The speed of the spread of technology, or rather its immediate effects, has taken many customer-facing organizations by surprise. Because of internet connectivity becoming rapidly commonplace in the workplace, at home, and more importantly, via mobile device, every person who’s connected suddenly has a voice.

And unlike real life, there’s a great deal of democracy in the online experience. Every person’s virtual voice carries as much clout as the next, and it’s this situation, in combination with messaging and social media platforms, that have lead to the rise of the consumer advocate.

These days, everywhere we go to eat, every hotel we stay in, and even every journey we make, we can comment on publicly and see our opinions placed alongside (and given the same weight) as experts on the subject matter. The days of the hotel inspector are fading, while the age of massed online opinion is upon us.

In the same way, each interaction customers have with organizations can be broadcast, on social media, the web, or via electronic messages. The same platforms are used to keep in touch with businesses & organizations too, so companies have challenges in customer care that only a few years ago just didn’t exist. Thanks to technology and the customer advocate, organizations now have to:

• Monitor many different forms of communication between customers, partners, suppliers, and stakeholders to be responsive.
• Be able to switch from platform to platform to continue conversational threads.
• Be aware of the differences in communications channels between different demographics and geographies.
• Know which channels are appropriate for which type of communication.

Therefore if your company is serious in the way it creates an overall customer experience, being able to manage digitized communications is absolutely imperative. Some platforms will help manage social media accounts, for example, while others will create repositories of email correspondence based on machine learning algorithms that comb for keywords and run sentiment analysis routines. But, however you pull your customer data together, making sense of the disparate communications is a task that isn’t simple, and certainly requires resources that are more powerful than those designed for a single function – k=like a marketing department’s social media aggregation tool.

The key to customer experience metrics is the ability to aggregate data, and then treat it with the same kind of rigor that research-oriented institutions approach “big data” science. However, the type of data curation tools used by academics and large enterprises to detect trends are not suitable for developing a clear idea of your customer’s overall experiences: the routines are just not part of the package.

Instead, your business should be looking to specialist providers of CX (customer experience) platforms, that can cover off some or all of the following:

For customer service departments

Highlight ways that better and more proactive relationships can be evolved, driving brand loyalty and creating fast-growth in markets.

For marketers

Examine changes in customer behavior by exploring and analysis of data from multiple, often unstructured sources.

For operations staff

Create an understanding of issues in vendor management, identify gaps in staff training or facilities because of CX failings.

For Human Resource departments

Understand employee behavior and appraise staff skills to reduce turnover and improve working life.

For business analysts and strategists

Get real-time alerts about changes in customer behavior while getting the tools you need to explore and analyze previously siloed customer data.

Customers already provide all the information your organization needs to inform it of the best and most productive ways forward. With coherent CX data, and the right tools to mine it, you can track your brand’s profile, and the effects your behavior has on customers’ behavior. Running your CX program more effectively will mean you will be able to differentiate your business and will ensure your decisions are taken on empirical evidence, not “gut feeling”.

Here at Tech Wire Asia, we’ve considered the customer experience software platform market, and are showcasing two suppliers of the very latest in CX platform design. While no single solution will be a perfect fit for every organization, we think that the following should be your starting point for your research.

INMOMENT

In use all over the world by many household names, InMoment defines the way customer experience management systems should behave. The modular platform helps companies & organizations gather, process and make sense of customer data.

Taking unstructured data from, for instance, text-based interactions with customers and making sense of it is something that until now has been the area of advanced data science techniques. But InMoment’s algorithms can surface difficult-to-locate trends and customer sentiments from the masses of data that most organizations collect daily.

With real-time alerting, and case prioritization, the InMoment solutions mean that the even at scale, customers are individualized, with prioritized loop-closing and anomaly detection giving CX staff the tools needed to create positive experiences that drive significant brand loyalty.

The platform centralizes information and metrics into a series of highly configurable dashboards that can be designed for different uses: marketing, human resources, customer care, PR, and so on. Only by bringing together the collected customer interaction datasets can businesses create the type of customer care that today’s individuals require from every concern with which they interact: and InMoment helps organizations do just that.

To learn more about InMoment, you can read more here.

IBM CX ANALYTICS

The IBM Customer Experience Analytics engine helps companies track their customers’ journeys as they take place over time, and across the multiple channels in use today (many journeys typically start on one medium, such as a social post, and then change to a website, and from there to a voice call, for example).

The analysis engine in the IBM solution shows all this graphically and lets staff drill into any element of the journey to see dwell times, abandonment points and the most successful aspects of any journey.

The platform is powered by the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange, which can be side-chained to IBM’s AI (artificial intelligence) engine, Watson, for insights that improve their accuracy as time goes on, and more data flows across the system.

Each element of even an individual’s path can be correlated with regards satisfaction, revenue, or a host of other metrics, allowing companies to design their optimum customer journey by combining the most impactful elements of each campaign.

The efficiencies are impressive, with double-figure reductions in sales funnel journey times, and the platform encourages a meticulous approach to customer experience management on existing tools and tracking methods.

*Some of the companies featured on this editorial are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia