Meeting customer expectations is an ongoing process for brands around the world. Increasingly, customers expect to be able to interact with a company using any available communication channel or whatever mix of them is convenient and at a time of their choosing. To handle this array of interactions, companies are implementing next-generation technologies that support efficient and effective customer engagement.
According to new research, nearly three-quarters (74%) of organizations are being driven to improve this engagement to improve the customer experience. But, according to the benchmark research and application of the Ventana Research Maturity Model, less than one in six companies is fully mature in how it engages with customers.
Deploying collaboration to improve internal communications is the most important technological advance a company can embrace to improve engagement, the research found. What’s more, three out of five organizations view mobile technology and analytics as important technology capabilities that make possible innovation in customer engagement. Topping the list of businesses’ plans for improving customer engagement is deploying mobile customer applications. In the area of analytics, the important customer metric is customer satisfaction score for a substantial majority (64%) of companies.
“This research finds a significant shift in companies moving to a multichannel method to support the range of interactions required to meet customer expectations,” Richard Snow, VP and research director of Ventana Research, said in a press release. “Organizations that do not expand their channels to support the next generation of customer engagement will face a reduction in customer satisfaction and loss of business. This research confirms our view that although many companies now support multiple channels, there is still of lot of work to be done before customers get consistent, personalized and high quality responses across all channels.”
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