by Trent Rossini, First published by TIBCO blog, May 10 2016
While CX has evolved over the past decade, and practitioners have turned CX into a science, the industry has not learned how to use the data it so readily collects to understand the psyche of customers. Scaling empathy is at the heart of customer experience and clearly the next CX frontier.
Empathy requires context: Knowing when it is the right time to speak to the right people, and to say the right thing. Our ability to gain that context, however, requires a deeper understanding of the where, why, when and how of the perception of customers towards a company and their interactions with the company. The challenge of gaining this holistic view lies in integrating the different methodologies and various customer-facing tools that companies typically use.
CRM provides an inside-out view of the customer. This enables an understanding of the customer from the perspective of the organization. This provides valuable insights, but not enough to understand the customer’s emotional state and attitude towards a brand. CX management fills in that gap, providing an outside-in view, and informing that all-important context.
Context is the key to understanding customers, their motivations and their likely responses which enables the driving of customer behaviour, thus extending CX from understanding to action. We call this CXtended. If the context is understood, it can be used to inform every area of customer engagement. However, context must be understood at the starting point in order to realise the benefits of customer behaviour change throughout the customer journey in such a way to utilise the changing context of the customer to inform what form of engagement should come next.
From location to transactions, and most importantly, to sentiment, the context is rooted in the data. Whether customers are providing likes or criticisms via social media, or they go to the same store at the same time every week, or they have put in an insurance claim only twice in the past decade, that data – and the context that can be extrapolated from it – can change the way businesses and their customers interact. However, extracting an understanding of the customer context requires the ability to navigate and organise both structured and unstructured data.
Fundamentally, understanding where the customer is in their journey from both a process and emotional perspective rests on making sense of all of the data available. A customer’s relationship with a brand is built up through multiple layers, shared through many different media, and thus a layered customer experience model is the foundation on which any insights must be built. inQuba uses a CEM repository to organise the data together with the semantic anchoring of unstructured data against the CEM model which together with the use of TIBCO’s visual and predictive analytics technologies allows context to be built up through the data.
The data collected throughout the customer journey is not only used for determining what action should be taken, but for the measurement of engagement effectiveness allowing the results to be tracked and measured. Closing that loop is the final piece of the puzzle.
inQuba leverages TIBCO’s visualisation technology to provide patterns and insights to establish this context making CXtended a reality. With this context comes relevant engagement and empathy – and when you get your customers they get you! Buying more, staying longer and telling their friends – every CX Exec’s dream!
