Supporting the connected customer

Deriving Value from Deeper Customer Insights

Excellent customer support has traditionally been the key to market success. Maintaining customer satisfaction levels would be the goal of any enterprise, specially a support organisation. But this is becoming an increasingly difficult task in a constantly connected world. While automated and connected systems and processes generate and accumulate mammoth amounts of customer data at every interaction point, not many tech support teams realise the value they are sitting on.

The tech support organisation of any enterprise is the biggest repository for customer data, and needs to learn how to store both structured and unstructured data to use it to their best advantage. In most cases, all that is required is awareness that this data bank can be a fertile ground for reaping intelligent insights. That can actually be the biggest market differentiator.

It is time that enterprises realise the value that this data can provide, with the help of the right analytics and Big data solutions. In the enterprise world today, it is this value that can be the keystone of superlative customer experience. An intelligent Big data strategy can play the most significant role in generating meaningful customer insights from these huge amounts of data. It has the capability to offer scale out, cost effective analytics framework, that adds the ability to ensure business strategies have strong data backup.

The biggest point of contention for the tech support teams and the primary reason why they do not recognise the business value for this data, because it is completely unstructured and comes from very disparate sources and the backend systems don’t have the intelligence needed to analyse the new data.

The Big data strategy needs to be based on the premise that its utility is for providing better customer service, so essentially CEM (Customer Experience management) needs to be the core layer of this strategy. The fact that this is a business strategy, with revenue implications, will ensure it is put to good use. However, there needs to also be an awareness that an analytics strategy is not merely about facts, figures and statistics. It has to do with intangibles that nevertheless add value to an engagement – excellence in agent performance and understanding customer behaviour, which build up to data collation. In order to be able to chart out an effective strategy for extracting meaningful insights not only from customer interaction content but also legacy data which is often concealed in silos, analytical tools are the best support. Since data flow is dynamic, and a constant, an analytical framework that uses a loosely coupled Big Data strategy is needed. What is needed is a clear technology layer that derives, sifts and structures data from myriad sources, and presents the right data for an efficient customer experience across all touchpoints.

Only an action driven, well supported Big Data strategy can ensure that this technology sits on a comfortable framework of customer support and will be able to offer enterprises maximum value from this data. For this, the support of a technology and strategy integrator, an intelligent partner to success is imperative.