must use tools
to “hear” what customers are saying and feeling, and to infer as much
as possible about what really matters to them.

akeaway: Modern analytics tools provide a way to

gain insight into the customer’s mind and guide organizations
to outcomes that satisfy the needs of both parties.

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Learn from Customer Behaviors

Predicting a customer’s needs and behaviors keeps expectations realistic. Potential buyers want information, choices
and advice, while existing customers want speed, consistency, constant attention and empathy. The goal is to establish
a relationship from the outset that leads to long-term retention and to customers that act as advocates for the brand.

For this, organizations need to put resources towards intelligence gathering and analysis: what are customers saying,
and what do they actually mean? Successful CX strategies look at the customer over a stretch of time beyond the buying
or service moment and harness systems using conversational
AI or natural language processing (NLP) to determine customer
sentiment. Tools like these allow the organization to better
predict how customer needs evolve and present offers that are
relevant to the precise stage of each customer’s journey.

akeaway: Adding AI and analytics tools throughout the

buying process gives the organization a better understanding
of—and more control over—the customer journey.

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Guiding the Buyer’s Journey

A complete CX strategy is more than just listening to customers; it is a form of intelligence-gathering about ways
to make the buying journey more effective for the customer and more certain for the organization. Of interest are buying
decisions stemming from marketing efforts, face-to-face connections in stores, kiosks and field service engagements,
and communication via chat, email, social media, website visits and more.

Customers want the option to change their minds and direction at will, narrowing the opportunity for organizations
to impress and lock in a purchase. Organizations that successfully take advantage of these opportunities use real-time
data to predict how customer needs evolve and present
offers that are relevant to the precise stage of each customer’s
journey. Yet our research indicates only 22% of organizations
analyze data in real time.

akeaway: Modern CX strategy relies

on real-time data throughout the customer
journey to respond in the moment and
anticipate future needs.

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Invest in AI and Knowledge

Adding AI to knowledge management (KM) and analytics tools enables CX teams to guide customer behavior. Advanced
analytics can be used in marketing for journey analysis and orchestration, in service interactions for detecting sentiment
and underlying issues, and in sales to qualify and score leads, among other use cases. Our research shows nearly
9 in 10 (87%) organizations either already use or plan to adopt AI, with 59% of organizations planning to include
NLP in their adoption within a year.

AI-powered processes speed the delivery of self-service knowledge resources

for customers and prepare agents with appropriate responses to customer
queries. KM enhanced with AI also provides a more consistent and
less fragmented experience by helping agents close more
cases on the first contact.

akeaway: AI-powered insights about

customer expectations help drive desirable
organizational and customer outcomes.

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Invest in Automation

At its heart, CX is about looking at the customer’s journey well beyond any individual interaction. But personalized
experiences need to be handled at scale without overwhelming costs. When properly implemented, automation
technology can be used to do some of the heavy lifting in CX, providing answers that were once dependent
on manual analysis, researching and collecting survey data. Automation can knit together workflows across
teams, and relieve agents of mundane, repetitive tasks. This allows
them to focus on more complex interactions and helps reduce agent
attrition. For these reasons, one-half of organizations (49%) in our
research consider process automation important.

Consider an automated platform that extends CX practices

as widely as possible across an organization to give
leadership a high-level view into customer trends and allows
them to fine-tune best practices while getting quick ROI
on technology investments.

akeaway: Technology upgrades and investments

in automation technology can support continuous innovation.

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Break Down Silos for Better Visibility

A single, unified platform provides greater value than niche applications because it:

• Allows innovation at the platform level to be used by multiple applications that interconnect,
rather than having to rely on piece-by-piece integrations.

• Allows people in different roles to engage with customers—or data about customers—based
on their persona needs.

Most organizations still develop their CX strategies around existing tools, thereby reinforcing
existing silos in data and process. Single platforms provide an organization-wide view of the truth
and put CX efforts into the hands of marketers and sales teams, using the
same data resources across CX, CRM and line-of-business tools. That brings
together processes that cross departments and that involve people who don’t
normally interact with customers directly. This also gives the agent more data
about the customer to help calibrate their approach to each interaction.

akeaway: By automating data collection, organizations can pull

data from the contact center and across the enterprise to provide complete
visibility of the customer across all data points, for all departments.

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Building a Modern CX Business Case

The key to building a business case for CX investment is to understand the desired outcomes from CX tools and
processes. And this starts with understanding customer expectations. An organization can then match those expectations
to reality by analyzing the types of experiences provided and the outcomes of those experiences. Assess customers
based on factors including loyalty, value, longevity and profitability, and tailor experiences to those factors.

The business case for CX investment is driven by analytics, which provide the insights to create unique CX processes
and allow an organization to find and utilize the moments of leverage that exist in customer relationships. That overarching
goal should be embraced by leadership across the organization, including CX, Digital Transformation,
IT and Operations.

akeaway: Business cases for

CX investments rely on analytics
to characterize customer expectations
and leverage opportunities within
customer relationships.

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Measuring CX With a Wider Lens

Organizations can build consensus by emphasizing the combined ROI of CX technology and the impact of more
advanced analytics on understanding key metrics like customer loyalty, value and longevity. These metrics reflect how
well an organization is anticipating and shaping customer behavior to generate revenue, and we believe that by 2027,
one-half of organizations will focus on customer value and loyalty as the key metrics defining success in customer
relationships. Organizations in our research identify customer satisfaction scores and customer lifetime value as the most
important customer metrics along with customer effort, acquisition
costs, and revenue per customer and per interaction. Other valuable
Customer Experience
metrics are related to retention rates, sentiment and loyalty. These Market Assertion

contrast with traditional contact center KPIs (Average Handle Time, By 2027, one-half of organizations
will focus on customer value and
Average Speed of Answer, Average After-Call Work) that don’t provide
loyalty as the key metrics defining
awareness of customer sentiment and intention. success in customer relationships.

akeaway: Key metrics related to customer sentiment and

intention are needed when building a comprehensive CX platform
Keith Dawson
and should be included in KPIs. VP & Research Director

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Exceed Customer Expectations
Building a modern CX framework means investing in three key areas:

•  ata and knowledge through knowledge management, customer data

D
platforms (CDP) and customer relationship management (CRM) that
produces consistent information formatted for people in multiple roles, many
of whom can benefit from seeing a fuller picture of the customer journey.

• AI-powered analytics that better describe the relationship between actions

taken and customer outcomes as expressed in revenue-related terms.

• Process automation that encourages cross-departmental activity to be

standardized rather than ad hoc.

With the right investments, it’s possible to develop sustained satisfaction

that prompts increased spending and leads to customers becoming lifelong
brand advocates.

Sponsored by

Ventana Research Dynamic Insights and Benchmark Research reports can be found at
www.ventanaresearch.com.
© 2023 Ventana Research

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