Explorers

Your score means that you are starting to explore the full potential of conversational engagement technologies and processes at your organization. At this stage, a solid strategy will set the pace for your conversational engagement plans. To elevate your organization’s conversational engagement competencies and deliver effortless and frictionless experiences:

• Understand your customers’ needs across pivotal moments and align the process, technology, and people requirements to your strategy and roadmap accordingly.
• Implement conversational support capabilities across all customer-facing and back-end processes or workflows.
• Leverage automation at well-defined touchpoints to enable swift resolution while supporting scalable personalization.
• Train your agents to maximize the use of conversational engagement solutions and tools.

To truly be customer-led, firms must map customer journeys to identify and address what customers need at each touchpoint. Identify the platforms your customers require a chat on and bring your chat vision for them to life with the appropriate processes and technologies, be it on email, social media, or mobile applications. While your organization starts to build its conversational engagement technologies, processes, and competencies, it is key to channel efforts that strategically align these moments. Thus, firms in the explorers phase need to carve out a conversational engagement roadmap that is centered around the customer's needs across their lifecycle and ensure that chat is available on the customers’ preferred channels.

As you launch chat initiatives across pivotal touchpoints, ensure that you build workflows capable of delivering seamless chat experiences for customers (i.e., enable front-end and back-end integrations). A solid process flow will define the quality of engagement for your customers from the onset. Moreover, great customer service experiences are often the result of highly motivated and skilled frontline agents who have the support of well-designed business processes and appropriate technology. To set your agents up for success, your organization must standardize processes across channels and operationalize them to help agents prioritize more complex service requests, instead of basic queries that bots can quickly resolve. This is because firms in the exploratory stage are more likely to receive routine queries than those in a more advanced stage (59% vs. 43%). Hence, starting with basic conversational engagement capabilities, such as building workflows that route routine queries, will deliver early customer service wins while being cost-effective. Back-end processes will also need to be implemented to translate the benefits of these solutions to the next milestone of the customer journey. This sets the groundwork for more advanced conversational engagement capabilities as your organization continues to scale its conversational engagement competencies.

As your organization works on providing chat support across platforms that are key to your customers, you will require automation technologies in order for your efforts to be scalable. Seek to infuse some form of automation across the customer journey, especially in well-defined messaging touchpoints. Chatbots can triage conversations to enable swift resolution by identifying the customer’s issue, responding if possible, or handing the conversation to the right agent with context. AI-powered capabilities support agents by allowing them to offload repetitive tasks and deliver value more efficiently. Automation can also drive the personalization of customer journeys by utilizing data, analytics, and real-time context to optimize interactions based on customer needs, intent, and outcomes.

As your organization continues to advance its conversational engagement processes, technologies, and competencies, your agents must be trained to use those solutions and tools effectively. Otherwise, your investments and initiatives will not be able to live up to their full potential, and you risk damaging CX and employee experience (EX). Support change management with innovative onboarding and training programs that assist your workforce in becoming more fluent in using these tools.

Adopter

Your score means that your organization has taken the necessary steps to implement conversational engagement processes and technologies. While progress is well underway, gaps still exist in conversational engagement competencies that hamper agents in delivering consistent omnichannel CX. As you build a roadmap for conversational engagement, ensure that you have adequate processes, technologies, and people to support your goals. To elevate your organization’s conversational engagement competencies:

• Define metrics to track the success of conversational engagement investments and initiatives while tying them to business outcomes.
• Ensure that conversational support capabilities are implemented and integrated across customer-facing and back-end processes to extract information that will drive efficiency.
• Equip your agents with a comprehensive knowledge base and empower them with the information they need to respond to customers quickly and accurately.
• Engage agents in actively using conversational engagement solutions and tools. Collect and act on their feedback to improve their productivity.

As your organization builds its conversational engagement technologies, processes, and competencies; metrics for investments and initiatives must be properly defined to convey successes, roadblocks, and failings. Best practice — which will increase your likelihood of success — is to develop your business case as a lifecycle. Follow an iterative process, using early results to justify or halt further investment. Tying the conversational engagement initiatives to revenue, cost, and efficiency outcomes can also help to drive organizational priorities and agent behavior.

Great customer service experiences are often the result of highly-motivated and skilled frontline agents who work within well-designed business processes and have the appropriate technologies. For a unified and contextual conversational engagement, your organization must ensure that the lack of integration with back-end processes does not erode the success of front-end workflows. Developing a unified view of customer context is key to calibrating an intelligent, frictionless, and personalized experience across the customer journey powered by human-automation interplay.

The convergence of automation, knowledge systems, and human support helps orchestrate a more efficient delivery of consistent omnichannel CX. With contact center attrition resulting in agent knowledge gaps, ensuring access to up-to-date knowledge and process guidance should be a top priority for CX leaders. Live chat agents should have access to a solid knowledge base and canned responses to ensure consistency and efficiency.

As you start to engage with customers on more channels, start to think about amalgamating your conversational data into a single source of truth. By uUnifying your customer's’ conversational histories and activities across channels , you will be takingguide you the first step towards gaining a deeper understanding of your customer's’ behaviors and needs at different touchpoints, and help you cater toing to them. This would will set a good foundation for you to instill the tenets of predictive capabilities within the chat ecosystem, – which can be done by pairing a single view of customers with advanced analytics capabilities powered by AI and machine learning.

As your organization continues to advance its conversational engagement processes, technologies, and competencies, your agents must be trained to use those conversational engagement solutions and tools effectively. If not, your investments and initiatives will not be able to live up to their full potential, and you risk damaging CX and EX. Support change management with innovative onboarding and training programs that assist your workforce in becoming more fluent in using these tools. At the next level of maturity:

Agents use conversational engagement solutions and tools daily and will have a more nuanced perspective on what is and is not working with current conversational engagement processes and technologies. Acknowledging and driving change through agent feedback will increase process and workflow effectiveness while also increasing agent engagement.

Builder

Your score means that your organization has made significant progress in rolling out conversational engagement processes and technologies. However, to take your organization’s competencies to the next level, invest in people and technologies that can help support more in-depth personalization for conversations to better engage with your customers:

• Develop a plan to utilize data for personalizing journeys for each customer segment and then track its success through customer satisfaction metrics.
• Personalize responses by ensuring that information can easily be fetched from the back-end to the front-end by speaking to different business teams to enable integration with their applications.
• Explore and leverage AI technologies to proactivity engage with customers at pivotal touchpoints.
• As you select and upgrade to new conversational engagement tools, place greater emphasis on user-friendly interfaces as a selection criterion to better motivate agents to serve customers better.

As conversational engagement operations become ingrained as part of your organization's day- to -day processes, it is easy to lose track of tying outcomes to the bigger picture and your overarching customer engagement vision. Other thanApart from ensuring the relevance of conversational engagement initiatives to customer satisfaction, revisit your conversational engagement strategies on a regular basis to take stock of shifting goalposts and cross-check that against your broader customer engagement goals. For example, if you are also aiming to build customer loyalty, it will be crucial to design conversational engagement tactics that place emphasis on increasing customer retention (e.g., designing conversational triggers that reward recurring purchase behavior).

As your organization gains a foothold in establishing best practices across people, processes, and technology, it is critical to understand how these initiatives contribute to business goals, especially in customer satisfaction. Higher levels of personalization throughout your customers’ conversational journey can help create a sense of relatability and hence engagement with your business. Craft plans to analyze your collected data to determine how to approach different customer segments. Use this information to design conversational plans tailored to each segment’s needs. As you do so, define the metrics and milestones you will track, especially those related to customer-satisfaction. You may want to test, launch, and iterate on which process or technology works best for various customer segments.

As your organization establishes chatbot workflows to optimize the incoming volume of support requests, the next step is to ensure that conversational experiences are increasingly personalized for each response. This means tailoring responses to customers’ preferences with contextual background on their queries. Your organization must enable integrations to extract data from relevant back-end databases or applications on demand. To achieve this, your organization must work cross-functionally across different business teams (e.g., sales, customer success, marketing, and product) to ensure that messaging platforms are integrated with all business applications. Your customer relationship management, order management software, marketing automation software, etc., may possess the data you need for higher levels of personalization.

To fully design a satisfactory omnichannel experience for customers, your organization must deliver beyond the basics of ensuring the availability of routing and delivering bot responses. It is time to examine how advanced AI technological capabilities can help by capturing, understanding, and predicting the customer’s journey. For example, use real-time dashboards to predict customer satisfaction levels as you initiate campaigns or lean on deep learning methodologies to conduct sentiment analysis on your conversational data. In the longer term, designing conversational engagement experiences with intention will result in more streamlined yet impactful experiences for your customers.

As your agents progress in know-how and become more experienced in using conversational engagement tools and platforms, emphasize user-friendliness in their tools. To achieve this, your organization should attempt to understand the pain points of your agents as they go about their day-to-day tasks in managing conversations. Using this data, find the best-fit solutions to streamline their daily operations and experience with the tool. This can boost their motivation and equip them with the right capabilities to deal with complicated queries.

You are a Pioneer

Congratulations! Your score means that your organization is leading in deploying conversational engagement initiatives and has set a strong foundation in optimizing resolution quality and efficiency. Beyond that, you will have started thinking about delivering anticipatory CX. In doing so, make sure that you define suitable metrics to constantly track returns on your investments and identify remaining gaps to improve overall customer engagement outcomes. As next steps:

• Strengthen your conversational engagement strategy by bringing a cultural shift toward new metrics beyond engagement.
• Build better processes and workflows to enable your organization’s proactive engagement initiatives.
• Orchestrate a coordinated conversational experience across channels using the appropriate technologies.
• Define and own metrics that measure the impact of conversational engagement tools on productivity and experience to ensure that they are empowered to serve customers optimally.

Beyond understanding your customers’ needs and offering them support through pivotal touchpoints, it is important to follow through and track whether your conversational engagement initiatives increase customer satisfaction and fit into your overall vision for CX. Firms often get carried away with vanity engagement metrics (e.g., number of app downloads, app or web traffic, monthly active users) to measure success. As you achieve mastery in anticipating customer needs and proactive engagement, customers will reduce visits to brand-owned properties. When this happens, internally socialize the emphasis on revenue, customer lifetime value, or satisfaction and diminish the sole focus on top-level engagement.

As your organization scales capabilities to address customer queries effectively through automated responses (e.g., bot responses), keep in mind that it is also necessary that more complex queries can be attended to effectively. Your organization should also build capabilities around transferring customer queries to live agents where relevant, especially since advanced organizations tend to receive more complex queries (57% vs. average of 50%). Explore intelligent routing systems to determine the intent of customer queries accurately and anticipate when they will require bespoke support, especially at pivotal touchpoints (e.g., at touchpoints nearing to final purchase).

To deliver the best anticipatory experiences for your customers, you need to use advanced automation technologies that can help you operate with maximum context. The core of anticipatory experiences is not about the frequency of engagement, but how meaningful it is. Hence, it is important that conversational experiences are designed based on real-time insights of what customers need at their unique pivotal moments. Invest in the appropriate business intelligence technologies that can help your organization anticipate needs and act on the information in real time. For example, you can move from batch-based segmentation of audiences to selecting audiences for messaging actions in real-time using machine learning. On the actioning component, consider triggering messages based on real-time contextual elements such as location weather or even biometric data. When required, integrate software as necessary to seamlessly connect the data you have to platforms with real-time analysis capabilities.

Organization often over-communicate with customers with outbound communications, such as promotions, account updates, or process status. Too much of these messaging will appear to the customer as a bad behavior stemming from lack of coordination. It is now time for your organization to consolidate messaging efforts across channels so that communication can scale beyond fulfilling foundational messaging needs at every channel your customer is on. To do so, consider using technologies that can help with designing of journey maps and rules to choose messaging types to prevent over-communication with customers.

Your organization may have come a long way in establishing best practices for agents to be familiar with and deliver optimal conversational experiences for customers. However, it is also important to ensure that the conversational technologies and tools your organization is deploying impact their workday productivity positively. Help agents achieve productivity gain by conducting real-time assessments of those conversational tools that are meant to increase their productivity. Do so by identifying and tracking well-defined metrics (e.g., agent satisfaction scores and issue resolution rates) and reviewing if a service or platform provider change is needed if an investment proves suboptimal.