Tailored Customer Experiences to Reshape Consumer Landscape

The past year has brought in some radical changes to our world due to the pandemic, and digital technology has allowed for creative customer service solutions to keep business moving as the general population goes remote. According to a new report by Avasant, the customer experience may change dramatically even after the world begins to open back up.

Avasant, a digital consulting firm that analyzes emerging trends, recently released their Digital CX and CRM Services 2020 RadarView™ report, which details the evolution of customer experience over the past year of a selected group of service providers. In the report, 35 are evaluated using 3 key dimensions for consideration: practice maturity, partnership ecosystem, and investments and innovation. Avasant then selected 20 providers as ones who brought the most value over the past 12 months:

• Leaders: Accenture (News - Alert), Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, IBM, Wipro
• Innovators: Atos, DXC, Infosys, NTT DATA, TCS, Tech Mahindra
• Disruptors: Birlasoft, Coforge, Mindtree, Zensar
• Challengers: Jade Global, Mphasis, Stefanini, UST

Matthew Barlow, Principal and CX Lead with Avasant, congratulated the winners noting, “The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards tailored experiences driven by AI, automation, data, and the channel-less customer experience. We would expect this shift to continue even after the pandemic."

While there are some signs the pandemic is winding down, we can expect remote activity to still be highly active over the next year or two. Remote technology has made it possible for service providers to leverage resources to bring the benefits of offline customer service to the digital world, further cementing these new trends for years to come. But customers are searching for a connection that can get them an experience that is similar to being offline. This is why customer experiences are shifting toward a more personalized approach, tailored to the needs of the individual.

The following list from Avasant’s report details the most common trends that enterprises should consider for an improved customer experience:

• Build an integrated customer experience strategy: A company’s CX efforts should not focus only on specific areas such as customer service, sales, commerce, or marketing. It must encompass every interaction between customer and company.

• Increase customer engagement to drive customer value, loyalty, and retention: From conceptualizing customer engagement strategies to their implementation, businesses should be careful with customer data and be transparent with how data will be used.

• Leverage emerging technologies along with human-centered design techniques: businesses must not focus on deploying a point solution alone, but leverage emerging technologies like AI/ML, analytics, and AR/VR to generate customer insights and create immersive experiences.

• Carefully evaluate when choosing the right CRM solution: Organizations must conscientiously assess their needs and objectives when selecting the right CRM solution. They should choose based on the type of customization, for example, a custom solution or a pre-packaged solution, along with comprehensive or basic features and functionality.

The customer experience has been reimagined faster than anyone could have anticipated, yet many of the solutions come from what brought success in offline relations. In order to build strong relationships with customers and meet their demands at a competitive level, by using data driven technology to modify the experience for the individual.

Edited by Maurice Nagle