Q&A: The Future of CX and Communications

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Broadridge.

As members of the Broadridge Consulting Services team specializing in communications, we advise our clients across the financial, healthcare, utility, telecom, insurance, and other industries on creating a customer experience (CX) strategy while optimizing customer touchpoints – from technology to processes, from benchmarking through execution.

What is the current definition of Customer Experience?

We look at CX from both the customer view and the business view. As the customer, the experience is about the various interactions with the company, which directly impacts their level of engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. When you look at it from a business view, CX is about how the business manages the customer journey, including the technology, data, content, and processes that support it. While there are many different ways to look at CX, businesses really need to understand the customer’s perception of their experience because that’s what matters at the end of the day.

Is it easier to deliver better CX online compared to physical platforms/interaction?

Digital is optimal for delivering a rich customer experience for three reasons:

• Digital provides fewer constraints than paper. With paper, you’re limited by static messaging, number of pages, etc.
• Digital gives customers more control over their experience. With print, the business defines it
• Digital offers the ability to gather data (e.g., customer clicks, inquiries, etc.) and make real-time adjustments to improve the experience

That said, if your digital platform isn’t intuitive and lacks the necessary information or capabilities, you’ll be damaging the customer experience.

What does it take for an organization to build true Customer Intelligence?

You need to capture data across multiple lines of business and channels – structured and unstructured – to build true Customer Intelligence. This is how to get an accurate picture of your customer base and what is really happening: their attributes, their behavior and the context of their lives. For a deeper dive, we help our clients conduct voice of the customer feedback, user testing, and satisfaction surveys. This research provides qualitative and quantitative insights to drive innovation strategies.

How do webinars, video conferencing and social media help to improve Customer Experience?

We see these tools as additional touchpoints along the journey, providing customers with more options of how, where and when they can receive information. They can also give businesses a better understanding of their customers (e.g., interactions and favored content on social media) and help them deliver relevant content, which can improve the CX and drive additional revenue. It’s a win-win.

Which technologies are disrupting the Customer Communications ecosystem?

Emerging digital technologies, like AI, Voice, and Chatbots, are creating opportunities for businesses to up their communication experience game. Looking broader, with Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud and Digital capabilities – or what Broadridge calls “The ABCDs of innovation™” – we’re seeing disruption across industries, from service models to customer expectations, with leading companies capitalizing on these opportunities.

Which players in the communications landscape are you keenly following and why?

We are partnering with leading communication companies like Amazon Web Services and Adobe, to help our clients advance their communications and connect with their customers. It’s truly exciting to work in such a dynamic environment with these industry leaders and develop Next-Gen capabilities.

How can an organization obtain a successful CX program?

It can be overwhelming for companies to know where to start with their CX transformation, so we broke it down into 3 Practical Steps to Better Customer Communication Experiences: gather internal and external perspectives, revisit your communication design and analyze the communications workflow. These are steps you can take today that can make a difference.

What impact do AI, ML, and Chatbots have on the Customer Journey and Experience?

These technologies are helping businesses leverage data – new, legacy, structured and unstructured – to enhance the CX, drive better user experiences, simplify compliance and reporting, and reduce costs. For example, chatbots are helping customers get answers to basic inquiries on their terms without an expensive call to a service agent. AI is driving business insights by making data more usable and interactive; it’s really providing businesses with the information they need to start treating customers as individuals.

What are your predictions about Marketing growth for the next 3 years?

In the next three years, we expect businesses to incorporate more Personalization and relevant content, interact dynamically across all customer touchpoints, and evolve to a true Omni-channel communications environment.

First published on MarTech Series.