Globally, when every organization is facing the challenges associated with managing customers & their experiences, Indian CXOs have been able to strike the right balance between their employees’ and customers’ expectations
The changing scenario of CX in the past two years
The past couple of years have had one thing in common for all i.e., “disruption as usual”— a new normal wherein people and organizations have to be on their toes to acclimatize to newer developments. Further, in 2023, organizations facing the threat of recession have to replan their budgets, workforce, and operations. But despite the challenging economic environment, organizations are still expected to meet the rising customer expectations. Indian organizations have been able to understand the challenging business climate and accordingly strategized their way forward with the right mix of next-generation technologies, which has helped them close the engagement capacity gap.
Bridging the Engagement Capacity Gap – what is an Engagement Capacity Gap?
An Engagement Capacity Gap is when there’s a gap between customers’ expectations for service and an organization’s ability to fulfil them. With the increase of multi-channel conversation, customer agents didn’t have access to every customer’s data to make the right decisions and this widened the communication gap between the customers and organizations. In today’s fast-paced world, engaging with customers has gone beyond just listening to their queries. To increase the customer base and retain their brand loyalty, contact centre agents need to value their requirements and queries and address them in real-time. In order to achieve this, organizations need to constantly keep themselves updated on their customers’ feedback, requirements, concerns and problems.
Bridging the gap while maintaining the CX cost Equation
With digital-first engagement and multiple channels of communication, organizations have a lot of data to analyze and with growing customer bases, it is only investment in the right solutions that can help them elevate the customer experience. But with the recessionary scenario, organizations also need to be cognizant of the CX cost equation– the need to deliver exceptional customer experiences while also lowering the cost to serve, as they need to deploy the right solutions to connect with the customers on a tightened budget.
Indian organizations are on the right track in their CX journey
However, the positive side of the scenario has been quite in favour of Indian organizations when it comes to connecting with customers. According to Verint’s recent study, Indian CXOs are highly confident in their company’s ability to provide high quality customer experiences during 2023. They achieved this by deploying efficient self-service solutions for customers to decrease transaction load and by enabling employees with better tools and training to support consumers when required. Some of the effective solutions that Indian CXOs relied on in 2022 include Workforce Management, Knowledge Management and CCaaS, which helped them keep up with the rapidly changing customer engagement trends.
Indian CXOs plan to keep employees empowered with the right tools in the CX journey
Globally, when every organization is facing the challenges associated with managing customers & their experiences, Indian CXOs have been able to strike the right balance between their employees’ and customers’ expectations. In order to keep the momentum going and empower the employees, Indian organizations have prioritized investment in workforce management/automation in 2023. Organizations plan to invest in deploying solutions that will help employees quickly find information to better serve customers and improve employee engagement, as well as empower their workforce without disrupting the CX cost equation. As organizations adapt to ‘disruption as usual’, it’s good to see that there is an upward trajectory as Indian organizations are devising technology-infused strategies to elevate both employee experience and the delivery of excellent customer engagement.
(This article is authored by Anil Chawla, India MD, Verint)
