Enhancing Customer Experience (CX) by Bridging the Gap through Human Experience Platforms

Tactis, DC’s fastest growing customer experience agency, has over time gained invaluable experience implementing communications strategies across most channels. These strategies include traditional, digital, and contact centers. But one of the most significant issues to surface with many communication programs is that they are siloed into different operational groups, resulting in competing interests and goals. Further, as per a recent Tactis blog post I wrote – How Will the Communications Landscape Evolve? – it has become clear that current technology strategies can be inherently dehumanizing.

Reversing the Trend 

At Tactis, our goal is to reverse that trend to ensure that customer experiences consider the human touch. Our focus is on helping our clients bridge these gaps through the kind of human experience platforms that help unite omnichannel experiences and ensure that users feel respected in their engagement with those experiences. To achieve this, we focus on five main areas: User-Centric Self-Service, AI-Driven Insights, Omnichannel Orchestration, Automation of Emerging Channels, and Smart Contact Centers.

Omnichannel Orchestration 

At the core of a human-centered platform is the ability to provide omnichannel orchestration. This means orchestrating solutions across channels to ensure a consistent customer experience and associated messaging regardless of the touchpoint with your audience. This orchestration occurs through tightly connected technologies – technologies driven by automation, cognitive solutions, and data. Often this leverages our client’s existing technology which is then intelligently supplemented as we identify gaps through our human-centered design approach.

User-Centric Self-Service 

User-centric self-service capabilities are crucial for brands wishing to take customer experience (CX) to the next level. No one doubts that user demand for always-on services will continue to grow. Users will simply expect brands to provide services that are available where and when they want them. In addition, users are increasingly expecting those services to understand the context that they – the user – find themselves in, such as time, location, emotional state, prior interactions, etc., to provide dialogue in a near-human way. This is not surprising. Technology has evolved to a point where these are realistic expectations. Adopting technologies such as these not only offer benefits to users, but they also enable more effective operations through automation and cost-savings. But, as noted earlier, these services must be built in ways that acknowledge their limitations. We need to understand at what moment real people should be introduced into the process to avoid unintentional consequences that might arise from purely machine-driven interactions.  

AI-Driven Insights 

AI-driven insights are a core component of both our work today and in the future. At the macro-level, Tactis uses AI to scour vast amounts of data to uncover insights that can drive innovations and insights across the organizations we support – insights that would be difficult, if not impossible, for a human to discover on their own. At the micro-level, AI insights are what drive the kind of experiences that offer a sense of personalization for each individual user, insights that enable better self-service, communicate smarter messaging, and drive greater brand engagement.

Automation of Emerging Channels 

Part of our MO at Tactis is to continuously look at how we automate increasingly complex emerging channels, both organically through our clients’ platforms, and with our programmatic partners. It makes sense that over the next 4-6 years we continue in our quest to automate more channels. These include traditional channels in desperate need of automation (TV, out-of-home, radio, print), and emerging digital channels. From mixed reality to true 1:1 addressable advertising, we are already exploring solutions and developing future offerings with our partners that will smartly integrate with new technology and consumer adoption. We are also working with our partners to develop new solutions for advanced measurement and attribution across devices and channels while staying committed to consumer privacy.

Smart Contact Centers 

To ensure that we can help our clients deliver a more human touch at the right points in the user journey, Tactis is increasingly focused on developing our smart contact centers. The goal here is to fundamentally change the role contact centers play in the communications mix. By reducing call center agents through many of the areas discussed above, and by employing these innovations, not only will we lower the cost of contact center operations, but also allow contact center staff to focus instead on high impact interactions and novel use cases that AI and machine learning have not yet fully adapted to. This will free up the smart contact center agent to interact with users across channels – phone, social, email, etc. – with consistent and contextually aware responses supported by cognitive technologies, ensuring the best outcomes. Moving forward, Tactis will also view contact centers as a source of direct user insights since we are interacting with people in a way that can help us better understand their needs and intent better than one-way communications or transactional social media interactions can.

To learn more about ways to prepare for changes in the ever-evolving communications landscape, and to drive CX, contact us today. 

***

In his role as Managing Director with Tactis, Todd Coen works to make an impact for clients through design thinking, intelligent technologies, and business process operations. Todd can be contacted here.