Johannesburg, 12 Aug 2022
Personalisation and customer-centricity are a priority for almost any organisation dealing with customers and stakeholders, but to deliver on the vision, organisations need to start with unified data.
This is according to experts speaking ahead of a webinar on the 'Customer Service of the Future', to be hosted by AWS, Salesforce and Synthesis this month.
Archana Arakkal, Practice Lead: Intelligent Data Engineering at Synthesis, says personalisation, know your customer (KYC) and customer-centricity are driving forces for change across sectors: “People engaging with brands on any channels have an expectation that the company should know them by default. They expect personalised recommendations and engagement, whether it is in a B2B or B2C or even across business units. Organisations that aren’t able to understand the customer and their journey will eventually take a back seat to those that can.
“The intention and vision is there among local companies. Every strategy incorporates a single view of the customer and customer-centricity. But the challenge is implementing this. Typically, data is separated in legacy infrastructure and there are no linkages in older long-established businesses. Newer companies are better positioned to make these linkages because they are built for integrated data, but they may not have as much historical data on customers as their older competitors,” Arakkal says.
Roark Raman, Amazon Connect Specialist at AWS, says historical data is not all that matters – understanding the customer’s interactions with the company also support enhanced customer service: “To personalise service, we also need to give contact centre agents context, enabling them to greet customers by name and understand how many times they have called and what their query was.”
Raman says to build context and KYC, companies need to break down the silos in their data. “One of the key things companies like AWS are doing is helping organisations to organise data within a single repository. Data lakes are very valuable, with data in both structured and unstructured format. But achieving a central repository providing a wealth of information can be a long journey. The tooling we put in place has smoothed the journey. Because it can be an ongoing effort to unify all data within a data lake, we have also made it possible to move forward in personalisation and customer service journeys by unifying data from multiple data sources, so agents have all the necessary information on a single pane of glass,” he says.
Julie Barlow, Service Cloud Account executive at Salesforce, says: “The biggest challenge we are seeing today among companies servicing their customers is them not having all the customer data in a single platform. It is very difficult for agents to provide a personalised experience for customers if they don't have a full 360-degree view of that customer with all the products and services they have purchased and the full history of the customer interactions.”
Barlow notes: “Salesforce Service Cloud is built on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers and enabling you to deliver smarter, faster and more personalised service. Customers want connected experiences where your agents become trusted advisors. Service Cloud not only connects to sales, marketing, commerce and across every customer touchpoint, but can be connected with external data through integration so you can have a full view of the customer across all departments. Our customers are seeing on average a 30% increase in customer satisfaction or net promoter score when implementing Service Cloud.”
The 'Customer Service of the Future' webinar will take place on 16 August, with AWS, Salesforce and Synthesis outlining their tools to overcome obstacles and transform the customer experience, including Amazon Connect, Salesforce Service Cloud, real-time telemetry and smart chatbots. The event will examine how organisations can use personalisation, machine learning and artificial intelligence to better manage their data for genuine customer understanding, and will highlight how leading local and global companies are meeting customer expectations.
To register for this event, click here.
For more information, visit www.synthesis.co.za, https://aws.amazon.com/ or https://www.salesforce.com/.
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