Is Your Customer Engagement Data Done Right?

The world is digitally transforming, and the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of that transformation. The number of channels and communication modes used for customer engagement has exploded. With that, so has the volume of interactions and associated data.

At the same time, customer expectations are skyrocketing. Consumers demand personalised experiences across the entire customer journey. So being able to tap into your treasure-trove of customer engagement data has never been more important!

Experience suggests that businesses that offer the best customer experience will be rewarded with customer loyalty, growth, and brand recognition. So, putting in place a focused data strategy around customer engagement will help you become a clear winner.

However, while businesses recognise the importance of data, recent surveys indicate that business leaders have many concerns.  “Eighty-eight percent cited concerns around dealing with volumes of interactions and 79% cited concerns around having a unified view of customer engagement and overcoming data silos.”

They are right to be worried about this. To address these concerns, it is imperative that businesses give serious consideration to the management and use of their customer engagement data and develop a strategy around it.

So how can you help ensure that your business has the right strategy and approach to customer engagement data?

Read on for 3 key considerations.

The Customer Engagement Data Platform

If you are like most businesses, you are considering a move to the cloud or have already moved your communications systems to the cloud. You have probably deployed or are considering a Contact-Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) or Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) platform to effectively manage communications. But ask yourself these questions.

Is your data strategy tethered to your CCaaS platform?

If you need to switch out your communications platform, will your engagement data be held hostage to the existing platform?

And are your voice and digital interactions stored across different solutions?

If you want to truly harness your engagement data and break down the silos that exist, you need to manage your customer engagement data in a platform that is built for that type of data. This will provide you with ultimate analytics and business agility.

Data Platform Capabilities

Ensure your customer engagement data platform has the right data management capabilities. This is key to short- and long-term success. Key capabilities should include:

• Cloud-based: For maximum advantage select a cloud-based solution for your engagement data platform. Pick a simple-to-deploy SaaS or hybrid solution with the ability to pay-as-you-go and expand capacity as needed. This will truly democratise data availability across the contact centre and other parts of the organisation.
• Omnichannel: You need an engagement data platform that is omnichannel. One that can capture and view data across all channels, voice and digital. That way you’ll be able to break down the silos of engagement data by creating a single, coherent view of all interactions and experiences.
• Data treatment: With all the unstructured and structured data available, ensure that your platform can normalise data across formats, for easy and seamless analysis. It is also important that you can enrich your data with additional engagement data as needed.
• Open platform: To avoid your data being held hostage to any one solution, picking an open platform is very important. It needs to be supported by APIs and adaptors that enable you to bring in key data from your CRM, survey platforms, and other engagement applications—now and in the future.
• Compliance: Non-compliance with regulations can be expensive! Ensure that your platform allows you to manage your data in a compliant manner. It should unify data management, provide governance, and help ensure security.

Powering Insights

Finally, realise that data is only valuable if it empowers the entire organisation with a unified view. Your solution needs to break down the silos and unlock customer engagement insights in a timely manner.

To that end, ensure your platform can easily ingest and visualise interaction data (data associated with actual conversations), experience data (feedback from customers) and customer data (from your CRM). Once you have this data in your platform, equip users with easy-to-use visualisation tools to empower them like never before.

Understanding what your customer engagement data is telling you is vital to future success. But customer engagement data is also unusual because it comes from so many different sources in so many different formats.

Taking a strategic approach to unifying, managing and analysing this very special class of data should be a top priority!

Interested in learning more about customer engagement data solutions? Ensure your customer engagement data platform has the right data management capabilities.