Techseen: Is micro-targeted consumer experience optimization unstable? What are your thoughts and why do you feel so?
Chawla: In an ideal world, every customer should feel as though they are unique. There is a lot of data that can be collected, analyzed and utilized to provide an individual experience for each customer. The ability for an organization to continually evolve their processes and deliver world class CX using information at hand will be the key differentiator between successful market leaders and the followers.
Techseen: Verint states that it provides various facets of actionable intelligence from workforce performance to customer behavior? Do you feel CX goes beyond personalization, processes and insights?
Chawla: Technology alone cannot deliver great CX. It’s a possibility to get entangled in lot of jargon and lose sight of the end goal. In its truest sense, it’s not the organization that defines CX, it is the customers themselves. What does that particular individual feel about their experience? Recognizing this, organizations that are looking to focus on how they deliver their services, need to place the CX at the heart of everything they do. It has to become a foundation strategy, an inherent cultural behavior, from which great experiences evolve.
Techseen: Can CX work in conjunction with Customer Relation Management applications?
Chawla: CRM tools are just one of the enablers of CX which simply equip organizations with access to data about customers and their transactions. But utilizing a CRM tool as a standalone platform will not deliver great CX.
Techseen: You said that banks and the BFSI should accede to this technology? Why should a bank choose your solution?
Chawla: Expectations around CX are still evolving. Previously, the voice channel was the typical way a customer communicated with a contact centre, with the agent or customer service representative (CSR) being its only contact point. There has been a shift in the way a customer has been connecting in the past year or so; the customer has started to engage via multiple channels. Today, a customer connects not only by voice but also via a web self-service, webchat, SMS and use social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
To deliver a world-class CX, the modern contact centre needs to aggregate data from across all of these sources and be ready to deliver a consistent response across each of the channels. Whether it be an employee desktop application that provides a “single pane of glass” view of comprehensive customer information, speech and text analytics to unearth hidden interaction or intent from customer conversations, or enterprise feedback management tools that enable organizations to regularly take the pulse of their customer engagement processes, Verint’s technology and business consulting expertise gives us the opportunity to work across every stage and channel, allowing banks to make fully informed CX business decisions.
Techseen: How will CX help in improving business processes of banks?
Chawla: Our comprehensive platform for customer engagement optimization includes proven and unified solutions for customer analytics, omnichannel engagement management, and workforce optimization. Armed with these insights, Banks can be better equipped to deliver consistent, contextual, and personalized experiences that count, no matter which channels customers use to engage. Happier customers are less likely to deflect to a competitive bank, will become better advocates for your organization and are more likely to consume more of Bank’s products and services.
Techseen: You say Verint is about actionable insights. Talking from an Indian point of view, do your clients think beyond the reduction of costs and improved engagement?
Chawla: Indian contact center industry has gone through a notable transformation over last 3-4 years. We will see the impact of all the combined forces coming to fore – technology advancements, integration of multiple communication channels, the power of analytics and the social media puzzle. Contact centers are becoming more strategically aligned rather than just being seen as a ‘call center’. The main idea behind it is to attract and retain customers by offering them the right type of experience; irrespective of the communication channel being used. The emergence of non-voice channels and automated technologies have taken customer care interactions to another level and the expectations have never been this high.
Techseen: What are the roadblocks/ challenges that you think you can face while pitching CX to the BFSI sector?
Chawla: There is a lot of confusion around the sector on what exactly is CX. You cant just buy a great CX outcome off-the-shelf. Some organizations are looking to purchase a singular solution to transform their CX strategy, others are looking to modify existing tools to achieve the same result. Whilst every organization is different, Verint’s technology framework enables banks to develop their strategy piece-by-piece, allowing momentum and success to be built.
Techseen: Do you think the Indian enterprises will move away from labour intensive segmentation and modeling practices to make CX more targeted and impactful?
Chawla: We are witnessing Enterprises e.g Banks, Telecom, Travel, Ecommerce and Hospitality as prime verticals that provide impetus to the adoption of Customer Experience in India. We are focused on providing them with best in class Customer Engagement Solutions that will help organizations serve customers in this evolving market.
Techseen: What do you think is the future of CX and where do you see Verint 2 years down the line?
Chawla: Organizations that do not put the Customer Experience at the heart of their growth plans, risk getting left behind. Customers are becoming more and more demanding and fickle, at the same time as their expectations rise. As a public company, Verint does not make forward-looking statements on its future.
