What does it mean to your team when you talk about the customer experience? Do you define it as seen through the eyes of your staff or are you actually capturing customer perception? For instance, you may believe the customer experience is optimal if the customer only has to wait 30 seconds to speak with an agent. In reality, however, your typical customer may view that as too long and will consider the experience to be dissatisfactory.

Asking these questions is important in an industry where companies are spending upwards of $10 billion a year in the operation of customer service contact centers. These centers are high touch and high value, in addition to the high cost, and therefore their activities must be focused on the right outcomes. Exony (News - Alert), a customer experience solutions provider, highlighted this phenomenon in a recent blog.

The winners and losers in any market will quickly be defined by the ability to create customer engagement with each. How it will be delivered and consumed will also make a difference as contact centers throughout the world are working toward the omnichannel experience. Too often, customer experience professionals are trying to manage environments with complex silos in activities, channels, data and even infrastructures. As a result, resources and efforts are being duplicated and the customer perception is quickly lost in the mix.

At the same time, customer service centers are trying to engage the millennial customer, one who expects instant responses and satisfaction. Without the ability to deliver a seamless experience with instant results, these consumers are likely to form negative perceptions of the brand and shop the competition. It’s not a complex problem to identify, but it can be a challenge to fix. Fortunately, Exony is helping with its VIM.

This single business user portal allows customer service centers to more easily manage chat, voice, email, co-browsing, mobile, social and community, all with the analytics insight necessary to better understand and then proactively reduce the customer effort both in and between these channels. To deliver this VIM platform, Exony is partnering with eGain. Together, the new entity will provide cohesive and comprehensive solutions to support omnichannel engagement.

Still, even with such powerful tools in place to streamline the engagement experience and improve interactions, it’s still all about the customer. If you’re not measuring actual perceptions and adjusting your activities according to their voice, these efforts will fall short. Make the customer voice a priority to ensure the omnichannel experience delivers according to expectations on both sides.