The importance of a 360-degree view of the customer

Pradeep Rathinam, Chief Customer Officer at Freshworks, talks about the rapidly changing world of CX in the pandemic era and beyond, the importance of social media-like service, and the shrinking of implementation cycles from years to months in their business. Excerpts from the video interview…

The importance of removing friction at touchpoints

This is the decade of the customer. Or if you will, the century of the customer. Back in the old days, you heard: The customer is king. Today everyone has realized that, starting from Amazon that puts a seat or customer inside every conference room. Every touchpoint of customer engagement is important. Any friction in any of those touchpoints causes pain and a higher effort for a customer to engage with the business.

In this true world of contactless customer service in the Covid era, CX has come to the forefront more than ever before. Today your sales are remote. Your service is remote. Every aspect of your business is remote. How can you redefine the experiences that were done in person, to become more digital? This has become the core of every business today.

Every touchpoint of the customer engagement is important. Any friction in any of those touchpoints causes pain and a higher effort for a customer to engage with the business.

Implementation cycles shrink from years to months

It doesn’t matter if you are a retail business, or manufacturing business, or B2B Saas business… Every business has to start thinking about putting CX at the core of its strategy. The crux of Digital Transformation that has been happening in the last two decades is happening at a much more accelerated pace in this decade primarily because putting the customer at the center and thinking about how can you actually enable smarter ways to deliver self-service and automation in such a way that you take every friction point in your organization away from your customer?

Today we’ve seen implementation cycles shrink. In our case when we talk about Digital Transformation for our customers, whether it’s with our CRM suite or whether it’s with our omnichannel suite, we find ourselves in a situation where we can implement these types of breakthrough Digital Transformation solutions within months and not years as it was done historically. The promise of the cloud and SaaS-based solutions help enable rapid onboarding.

Shifting from the phone to digital channels

Businesses are looking for ways to really have an omnichannel engagement with their customers. Even in those Omni channels, whether it was an email-based ticket or a messaging channel like chat or messenger or WhatsApp or phone-based channels, the shift to digital channels has become immense. Businesses are thinking: How can we take more of the traffic that comes through phones and move them to digital channels.

The other part is that consumer behavior has changed. We are all used to WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram. We want to engage with businesses in the same fashion in terms of ease of use and asynchronously sending a ticket or text and waiting for a response. No one really wants to pick up the phone and wait anymore. The phone is an expensive medium too. Every time you pick up the phone and call a customer service agent, it costs the company a lot of money. (This may still be offered in case of an urgent situation though.)

Self-service with automation and bots

Then there’s self-service. We all have now come to a place where: I want to see my past orders, I want to see my past transactions, I want to be able to change my seat, I want to be able to get a refund, I want to be able to get an exchange… All of that, can I be able to do it without having to talk to anyone? Automation and bots are becoming a core part of CX strategies too. Digital channels lend themselves better to automation.

We are all used to WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram.

We want to engage with businesses in the same fashion in terms of ease of use and asynchronously sending a ticket or text and waiting for a response.

A 360-degree view of the customer

Businesses are also asking themselves whether they can be more proactive. The lines are blurring between sales and service, especially in this new digital contactless world. Seeing that a 360-degree view of the customer for every part of the organization is becoming paramount. All entities need to access the customer records. You need to see all the history, all the transactions, in any system that you may be operating.

The SaaS World is Flat

Technology in the SaaS industry has leveled the playing field. In the past, you had to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure and then scale it. Today a small business essentially has amazing platforms where they can think about the core promise that they offer to their customer. All the building blocks of software can be stitched beautifully in a very easy-to-use manner in a plug-and-play.

Pradeep Rathinam is Chief Customer Officer,  Freshworks

By Sunil Rajguru

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in