In part two of CEO Focus, Somya Kapoor, CEO of the TheLoops, speaks about contextual awareness and how it will enable businesses to deliver innovative, revenue driving solutions. Transforming reps to proactive growth oriented assets. Here are some of her opinions…
SaaS products are generating a massive amount of customer interaction data. The tooling around each SaaS product is also generating a massive amount of data. This tooling includes support tickets yes, but also system alerts, team messages, log files, product analytics and more. Early work in Natural Language Processing has helped support reps to manage and understand more clearly what a customer is stating, but it doesn’t explain or give context to what a customer connected to your SaaS application is actually experiencing.
However, product data on the other hand is different. With product signals, it’s easier to correlate and contextualize the data to your customer experience in order to identify the problem and solve it.
Contextual awareness is the all-important success factor here. With the customer’s product data you can achieve contextual awareness of what they are experiencing. First line support reps and managers can take the customer experience to the next level. Contextual awareness is how businesses can deliver modern support. Reps transform from being reactive to proactively growth oriented. A customer experience that converts support tickets from support issues to opportunities for growing the lifetime value of your customers.
In the new digital landscape, agents need to be able to take ownership of the end-to-end resolution process and empathize with the customer. This starts by providing them with contextual information from the integrated tool stack to support real-time data sharing within the tools they are used to using.
All the data exists within the tools and technologies that companies have invested in – it is just spread across support tiers, engineering, and DevOps and frequently lost during collaboration. Your service agents are the public face of the company, especially in the digital world, and first point of contact for anything going wrong. They have a huge impact on the success of your business. They need to be empowered with real-time insights. Support needs to move from cost center to growth driver, an interaction point where you can increase customer experience drastically, they need to become data-driven from all angles.
At the moment many solutions can’t tell you once a ticket is created what the impact of that ticket is on revenue. Organizations need to ensure customer service and engineering teams are working in sync to drive cost efficiencies and productivity. Support should be driving revenue and be a competitive advantage.
CEOs of SaaS will start to look at CCO [Chief Customer Officers] to drive real-time metrics from CX where customer support will take a center stage and become more of a competitive advantage. Connecting closely with the customer, anticipating behaviors, and predicting issues before they happen with the help of data, insights will give companies competitive advantage. These companies can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys. CCOs with an eye to the future are boosting their data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify CX issues and opportunities in real time.
