Channel-less CRM over the multi-channel is not only preferable for customers, but also benefits businesses, offering enhanced efficiency and cost reduction.
Gartner confirmed that over 85% of organizations had fragmented their customer engagement channels, leading to inconsistent customer experience. Till the time technology at the back end connects to all of these touchpoints and creates a common source of truth which will be instantly accessible to every agent, customer service will continue to suffer.
Without the right technology at the back-end, businesses cannot always ensure the consistency of the data, making it available between channels. Siloed data leads to customer frustration and sales loss. An always-on AI never differentiates between data and actionable insights across email, SMS, chatbot, voice, or any other channel, so consistency is assured regardless of the channel. It also allows businesses to maintain full customer data control to ensure it is being handled properly, in compliance with GDPR.
AI tools available to businesses assure real-time insights, decision-making, and collation of all interactions between the company and customers. This information flows from a central hub, sitting behind all channels, analyzing data, and decides the next-best-action designed for the customer. Having one unified AI hub means no useful data is lost. This is vital for organizations to understand their customer’s context and expectations for relevant, personalized, and convenient communication.
Moving to a channel-less CRM backed by a central AI hub allows businesses to cut down internal siloes that would otherwise act as roadblocks to completing the customer journey. Infusing the benefits of proactive customer service through AI with solutions like business process management (BPM) and digital case management (DCM), businesses can automate unnecessary tasks to reduce workloads and also drive employee efficiency from end-to-end.
CTOs and CIOs are pivotal in making the organizational move from multi-channel to a channel- less CRM. The best way to achieve channel-less CRM is to create an information ‘hub’ which merges the experience of all the channels, driving customer engagements- using one unified AI tool.
The first step is to create a regular flow of customer data through the channel-created siloes. Businesses can equip their central platform with a robust set of capabilities for cost-effective and innovative end-to-end automation. Using digital process automation (DPA) and robotic process automation (RPA), enterprises can bring processes, people, and systems together. Such optimization of technologies also allows the largest enterprises to safeguard against the missed opportunities to serve customers.
The next step is to set up efficient business process management to highlight the processes required to meet the customer’s expectations and track the progress. And the last step is setting up intelligent automation — training AI to calculate and derive the ‘next-best-action’ that should be taken. The AI would prompt the customer service agents to call with relevant upgrade offers and discounts.
Enterprises now seamlessly engage with customers moving from channel to channel, ensuring their history and context keeps getting updated accordingly. Customers will not forget less than satisfactory experiences easily. Hence, enterprises need to capitalize on AI and automation now to adapt to and meet the evolving consumer needs or expectations so that they don’t lose out to the AI-pro competitors.
