The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed customer experience and business process gaps, and has driven a dramatic change in global CX strategies for the year ahead.
This is according to Vishal Chopra, head of marketing, India, ASEAN, Middle East and Africa at Freshworks, who was speaking ahead of a Freshworks webinar on the New CX Mandate for Africa.
Chopra says shortcomings have been exposed both in the way internal processes are managed, and in the approaches enterprises traditionally took to customer service and customer experience.
“Internally, as organisations made the shift to remote work, they started seeing gaps in their processes, and experienced hurdles caused by a lack of digital maturity. Their legacy systems did not support agility and change at a time when workloads were piling up on customer-facing staff and numerous process changes had to be introduced to support remote workforces,” he says. “Now that organisations are planning to maintain a hybrid office-home work model in a post-pandemic environment, it has become clear that those process gaps have to be addressed.”
CX leaders’ strategies for 2021 are dramatically different from what they were a year ago.
Vishal Chopra, Freshworks.
Chopra notes that new research indicates that 65% of global CX leaders are now investing in supporting hybrid office-remote work operating models going forward, and CX leaders in Africa are aligning with this trend.
“This changes everything,” he says. “CX leaders’ strategies for 2021 are dramatically different from what they were a year ago. Early last year, they were focusing on reducing their CX budgets and reducing staffing. Now, they are changing their strategies to acknowledge CX as a revenue centre, rather than a cost centre.”
He notes that the pandemic drove this shift to CX as a revenue centre, as consumers avoided in-person contact and turned to digital channels for shopping and support.
“It’s no longer just the millennials shopping online: now it’s all ages. This pattern will continue, and enterprises realise that CX is what will bring these customers back to make repeat purchases. Everyone is online now, so it is important for organisations to set up online portals and stores, streamline all channels of engagement, and step up their online support.”
The Freshworks webinar on the New CX Mandate for Africa will feature insights from Chopra, as well as from Adré Schreuder, professor in the Department of Marketing at the University of Pretoria. This event will outline the top CX concerns and priorities for the year ahead, and will reveal the findings of the latest research into global customer service strategies for 2021.
For more information and to register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/freshworks-the-new-cx-mandate-for-africa/
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