Customer Experience
By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner
The True North team recently concluded its offsite in Austin, Texas to discuss the firm’s key focus areas, and where we envision the world of CX headed. When you analyze the business-to-business market, you quickly realize how many different solution categories exist, and the complexity it creates for the customer. It’s hard to be an expert on everything in the technology space, and at True North our focus is to be the de facto and best in class strategy boutique in the industry around the CX space.
For us, one of the most exciting solution categories is customer experience. Customer experience is one of those terms that doesn’t really have a broadly agreed upon definition. We view it as all of the ‘interactions that a customer has with an organization over the lifetime of the relationship’. With the rapid adoption of digital technologies, there are vastly more channels for customer interaction than they’re were in the past, and evolving rapidly.
At True North we are strong proponents of the customer journey, especially for business-to-business interactions. A customer journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a solution, as well as the adoption and promotion of the solution after it’s purchased. With SaaS solutions, we’ve come to a point where more investment is put into the customer journey than the functionality of the solution.
So, what are the different types of customer experience solutions? With such a broad focus, we felt it important to define the subcategories of customer experience solutions. Here’s how we see things:
Contact Centers - These are formal customer interaction solutions manned by human agents. It includes all of the standard functionality such as inbound voice, outbound voice, omnichannel, IVR and compliance. These types of solutions can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud or from the public cloud via a SaaS model.
Engagement Channels - These include all of the different ways in which a customer can interact with an organization. This includes voice, email, SMS, live chat, consumer messaging, social media, video chat, and co-browsing. Many of these solutions are purpose built for specific use cases such as help desks, customer service and support.
Self Service - These are automated solutions, not requiring human agent intervention. They include chatbots, virtual assistants, escalation to agent tools, robotic process automation, speech technologies and conversational AI platforms. These solutions are often used in conjunction with engagement channels to handle less sophisticated customer inquiries.
Analytics - These are solutions for collecting and analyzing data to get insights on performance, engagement and interactions. They include solutions for voice of the customer, customer journey analytics, interaction analytics, engagement analytics, customer insights and customer surveys.
Employee Productivity - These are solutions for managing, assisting and training personnel engaged in customer interactions. They include solutions for performance management, workforce engagement management, learning management, case management, knowledge management and time management / scheduling.
Field Service Management - These are solutions for automating and enhancing field service operations. They include solutions for monitoring, inspection, fault detection, scheduling, dispatching, delivery and interactions.
Without a doubt, customer experience is a fast growing space. Enterprises will have to up their game, ensuring that they improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. We believe there is a huge opportunity for companies focused on customer experience solutions. We at True North Advisory are excited about the opportunity to work in this segment, helping our clients with strategy and go-to-market. In summary, we strive to be the best resources for our current and future clients as it relates to the CX space.
