Customer Engagement Strategy & Technology Will Transform Your Business Date:   Monday , September 15, 2014 Founded in 1983, Concentrix Corporation provides innovative services and technology to accelerate high-value interactions at every stage of customer\'s lifecycle. Engaged customers impact businesses. At Concentrix, we understand the enormity of that statement and employ engagement strategies and technology innovations to maximize that impact engaged customers make. Engaged customers are far more willing to use a company\'s products and services repeatedly, they respond to up-selling and cross-selling most often, they generate more revenue, they are loyal, they are more forgiving, and they routinely provide valuable feedback with regards to how a business can improve products, services, and their customers\' experiences. Engaged customers become brand advocates who often create positive viral marketing for a brand. Engaged customers are critical to the growth of any business particularly in today\'s digital age. Today\'s customers are technically savvy, they know what they want, they provide us with important information, they interact across multi-channels yet demand a consistent experience, they want what they want now, they expect that we know what they want, and it\'s up to us to deliver to their expectations. It\'s actually up to us to deliver beyond their expectations. To delight today\'s customers and to maximize customer engagement, we must tie together disparate pieces of information that tell us a story. We must use that information to predict what our customers will want and interact with them in the manner they choose. We must understand how one interaction and transaction affects the next and must invest wisely in technology to achieve all of those critical objectives. Technology innovations like data management platforms, predictive analytics, voice of the customer applications, Concentrix\' Renewals Manager platform, Social Media applications, and more, enable us to look holistically at a customer, to serve and engage customers across multiple digital channels; including mobile, social, phone, chat, and email, and enable us to realize the highest value from every customer interaction. Technology innovations enable us to maximize the ecosystem that supports the lifecycle of our customers, improve customer engagement, and ultimately enable us to produce greater returns and improve business outcomes. The most successful companies are maniacally focused on best in class customer engagement and leverage technology innovations to help execute those strategies. Following are five strategies to accelerate your customer engagement and several technology innovations you may want to consider. 1. Capture every ounce of data and perform the analysis that gives you actionable insights: Customers are happy to provide information, provided that it\'s easy to give, it\'s captured correctly, and it improves their experience. Customers expect that we are smart and will leverage the information they give us. Connecting the dots, conducting analysis, and housing information in one place are all critical components of this strategy and can be achieved through technology. Data analytics are essential to building an effective database. New technologies such as predictive analytics are capable of generating accurate trends in customer response and behavior. Applications like Concentrix\' Next Best Action platform enable presentation of the next relevant offer to the customer immediately. Centralized customer management systems are critical to house the information that is analyzed and stored. Customer interactions are fertile grounds for mining extremely valuable information with which to fine-tune your customer engagement. 2. Understand the Voice of the Customer: Gain feedback through multiple mechanisms, such as customer councils, online surveys, social media platforms, and voice analytics, to garner a true understanding of what your customer is telling you. As an example, Concentrix uses text and speech analytics technology to measure sentiment during calls, emails and social media. Our platform leverages both structured and non-structured data to understand holistically what customers are saying and provides critical insight and key learnings. Those key learnings then are fed through predictive analytics tools to enrich the customer engagement and present relevant conversations and the next best offers back to the customers. These technologies empower both the customers in self-serve mode, and any front line staffs, who are interacting live with your customers, to take the relevant next step based on the ever-so-critical voice of the customer. 3. Be available to your customers across multiple channels real-time: An interesting 2014 study from Conversocial revealed that 63 percent of consumers think that companies should offer customer support through social channels; 55 percent now expect it; and one-third now prefer it versus picking up the phone. Consider exploring the use of a trained customer experience management firm that provides multi-channel and Omni-channel services. Leverage applications such as Concentrix\' Social Customer Care, Social Engage & Reach, Social Evaluate, Social Real-time and Social Lead Engine to meet your customers where and whenever they need you to, whether they realize it or not. 4. Deliver relevant offers and messages to your customers through their medium of choice: Nobody wants irrelevant offers and marketing campaigns. Respect the customers\' privacy and communication preferences. Organizations that send meaningful content and through means that a customer requests build engagement�and trust. A survey conducted by PR Daily revealed that 60 percent of respondents actually unsubscribe or opt out from future emails if they considered the content in a previous email to be spam. Leverage platforms that allow the customer to determine delivery vehicles, and leverage applications like Concentrix\' Next Best Action technology to provide relevance, but communicate through the preferred means. Technology is critical to achieve this objective. 5. Map the customer journey to expose gaps and areas for improvement: Oftentimes, organizations become overwhelmingly focused on one specific customer event and end up missing the big picture. Instead of looking at single instances in a customer experience, we must view the context of the entire customer relationship to optimize customer engagement. Organizations that generate maximum returns on their investment are the ones who use technology tools to map and redesign the client journey, focusing on the key \"aha!\" moments (when a customer is delighted), and the \"oh, no!\" moments (when a process needs to be rethought). As an example, at Concentrix we leverage tools and applications to gather social media input and web data on the customer experience, to perform web analytics and then we bring that into process mapping tools to distill this vast amount of data into actionable insight. Best in class customer engagement requires us to listen, to put information together, to analyze that information, to enable our customers to provide yet again more information, to connect the dots, to communicate real time presenting the right message or offering in front of the right customer at the right time. Best in class customer engagement requires the use of innovative technology. The effective use of such technology can be a daunting task, but if implemented properly, will dramatically impact customer engagement and your business. The combination of customer engagement strategies and technology innovations to enable those strategies are disruptive forces in today\'s marketing. The most successful companies are disruptive in the marketplace, move swiftly, build brand loyalty, and take share!