It has been well over a year since COVID-19 arrived and began making an impact on the business world. Employees experienced the difficulties of working from home while sharing the home with online learners and endless efforts to keep the entire family operating peacefully.
Consumers found out how easy it is to have store shelves cleared of basic necessities that were never an issue when 40 hours of every week was spent at an office. Searching online for goods and services is now practiced science for many. Out of stock has come to mean “click the next link on the search page” instead of asking “when will be you getting more?”
Through all the changes, customer experience has taken on a new level of importance. Phone, chat, SMS, email & browsers became the means for communicating with any number of resources we largely took for granted. As phone lines backed up producing long wait times, alternative forms of communication took on increased importance. The idea of “a quick call” or “pop by the store” was no longer a default approach to getting things done.
While voice may still be king, SMS, chat and social media have experienced terrific increases in customer service traffic. Companies that had only been dabbling in digital media as part of their CX offering have found themselves playing catch-up. Digital media is here to stay.
As noted by Twilio in their State of Customer Engagement Report 2021, the soaring growth of digital customer engagement has yielded a wealth of data that has the potential to be leveraged to provide more personalized interactions. I suggest that very soon, CX (Customer eXperience) will give way to CXP, (Customer eXperience Personalization); the consumer-designed experience.
Sending agents home has accelerated the adoption of web-based telephony. I am not referring to connecting a desktop phone to a cloud-based phone service but instead, I am talking about using a browser-based WebRTC-phone. WebRTC technology is a primary catalyst that will forever change how we connect. WebRTC phones can be embedded into mobile applications and initiate information-rich calls that no longer need an IVR to capture why a customer is calling.
Need more proof? Look at the market leaders in the hosted contact center space. All have WebRTC-based client to connect agents with customers. Supporting work-at-home agent is so much easier when the agent only needs a browser on a PC.
In the CXP world, the mobile app and its browser cousin will capture everything needed to properly route your call before you dial. 5G service will mean images and video pushed as part of every conversation. Best of all, the consumer will be given complete control over the experience. The generic experience suited for everyone will quickly be suited for no one.
COVID forced a lot of changes in our work and home lives. Remote is now an assumption rather than an anomaly. Consumers have a new expectation for service and communication channel diversity plays a big role.
Cyara is a market leader in CX testing. When you are ready to move from CX to CXP, Cyara is also ready to help make sure your CXP offering is thoroughly tested and ready for your customers.
