The onset of the pandemic brought about unprecedented change — and with that change came customers with questions that needed to be answered, fast. How will my insurance change? Can I defer payments? Consumers turned to customer service centers for help. It was a chance for businesses to shine — but customer engagement fell flat.
Why? The approaches businesses have relied on worked in the past, but recent world events exposed underlying faults in these approaches. Traditional customer engagement technologies are automatic, yet generic. They are inflexible — whether in the context of outside events or the needs that vary from customer to customer.
Customer service centers quickly became overwhelmed. Consumers became dissatisfied. But there is a silver lining. Businesses have been forced to reevaluate how they engage customers and what they can do better.
This is why we think it’s important to take a look at the 2022 Gartner® Rethink Customer Experience for a Disrupted World With the CX CORE Model report. Gartner explains their reason for the report: “In this research, we present a model to do what CRM and other customer engagement technologies were meant to do before they got subsumed by their overhead and complexity: develop customer empathy and make the customer the starting point for creating business architecture.”
By focusing on the consumer, businesses can learn how to send every customer the right message at the right time with the customer first approach. Read on to learn why your enterprise needs to shift towards dynamic customer engagement and how to get started.
Transform Customer Experience With Dynamic Customer Engagement
Before we delve into a new strategy, we need to understand the issues surrounding the current customer experience. Traditionally, businesses have built technologies that deliver customer engagement automatically and at scale.
While this works wonders for operational efficiency, businesses have failed to notice that the customer is missing from the process. Internal teams may be happy, but this is rendered useless if the customer is not satisfied.
And this issue becomes incredibly apparent when you look at customer service and its current performance from the pandemic onwards. Think about it. When do your customers reach out? When they have an issue.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of COVID-19. When customers contacted customer service, confused about their change in policy or in need of an extension, they were looking for clear, quick answers. But businesses relied on lengthy FAQ or automated messages providing little to no help. The bottom line? Customer service is disjointed, impersonal and ineffective, leaving customers feeling disconnected and frustrated.
But this can be solved with a new strategy. According to Gartner, “Dynamic customer engagement (DCE) is a strategy born out of customer service and support for using data and analytics to discover insights that drive highly personalized and contextual actions.”
It’s important to note that leveraging data does not mean prioritizing numbers over consumers once again. Rather, data is analyzed with the customer in mind.
“Gartner believes the path to DCE can be accelerated by leveraging the enterprise-level CX CORE model designed to help organizations construct experiences that put the emphasis back on individual customers. In this model, Customer Experience CORE helps customer service and support leaders architect for experience to build lasting and valuable relationships that can flex with ever-present disruptions affecting customers.”
– Gartner
By leveraging customer data to create a flexible, personalized customer engagement strategy, it’s possible to make existing customer service personal and proactively prepare for future disruptions, putting your business on a path to success.
Personalized Videos for Dynamic Customer Engagement
We know dynamic customer engagement is critical, but what resources are available to achieve this? The perfect tool businesses can use now is Personalized Video, delivering dynamic customer engagement automatically and at scale.
For one, Personalized Videos are data-driven, critical to dynamic customer engagement. Powerful customer information is leveraged to personalize the video to the viewer’s unique circumstances. And it goes beyond mentioning the customer’s name.
For instance, a customer with a substantial banking account can be sent a video with additional tips for investing, while new customers can watch a video with bonus tips for saving. Even timing can be accounted for — Personalized Videos can be sent out a week prior to a customer’s specific deadline. It enhances customer service on another level, providing dynamic customer engagement when needed most.
Data-driven videos leverage the same powerful technology and data in existing customer engagement technologies, but the key difference is that they focus on the customer first and foremost. Take a look at how businesses are using them now to drive engagement on a dynamic level.
Questions Answered In Advance
To reduce friction, issues should be taken care of not just when they happen, but before they even do. By proactively addressing your customer’s needs based on available data, you can create a more seamless customer experience.
Take this timely renewal sent out to customers by Zurich, for instance. It’s a customer-focused message that changes according to the individual’s unique circumstances.
Viewers were sent a video prior to their renewal period, reminding them of the upcoming date so they’re not caught off guard.
In addition to their policy renewal date, the video also showed the customer’s premium, what their current plan covered and the contact information for a local agent. The upshot? By providing customers a personal touch (and reinforcing the value Zurich brings) , the company increased customer retention.
Results: We’ve seen personalized customer service videos like the one above reduce call center volume in the financial services industry by over 70%.
Contextualized Data for a Dynamic System
A dynamic approach to engagement must also be contextual. Customers respond to the world around them — your customer service should do the same. As Gartner states, “The standard CX toolkit is not wrong – but, it must evolve by leveraging real-time data that reflects the dynamic nature of your customers.”
It’s possible to create videos that are contextual with Living Video technology.
A Living Video leverages contextual data to engage customers with the most relevant, real-time information. And a viewer’s context can include anything — from the current time to the weather to the device they’re using. A video that changes the greeting from “good morning” to “good evening” depending on when the customer views it is just one example.
Your video can also auto-update via API. Sync it with anything from stock prices to retail inventory to airline flights so your video is always up to date.
This is especially useful for creating a more flexible approach to engagement, allowing businesses to provide an uninterrupted customer experience in the new era of COVID and beyond. Dynamic customer engagement with Living Video may look like:
- A customer portal video that automatically updates to display patients’ new health insurance
- A video for a company that displays the viewer’s closest store location
- The language in the video changing based on the country where it’s viewed
The Dynamic Customer Engagement Solution
It’s critical for businesses to create an engagement strategy that can evolve and change with their customers. Personalized Videos are the perfect tool to engage customers with the data that matters most to them in a fun to watch video — driving customer satisfaction, retention and better business results.
But when you have a customer base spanning hundreds of thousands, all with different needs and interests, tailoring the way you interact with every customer can be a challenge. That’s why the top enterprises are leveraging the Next Generation Video Platform, able to deliver Personalized Videos at scale.
With a fully open platform, you have the option to either let us handle the details — or DIY. And with existing integrations among the most popular CRMs, including Salesforce and HubSpot, it’s easy to streamline your workflow while revamping your business communications. Ready to take dynamic customer engagement to the next level? Let’s talk.
Gartner, “Rethink Customer Experience for a Disrupted World With the CX CORE Model: A Gartner Trend Insight Report”, Don Scheibenreif and Marcus Blosch, 16 February 2022.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
