Meeting Customer Expectations Requires a Digital-First Approach

The idea of boosting the quality of customer service companies offer while simultaneously lowering the cost of doing so has always been something of a Holy Grail. In the past, the desire to accomplish this largely stemmed from a desire to increase profitability. Today, labor shortages and inflation have been added to the mix at a time when customer expectations are escalating, so the urgency is greater than ever before.

This week, customer engagement company Verint released its annual global research today examining the customer engagement challenges organizations face, and the strategies they are using to close the “engagement gap,” or the gap between customers’ expectations for service and an organization’s ability to fulfill them.

The study found that some companies are indeed managing to meet customer expectations while keeping costs and labor under control. The research uncovered a significant divide in confidence with 67 percent of respondents indicating they are “highly confident” about their organization’s ability to provide the level of experience demanded by modern consumers, and the remaining 33 percent indicating they were less confident in this capacity.

Highly confident leaders were 3.2 times more likely to be highly effective at engaging customers across digital channels, 2.9 times more likely to provide effective self-service options, 2.9 times more likely to have been highly effective in implementing or expanding their customer experience automation usage and 2.8 times more likely to be effective in leveraging customer feedback to improve customer experience during 2022.

The survey revealed that investment in solutions across multiple parts of an organization was key to having confidence in effective customer engagement. Organizations continue adoption of digital-first engagement solutions at scale, with a focus on the need to meet customers where they are on their channel of choice. In fact, 85 percent of highly confident leaders began using or expanded use of digital channels for interacting with customers over the last 12 months. Eighty-nine percent also cited their use or more extensive use of those digital engagement channels in improving customer experience has been highly effective.