Customer Engagement- How to Serve Millennial Customers

Smartphones, mobile apps, digital money, social media, self-service have all become part of the social fabric of our lives. Millennials now form a core chunk of the customer group. “As millennials are more 'experience-loyal' than 'brand-loyal,' consumer engagement is quickly becoming a far more influential factor in building positive brand perception. It’s imperative that businesses adapt their customer service strategies to deliver an interaction strategy that addresses millennial engagement preferences,” says Sanjay Gupta, Managing Director- India and Middle East, Aspect Software.

Driving Customer Engagement

Organizations need to change the way they look at customer interactions. Organizations that embrace integrated omni-channel support and self-service have a competitive advantage over firms that choose to rely on traditional support channels and technologies.

Customer interactions have moved from customer service to customer experience to customer engagement.

Still, there is lot of technology that works behind this continuum of customer management. Aspect Software is one such company that helps organizations lead in customer management. The company describes itself as a technology provider that helps organizations with tools and services to coordinate customer-facing activities across the front and back office, while optimizing business processes and managing personnel in the middle, in an integrated manner.

Sanjay Gupta says that Aspect’s fully-integrated solution unifies the three most important facets of modern consumer engagement strategy: customer interaction management, workforce optimization, and back-office. Through a full suite of cloud, hosted and hybrid deployment options, the company helps the world’s most demanding contact centers and back offices seamlessly align their people, processes, and touch points to deliver remarkable customer experiences, he added.

Omnichannel Customer Experience Platform

Sanjay says that over the past few years, we have witnessed a drastic transformation in the customer’s behavior, as they increasingly prefer to use self-service to resolve their queries. As India rapidly enters a mobile-first era, self-service will become a powerful platform for companies to provide personalized experiences to their customers.

In response to this need, last year, Aspect launched the next generation platform in India titled Aspect Customer Experience Platform (CXP), a design once-deploy anywhere platform that is a highly customizable and powerful ecosystem that utilizes automation and natural language understanding. This platform enables companies across verticals to build an omni-channel customer contact center which is truly engaging.

Sanjay Gupta, Managing Director- India and Middle East, Aspect Software

Says Sanjay, “We believe Aspect CXP will enable our clients better engage their customers with the help of the three key attributes of self-service - context, continuity and convenience.”

The other aspect is that customer interactions need to be two-way communication. Customers simply hate to engage in one way communication with machines or systems. That’s why even voice mail is not part of Indian business culture.

Says Sanjay, “Our interaction through SMS and Twitter with the brands we wish to engage with has evolved from one-way notifications to two-way conversations, thus empowering companies to expand automated omni-channel service interactions with consumers. For consumers, it means getting their questions answered in real-time without having to work through phone trees or be tied to a device while waiting for a response.”

Aspect beefed up its market-leading omni-channel consumer experience solutions with the acquisition of LinguaSys. LinguaSys’ native support for over 18 languages makes the solutions immediately accessible for virtually all regions of the world. LinguaSys’ text-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capability combined with Aspect CXP will transform one-way notifications such as outbound text into automated, conversational self-service dialogues, the company claims.

Providing Contextual Continuity

With the flexibility and nearly unlimited mobility brought on by smart phones, consumers around the world have taken to find issue resolution to business questions by themselves, on the go, and whenever they want instead of relying on the constraints of call center business hours. A study from Aspect Software found that the top customer service frustration for consumers today is that the consumers have to repeat themselves multiple times to multiple people via multiple channels - ahead of being transferred and ahead of not getting any issue resolution at all.

Another survey found that nearly all (96%) of the consumers surveyed said when contacting customer service about the same issue, they should be able to pick up where they last left off, regardless of channel.

To help companies address this growing pain point, Aspect announced Experience Continuity, an intelligent customer interaction platform that provides context and continuity when moving from self-service to live-service, switching between channels, or when switching between proactive outbound communication and inbound service inquiries.

Market Leadership

Aspect has been honored with the leadership position in the Champions Quadrant in the recent ‘Frost & Sullivan Industry Quotient Matrix 2015 Contact Center Outbound Systems Vendors report’.

Commenting on Aspect’s achievement, Krishna Baidya, Head of Customer Contact Research, ICT Practice, Asia Pacific said, “With its longevity in the marketplace, platform-agnostic approach, and comprehensive set of offerings, Aspect continues to enjoy enviable mindshare among contact center decision makers. Aligning to their customer’s needs irrespective of their size or operational complexity, Aspect’s solutions enables customers to power multichannel campaigns and deliver high-touch proactive customer care across a myriad of channels.”

The Frost & Sullivan report states that extraordinary growth in Greater China, Australia and the key ASEAN markets has also helped Aspect to further elevate its overall market share in outbound segment in Asia-Pacific up to 27.3 percent from 25.0 percent in 2015. Aspect’s performance in the India market in 2016 has been good with products license growth of 13 percent, ahead of overall India market growth rate of 5 percent, as per research reports. Sanjay points out that the higher growth rate for Aspect clearly indicates that the company managed to grow market share during the year.