In today’s competitive environment, the most successful businesses are the ones that have been able to establish themselves as leaders in Customer Experience. CX matters to a company’s success - and can be more valuable than product features, aggressive pricing or innovation.
New Challenges
To date, Customer Experience wins have been felt in the early parts of the customer journey – particularly around tailored marketing campaigns, personalized web and brand experience, and more recently orchestrated omnichannel communication.
However, a 2018 Forrester report points out that CX is stagnating. Over the last years, there has been no notable improvement. Why?
Last Mile CX
In the digital age, much of the customer journey happens independently through tailored web experiences or applications. However, research shows that most consumers still prefer agent-assisted help – especially when they need to complete a complex task or process. Today, it’s this last leg of the journey, aka the Last Mile, that is often long, painful and full of friction.
It’s this critical last mile of the journey that customers directly interact with the business for business issues like sales forms, renewals, loan applications, insurance claims, debt collection and billing disputes.
Last Mile CX Challenges
Last mile interactions are the most valuable and critical part of the customer journey. However, to complete these last-mile tasks, businesses often require customers to complete complex business processes. Those processes may include submitting documents, IDs, completing forms, submitting payments, or providing signatures and consent.
While none of these tasks are particularly daunting, the evolution in the way businesses have managed those last mile interactions has been slow. And as such, they have created a costly CX gap.
The CX Gap
Today’s customers expect seamless, complete, simple interactions. They expect to be able to complete forms, share documents, sign and pay while on the go, from their cell phones, while they are multitasking. In short, customers expect omnichannel experiences to match their busy lifestyle: digital, easy and mobile.
Business processes today often assume that customers are attentive, at a desk and have many other tools at their disposal - like printers, faxes and scanners. Today's omnichannel environment needs to create more effective customer conversations that allow contact centers to perform tasks in-channel.
Without the core capabilities to manage complex processes within the existing channel, businesses end up bouncing customers between channels – at the most critical moment of the experience. Rather than completing requests in the channel, the customer is bounced between websites, calls, emails, scanners, faxes and worse: making last mile interactions long and painful.
Close the Last Mile
New technologies empower businesses to complete entire processes with their customers instantly and in-channel. Last Mile Customer Experience Technology empowers contact centers to accelerate sales and service requests to address business-critical CX gaps. For example, while on a call, customers digitally sign documents, complete forms, share documents/ID, see images and videos and process payments securely on their mobile device. An agent simply sends the customer a text message which then opens a secure webpage that allows for the instant completion of last mile tasks.
CX investments must follow business impact. Today, businesses, customers and agents feel the impact of the last mile CX most pronounced. New call center technologies enable businesses to simply address these gaps and benefit from these important business wins.
