Customer teams in Singapore face a complex challenge. Organisations recognise the significance of a distinctive customer experience (CX) and adaptability to market shifts in a competitive landscape. They also prioritise enhancing employee experience (EX) and reducing costs. Balancing these priorities requires recalibrating across people, processes, and technologies.
This underscores the pivotal role of data in CX transformation. When CX teams and contact centres prioritise data in all their initiatives, they gain deep insights into customer journeys, facilitating proactive service delivery, enhancing self-service mechanisms, and fostering genuine innovation in customer engagement.
Here are 5 ways organisations in Singapore can achieve these business objectives.
Download ‘5 Ways to Succeed in Singapore’s Competitive Battle to Win Customer Hearts’ as a PDF.
#1 Build a Strategy around Voice & Omnichannel Orchestration
Customers seek flexibility to choose channels that suit their preferences, often switching between them. When channels are well-coordinated, customers enjoy consistent experiences, and CX teams and contact centre agents gain real-time insights into interactions, regardless of the chosen channel. This boosts key metrics like First Call Resolution (FCR) and reduces Average Handle Time (AHT).
This doesn’t diminish the significance of voice. Voice remains crucial, especially for understanding complex inquiries and providing an alternative when customers face persistent challenges on other channels. Regardless of the channel chosen, prioritising omnichannel orchestration is essential.
Ensure seamless orchestration from voice to back and front offices, including social channels, as customers switch between channels.
#2 Unify Customer Data through an Intelligent Data Hub
Accessing real-time, accurate data is essential for effective customer and agent engagement. However, organisations often face challenges with data silos and lack of interconnected data, hindering omnichannel experiences.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can eliminate data silos and provide actionable insights.
- Identify behavioural trends by understanding patterns to personalise interactions.
- Spot real-time customer issues across channels.
- Uncover compliance gaps and missed sales opportunities from unstructured data.
- Look at customer journeys to proactively address their needs and exceed expectations.
#3 Transform CX & EX with AI
GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) is revolutionising how brands address customer and employee challenges, boosting efficiency, and enhancing service quality.
Despite 62% of Singapore organisations investing in virtual assistants/conversational AI, many have yet to integrate emerging technologies to elevate their CX & EX capabilities.
Agent Assist solutions provide real-time insights before customer interactions, optimising service delivery and saving time. With GenAI, they can automate mundane tasks like call summaries, freeing agents to focus on high-value tasks such as sales collaboration, proactive feedback management, personalised outbound calls, and upskilling.
Going beyond chatbots and Agent Assist solutions, predictive AI algorithms leverage customer data to forecast trends and optimise resource allocation. AI-driven identity validation swiftly confirms customer identities, mitigating fraud risks.
#4 Augment Existing Systems for Success
Despite the rise in digital interactions, many organisations struggle to fully modernise their legacy systems.
For those managing multiple disparate systems yet aiming to lead in CX transformation, a platform that integrates desired capabilities for holistic CX and EX experiences is vital.
A unified platform streamlines application management, ensuring cohesion, unified KPIs, enhanced security, simplified maintenance, and single sign-on for agents. This approach offers consistent experiences across channels and early issue detection, eliminating the need to navigate multiple applications or projects.
Capabilities that a platform should have:
- Programmable APIs to deliver messages across preferred social and messaging channels.
- Modernisation of outdated IVRs with self-service automation.
- Transformation of static mobile apps into engaging experience tools.
- Fraud prevention across channels through immediate phone number verification APIs.
#5 Focus on Proactive CX
In the new CX economy, organisations must meet customers on their terms, proactively engaging them before they initiate interactions. This will require organisations to re-evaluate all aspects of their CX delivery.
- Redefine the Contact Centre. Transform it into an “Intelligent” Data Hub providing unified and connected experiences. Leverage intelligent APIs to proactively manage customer interactions seamlessly across journeys.
- Reimagine the Agent’s Role. Empower agents to be AI-powered brand ambassadors, with access to prior and real-time interactions, instant decision-making abilities, and data-led knowledge bases.
- Redesign the Channel and Brand Experience. Ensure consistent omnichannel experiences through data unification and coherency. Use programmable APIs to personalise conversations and identify customer preferences for real-time or asynchronous messaging. Incorporate innovative technologies such as video to enhance the channel experience.
Customer feedback is at the heart of Customer Experience (CX). But it’s changing. What we consider customer feedback, how we collect and analyse it, and how we act on it is changing. Today, an estimated 80-90% of customer data is unstructured. Are you able and ready to leverage insights from that vast amount of customer feedback data?
Let’s begin with the basics: What is VoC and why is there so much buzz around it now?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) traditionally refers to customer feedback programs. In its most basic form that means organisations are sending surveys to customers to ask for feedback. And for a long time that really was the only way for organisations to understand what their customers thought about their brand, products, and services.
But that was way back then. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the market (organisations and vendors) dipping their toes into the world of unsolicited feedback.
What’s unsolicited feedback, you ask?
Unsolicited feedback simply means organisations didn’t actually ask for it and they’re often not in control over it, but the customer provides feedback in some way, shape, or form. That’s quite a change to the traditional survey approach, where they got answers to questions they specifically asked (solicited feedback).
Unsolicited feedback is important for many reasons:
- Organisations can tap into a much wider range of feedback sources, from surveys to contact centre phone calls, chats, emails, complaints, social media conversations, online reviews, CRM notes – the list is long.
- Surveys have many advantages, but also many disadvantages. From only hearing from a very specific customer type (those who respond and are typically at the extreme ends of the feedback sentiment), getting feedback on the questions they ask, and hearing from a very small portion of the customer base (think email open rates and survey fatigue).
- With unsolicited feedback organisations hear from 100% of the customers who interact with the brand. They hear what customers have to say, and not just how they answer predefined questions.
It is a huge step up, especially from the traditional post-call survey. Imagine a customer just spent 30 min on the line with an agent explaining their problem and frustration, just to receive a survey post call, to tell the organisation what they just told the agent, and how they felt about the experience. Organisations should already know that. In fact, they probably do – they just haven’t started tapping into that data yet. At least not for CX and customer insights purposes.
When does GenAI feature?
We can now tap into those raw feedback sources and analyse the unstructured data in a way never seen before. Long gone are the days of manual excel survey verbatim read-throughs or coding (although I’m well aware that that’s still happening!). Tech, in particular GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs), are now assisting organisations in decluttering all the messy conversations and unstructured data. Not only is the quality of the analysis greatly enhanced, but the insights are also presented in user-friendly formats. Customer teams ask for the insights they need, and the tools spit it out in text form, graphs, tables, and so on.
The time from raw data to insights has reduced drastically, from hours and days down to seconds. Not only has the speed, quality, and ease of analysis improved, but many vendors are now integrating recommendations into their offerings. The tools can provide “basic” recommendations to help customer teams to act on the feedback, based on the insights uncovered.
Think of all the productivity gains and spare time organisations now have to act on the insights and drive positive CX improvements.
What does that mean for CX Teams and Organisations?
Including unsolicited feedback into the analysis to gain customer insights also changes how organisations set up and run CX and insights programs.
It’s important to understand that feedback doesn’t belong to a single person or team. CX is a team sport and particularly when it comes to acting on insights. It’s essential to share these insights with the right people, at the right time.
Some common misperceptions:
- Surveys have “owners” and only the owners can see that feedback.
- Feedback that comes through a specific channel, is specific to that channel or product.
- Contact centre feedback is only collected to coach staff.
If that’s how organisations have built their programs, they’ll have to rethink what they’re doing.
If organisations think about some of the more commonly used unstructured feedback, such as that from the contact centre or social media, it’s important to note that this feedback isn’t solely about the contact centre or social media teams. It’s about something else. In fact, it’s usually about something that created friction in the customer experience, that was generated by another team in the organisation. For example: An incorrect bill can lead to a grumpy social media post or a faulty product can lead to a disgruntled call to the contact centre. If the feedback is only shared with the social media or contact centre team, how will the underlying issues be resolved? The frontline teams service customers, but organisations also need to fix the underlying root causes that created the friction in the first place.
And that’s why organisations need to start consolidating the feedback data and democratise it.
It’s time to break down data and organisational silos and truly start thinking about the customer. No more silos. Instead, organisations must focus on a centralised customer data repository and data democratisation to share insights with the right people at the right time.
In my next Ecosystm Insights, I will discuss some of the tech options that CX teams have. Stay tuned!
The Internet of Things (IoT) solutions require data integration capabilities to help business leaders solve real problems. Ecosystm research finds that the problem is that more than half of all organisations are finding integration a key challenge – right behind security (Figure 1). So, chances are, you are facing similar challenges.
This should not be taken as a criticism of IoT; just a wake-up call for all those seeking to implement what has long been test-lab technology into an enterprise environment. I love absolutely everything about IoT. IT is an essential technology. Contemporary sensor technologies are at the core of everything. It’s just that there are a lot of organisations not doing it right.
Like many technologists, I was hooked on IoT since I first sat in a Las Vegas AWS re: invent conference breakout session in 2015 and learned about MQTT protocols applied to any little thing, and how I could re-order laundry detergent or beer with an AWS button, that clumsy precursor to Alexa.
Parts of that presentation have stayed with me to this day. Predict and act. What business doesn’t want to be able to do that better? I can still see the room. I still have those notes. And I’m still working to help others embrace the full potential of this must-have enterprise capability.
There is no doubt that IoT is the Cinderella of smart cities. Even digital twinning. Without it, there is no story. It is critical to contemporary organisations because of the real-time decision-making data it can provide into significant (Industry 4.0) infrastructure and service investments. That’s worth repeating. It is critical to supporting large scale capital investments and anyone who has been in IT for any length of time knows that vindicating the need for new IT investments to capital holders is the most elusive of business demands.
But it is also a bottom-up technology that requires a top-down business case – a challenge also faced by around 40% of organisations in the Ecosystm study – and a number of other architectural components to realise its full cost-benefit or capital growth potential. Let’s not quibble, IoT is fundamental to both operational and strategic data insights, but it is not the full story.
If IoT is the belle of the smart cities ball, then integration is the glass slipper that ties the whole story together. After four years as head of technology for a capital city deeply committed to the Smart City vision, if there was one area of IoT investment I was constantly wishing I had more of, it was integration. We were drowning in data but starved of the skills and technology to deliver true strategic insights outside of single-function domains.
This reality in no way diminishes the value of IoT. Nor is it either a binary or chicken-and-egg question of whether to invest in IoT or integration. In fact, the symbiotic market potential for both IoT and integration solutions in asset-intensive businesses is not only huge but necessary.
IoT solutions are fundamental contemporary technologies that provide the opportunity for many businesses to do well in areas they would otherwise continue to do very poorly. They provide a foundation for digital enablement and a critical gateway to analytics for real-time and predictive decision making.
When applied strategically and at scale, IoT provides a magical technology capability. But the bottom line is that even magic technology can never carry the day when left to do the work of other solutions. If you have already plunged into IoT then chances are it has already become your next data silo. The question is now, what you are going to do about it?
