AI-driven Communications Mining provides CX leaders with the tools and insight needed to capture and analyse the Total Experience.
The customer experience (CX) has long been a core focus of competitive differentiation. Between 2007 and 2009, CX leaders generated 3x higher returns for their shareholders than CX laggards. That’s why brands are now focusing their efforts on optimising the customer experience across all digital channels.
However, the pandemic has really reminded businesses that employee experiences (EX) are just as important as customer experiences. High-quality, competitive customer outcomes won’t be achievable unless the people delivering these services are fully supported, given the latest tools and freed from the monotonous, transactional work that’s driving continuous churn.
This has translated into renewed interest around the total experience (TX). TX is a concept representing the shared experiences of everyone who interacts with a brand. That of course means customers, but also employees and users of your platforms and services. Growing interest in TX is well justified: Companies with engaged employees enjoy customer loyalty rates 233% higher than those that don’t.
The bottom line is that EX drives and enhances CX. To provide market-leading CX you first need to deliver superb employee and user experiences.
The TX intelligence gap
The keystone of great TX is a joined-up customer and employee experience. You need to be able to see how the changes and experiences of your people are directly impacting the experiences of your customers. CX leaders require complete insight into end-to-end brand experiences - starting with the business processes that employees must engage with.
However, this demands a level of operationalisation most CX teams simply don’t have. In most enterprises, customer and employee experiences take place on distinct, disconnected systems. For customers, this usually means engaging with modern, consumer-grade apps - while employees deal with corporate, legacy systems.
The employee-customer disconnect makes perfect sense for security and privacy reasons, but it robs CX leaders of valuable insight into shared brand experiences. This leaves them unable to identify the really valuable improvement opportunities on the employee side that would, in turn, transform the customer experience.
When you consider that 69% of employees waste an hour a day switching between applications, and that nearly 10% of enterprises have over 200 different apps for their people, achieving a consistent view of the employee experience can be a challenge in itself.
Conversations: Linking employees and customers
Fortunately, there is one activity that closely links employees with customers - and it provides CX leaders with enviable insight into TX. That missing link is conversations.
The average employee spends a great deal of their day having conversations. Increasingly, these conversations take place on digital channels like email and instant messaging as well as collaboration apps. Indeed, the average employee sends and receives over 120 emails a day, and spends 40% of their time in Outlook alone.
For the people who don’t engage with customers directly, they still speak to and support employees who do. Communications - whether they take place on email, in chat or over the phone - are the single thread between all of these people, connecting every component of TX.
The most valuable customer interactions take place when employees and customers talk together. This has always been how the most important business is done. The question is, how can CX leaders extract insight from these conversations?
In any large enterprise, hundreds of thousands of messages are exchanged each day. Trying to sift through all of this information manually just isn’t scalable. At the same time, few analytics solutions are able to analyse so many disparate communications channels. Nor are they sophisticated enough to understand and extract the right information from complex human conversations.
Communications Mining completes the puzzle
AI-driven conversational intelligence now provides CX leaders with a new capability to gain unprecedented insight into their customer and employee communications. Communications Mining techniques deliver complete conversational intelligence - at speed and scale, on any channel.
Recent advances mean Communications Mining solutions can quickly and accurately extract the most valuable information from masses of communications. This includes sentiment (the emotional state of the people having the conversation) but also intent data, revealing the reasons and drivers that started the conversation in the first place. For the first time, CX leaders can rapidly identify the most pressing issues and beneficial change opportunities - without manual effort, without customer surveys or stakeholder interviews.
Crucially, Communications Mining is omnichannel. Every communication type used by businesses - from email to chats, phone calls and even notes left by employees in ERP, CRM and workflow systems - can be read and understood. Every customer conversation, every message exchanged between employees, is now open to analysis and opportunity discovery.
With Communications Mining, CX leaders have unprecedented visibility into the total experience. AI provides a window into business processes, employee collaboration, service and the customer experience. The total experience becomes tangible, measurable and ready for improvement.
