Digital technologies and artificial intelligence are now essential ingredients to creating superior customer experience, and Genesys is committed to enabling that, Brett Weigl, Genesys' senior vice president and general manager of digital and AI, told the virtual audience on Day 2 of the Genesys 2022 Xperience Conference Thursday.
"We've seen a massive shift in customer expectations in the last few years," Weigl said. "Today there's a constant push for better experiences and more personalization. Consumers want interactions to be easy, digital, and tailored anywhere and at any time. When those expectations aren't met, they let everybody know about it, with the average dissatisfied customer telling upwards of 15 people."
So companies need to be able to provide seamless, personalized engagements that keep customers coming back, Weigl added. Customers want to use their preferred channels with fast and intuitive options.
"If you can't solve the problem yourself, you want to get to an agent who already knows what you've done and what products you use so that you can get to a resolution fast and get on with your life," Weigl said. "Being able to bring these kinds of high-value, effortless experiences for your customers presents a whole range of challenges that many of you are facing in your own businesses right now. If you have limited access to customer data to base your decisions on, you're not alone. This is a problem across the board."
In fact, 85 percent of CX professionals said in a recent survey that silos prevent a holistic view of their data, according to Weigl. "You also have limited resources to keep up with ever-growing customer demand. So you need to figure out ways to maintain service quality while using resources efficiently at the same time. So we exist at a big divide. We're delivering high-quality experiences, hindered by ownership, by process, and even by definitions of success."
Even though the goal is to deepen customer relationships, many companies treat each channel independently and use separate technology processes and resources to capture and manage engagement, according to Weigl. "Technology, fragmentation, and ownership issues can get in the way of thinking about how to serve customers holistically, and signals get missed that could be used to create a smoother customer experience."
Many organizations still use legacy metrics processes, and silos that can orient people around the wrong goals, further fragmenting the customer experience into a series of disconnected touchpoints rather than understanding each moment as part of a journey, Weigl added.
"To navigate, survive, and thrive in this complex landscape you need to transform into an intelligent and cohesive business to support success from every dimension where customers want highly personalized experiences, real-time responses. and all of their questions answered correctly the first time," Weigl said. "Genesys is designed to empower support agents with a unified view of the customer and their journey so they can have productive and meaningful conversations."
Of course different companies are at different stages in their digital transformations, which is leading to a whole range of problems that erode the cuastomer and employee experience, said Josh Goldlust, Genesys' vice president of product for digital platforms.
But, "when you connect the data that's generated across channels, you begin to see the customer beyond the single interaction. This allows you to minimize customer and employee efforts, as you can use the technology to enable front-line staff to view connected insights in real time. They can better personalize experiences and drive to a meaningful outcome."
Journey visualization provides a centralized view of each customer's active and past digital interactions, enabling users to start conversations with empathy and remove unnecessary fracturing to meet customers' needs faster and more effectively, according to Goldlust.
Genesys is in a trial with a large accounting firm to change the way it interacts with high-value clients. Intelligent automation is used to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
"It's all the same source knowledge, making it easy to ensure everyone always has access to the most current information." Goldlust said. "Because you can leverage real-time feedback, we will be able to continue to build and refine this body of knowledge to make it possible for your customers to confidently and consistently self-service."
Goldlust added that having a strong digital presence in place opens the door to connecting with a wider audience, providing the foundation for business growth.
Genesys has been working to add new features in its products to help customers in this evolving digital environment, said Katie Ritz, the company's senior director of product management.
<p<"We've seen a shift to digital for the last several years," Ritz said. "Connecting with your customers is one of the most important aspects of your business. Therefore, many of our recent features have been focused on helping you connect."
Last August, Genesys added asynchronous messaging to the website as a channel that customers can use, Ritz said. "Since that initial release, we've been working hard to roll out additional enhancements to extend the value of the channel. Dedicated web messaging allows visitors that have been authenticated by logging into your website to start or resume messaging conversations, providing an additional level of security and confidence that your agents and bots are interacting with."
Configurable positioning allows administrators to adjust the positioning of the messaging icon and the messages window to either the left or right side of the screen and allows for configuration of distance from the side and bottom of the screen. Genesys also added the ability to collect custom attributes within participant data, which opens the door to all types of personalized and customized routed configurations.
Genesys now also allows customers to work with native mobile software development kits, enabling them to add web messaging directly into native iOS or Android mobile apps.
The company is working on an auto-surf capability to give companies tools to kickstart conversations with their customers by helping walk them through complex web journeys and complete desired objectives, like requesting a quote or submitting an application.