Every consumer’s needs evolve as they adopt new communication technologies available to them. Today, consumers want faster, ever more personal experiences when interacting with their favourite brands, while also demanding to buy products or services at the best possible price and quality. To meet this need, brands have had to adapt quickly to use technology to engage consumer audiences and increase customer experience, and so are now realising ever more AI-powered interactions with customers on channels like SMS, WhatsApp and Instagram. With publicity on new AI platforms like ChatGPT increasing consumer interest in AI, it has also helped build their trust in AI, as they are seeing the benefits of AI themselves firsthand, outweighing a lot of previous scepticism. Therefore, far more consumers are more open to AI and like the increased customer experience it offers.

However, without the right kind of data, AI will never be able to provide meaningful insights that can help brands create the personalised experiences that build business growth, provide consumer value and develop customer loyalty. Consumers are far more likely to share their data when they know that doing so will provide benefits to them, in terms of cost savings, better customer care and closer connections to brands they love. Transparency is needed from brands as it’s crucial in gaining trust. Sharing how data is being used when consumers first interact with a company means those brands that provide transparency and direct value will enjoy the kind of wide-reaching brand loyalty that only comes from more personalised, value-oriented interactions.

It is also important that consumer data isn’t seen in isolation. It can span engagements across customer service, marketing and sales transactions. So, it’s important it is not siloed by companies and covers multiple communications channels the consumer uses to interact with brands.

, Senior Sales Lead, Africa & Israel for – a global communications platform as a service (CPaaS) leader – says: “Modern customer engagement has to enable rich, interconnected, omnichannel communication across multiple channels for a personalised experience. So, to gain a full 360-degree view of the customer, including their prior engagements and sentiment, a brand need access to consolidated omnichannel data.”

He cites, for example, the retail opportunity to generate targeted digital marketing, linked directly to sales, customer verification, delivery confirmation and engagement, returns, complaints and customer service. However, consolidating and integrating disparate systems and data plus integrating and automating key processes to achieve this can prove challenging.

“Organisations need to choose solutions designed to integrate and deliver business value through improved customer engagement. Their customer experience strategy should be supported by established partners who have the expertise to guide them and the advanced technologies to support their business strategies,” he adds.

, Sales Leader, at , adds: “With ever-improving and sophisticated algorithms, we can now better understand customers, anticipate their needs while providing a human-like conversational interaction. Yet, complex and tailored solutions that cater to unique business requirements demand a vast and composable partner ecosystem. Intelligent customer experience comes from working with technology partners that understand individual industry needs, providing connections across departments and their technologies. Working with the best technology partners that can provide integrated operational and contextual data from across the entire enterprise with AI insights to support a seamless customer experience is therefore critical to success.”

It is therefore vital that any business that wants to have an intelligent customer experience approach must support current and future growth and have feature-rich, composable, core platform capabilities. This allows customisation at a flexible pace through vetted, certified and integrated technology partners.

Sinch, recognised as a leader in the , and in the , is the only SAP-endorsed contact centre solution that works with 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA, 51ˇçÁ÷CRM and 51ˇçÁ÷Service Cloud. With out-of-the-box integration with SAP, Sinch supports omnichannel contact centre communication across channels, including telephony, e-mail, chat, video, SMS and a broad range of messaging apps. It also supports RCS communication – the next generation of SMS that isĚýĚýin the near future. Sinch is also the partner for SMS and WhatsApp. Its own chatbot solution – Sinch Chatlayer – is pre-integrated with Sinch Contact Centre to deliver 24/7 human-like voicebot and chatbot conversations.

51ˇçÁ÷Customer Experience Partner Director EMEA South, says: “As a key partner, Sinch fits perfectly into SAP’s customer experience strategy, the Sinch Contact Pro solution together with its AI-enabled Chatlayer, gives SAP’s Service Cloud customers the opportunity to communicate with their customers on all mobile channels and reduce the number of calls to customer service by approximately 80% – a true customer experience moment.”

Sinch and 51ˇçÁ÷will co-host a webinar for South African organisations, focusing on the future of customer engagement, on 21 September 2023. For more information and to register for this event, clickĚý.

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It employs advanced technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning to create tailored value propositions that are relevant and appealing to individual customer needs and wants.

Hyper-personalisation is the key to delivering exceptional customer service.

It enables businesses to be hyper-intuitive, connecting with customers at the right time and with the right information.

According toĚý, brands that provide a superior customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors

For example, a customer ofĚý, an American pet food retailer, lost both of her pets in the space of one week.

When she contacted Chewy about returning unused pet food, they not only processed a full refund and picked up the food right away, but they also sent the customer a bouquet of flowers a few days later with a personalized note of condolences for her loss.

Another example isĚý, which generates more than 35% of its revenue by curating customer experiences through hyper-personalization; for example, on their Kindle platform, where they recommend new books to customers based on previous purchases on their e-commerce platform.

So, what do Chewy, and Amazon have in common?

They connect the dots and use existing data to create tailored value propositions that are relevant and appealing to the needs and wants of individual customers.

What distinguishes Chewy and Amazon from their competitors is their ability to connect with their customers at the right time.

Hyper-personalisation is all about connecting with customers at the right time and with the right information to either identify an upsell opportunity or improve customer experience, fostering stronger relationships, and developing customers for life.

Many pundits have dubbed data the “new oil” of the 21st century, but only a few businesses are truly leveraging it to create unique customer experiences and new revenue streams.

The collection of customer data by businesses will only grow in the future.

Consider Domino’s Pizza, which allows customers to place orders from up to 12 channels via itsĚýĚý˛šąčąč°ů´Ç˛šłŚłó.

Customers can place orders for pizza via traditional channels such as the phone, as well as newer social media platforms and messaging apps such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Alexa, and Slack.

As a result, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to ingest, consolidate, and use large amounts of customer data from multiple sources in a meaningful way that benefits both the customer and the company.

Building a 360-degree view of the customer by consolidating many data sources and engaging with customers in real-time and in a highly personalized manner is even more challenging.

Customer Data Platform, also known as CDP, is the solution to this challenge.

At its most basic, CDP is a piece of software that unifies and organizes customer data from various sources and touchpoints and uses it to drive 1-to-1 personalized customer engagement.

If data is the new oil that businesses can use to generate new customer value, then CDP is the engine that drives hyper-personalized customer engagements.

According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, hyper-personalization influences $87.5 billion in sales through personalized offers that lead to consumers making purchases they did not intend to make when they began the purchasing process.

Customer-centric and data-driven marketing is the key to gaining a long-term competitive advantage, and hyper-personalization is at the heart of it.

This can be a powerful differentiator against competitors and a sure-fire way to create new revenue streams and increase Customer Lifetime Value.

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This has involved servicing, selling, and consulting to top South African corporates, and Emert has extensive experience selling SaaS products such as CRM, Marketing Automation, CIAM, ECPM, eCommerce solutions, CDPs, and much more.

SAP’s Customer Experience division focuses on rapid transformation and agility across all channels, and makes products that cut costs, time, and complexity so that businesses can focus on innovation and strategy.

On this episode of What’s Next, Emert explains that he encounters many businesses that are lacking in their customer experience approaches because they aren’t prioritising a personalised relationship.

He details how the national lockdown has driven major change within the customer experience industry and how personalisation has been key to this — making it a must for all businesses.

Emert also provides examples of how certain businesses approach customer experience correctly, such as Amazon, which prioritises a personalised customer experience in almost everything it does.

He then explains how SAP’s customer experience solutions help businesses collect important front-office and back-office data in a GDPR and POPIA-compliant way.

This data is then fed into marketing automation systems, enabling you to provide a superior, personalised experience to your customers.

You can access the full interview with Emert here: . You can see all .

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ĚýThe massive increase in online activity due to the coronavirus pandemic has created a customer data gold mine that advertisers and marketers can leverage to better tailor their campaigns. But as of 1 July 2021, accessing, and making use of, this personal information is set to get a little bit more complicated. Why? Because that’s when businesses need to start complying with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Privacy Act (POPIA), which sets out various conditions that must be followed in order to lawfully process personal information.

Global and local privacy legislation like the General Data Protection RegulationĚý(GDPR) and the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) dictates that for brands to use this personal data, there needs to be an element of customer consent. With the power now sitting in the customer’s hands, individuals have greater control over how their data is collected and used. But what does this mean for brands and advertisers who have predominantly been using third party cookie data to identify consumers and track their online activity?

While POPIA does not explicitly regulate the use of cookies, these “online identifiers” do fall under the definition of personal information. As such, how we use cookie data is set to fundamentally change; particularly relating to the collection of third-party data.

Third-party cookiesĚýallow advertisers to track users as they move across the Internet and target advertising at these individuals wherever they go. “With global privacy legislation gaining traction, the likes of Google and other providers are fundamentally changing how they use cookie data to collect customer related information. Subsequently, third party cookie data becomes less relevant and first party data – rich data around an individual’s behaviours; actions and interests demonstrated across online properties – becomes significantly more powerful,” explains Marc Emert, Customer Experience Sale Lead for 51ˇçÁ÷Africa.

Add a dash of customer data management

Privacy legislation like POPIA doesn’t prevent you from collecting customer data, continues Emert. But it does mean that any data collection must be done in a GDPR/POPIA aligned manner. “Going forward, while you’re collecting this rich, contextual data that can be used for marketing engagements and targeted advertising, you need to also make sure that you’re collecting the consent directly from the customer. If a marketer or brand is sending something to a consumer, they’re sending it because that person has opted in to receive it.”

SAP’s Customer Data Cloud (CDC) solution makes the process of gaining this consent easier, he adds. “With CDC, marketers and brands can gather first party data from customers across various digital channels and make sure that they are also securing consent throughout the engagement process. Customer provided consent is then integrated into an existing automated marketing solution, which delivers one-to-one personalisation at scale and is based on trust.”

CDC also makes progressive profiling possible, adds Emert. As a customer engages with a brand, they’re being asked to provide different pockets of information about themselves, he says. So, while I’m selling a mother a certain type of baby formula for her new-born, I’m gaining insights that allow me to market other products to this mom as her baby grows up.Ěý “Basically, you’re progressively collating more and more first party data that can be used to engage with customers broadly and through different stages of their lives.” And the results speak for themselves.

SAP’s CDC has helped a global academic and educational publisher manage the data of over 4.5 million users and achieve 100% GDPR compliance in 40 countries. And in just four months, a German supermarket chain got up and running on the 51ˇçÁ÷CDC system, centralising omnichannel customer data to GDPR standards and boosting membership to their loyalty programme by 25%.

“Similarly, for three years the Technology Centre of Excellence team in Wunderman Thompson South Africa has been using SAP’s CDC solution to do just that”, notes Niel Mouton, MD of Wunderman Thompson Technology SA. “Home to over 4,000 technology specialists across the globe with 54 technology centres in 33 countries, we support forward thinking businesses to design, build, run and operate digital programmes wherever they are.”

“With the onus in a cookieless world now falling on brands to collect and build their own first party data, Wunderman Thompson has used SAPS’s CDC solution across 30 implementations for brands like Nestle Purina, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Colgate and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). ĚýOur teams used 51ˇçÁ÷CDC to create customised solutions for their clients, allowing these businesses to collect first party data, while protecting privacy and complying with personal information legislation,” he continues.

According to Mouton, conversations around privacy, data collection and POPIA/GDPR centre around trust, which is fitting because the Wunderman Thompson partnership with 51ˇçÁ÷is also about trust. “With SAP, we can trust the quality and standard of the product. There are no teething issues on a product as mature as this. All we have to do is understand the client’s business need and adapt the 51ˇçÁ÷product to their requirements.”

While Mouton admits that it would be possible to be compliant without a solution like CDC, it’s near impossible for enterprise businesses like banks or pharmaceutical companies to manage the scale of personal data they’re dealing with, while keeping their customers and their business safe, without an automated offering.

Customer experience has become a major market differentiator. The following white paper highlights why modern businesses need to understand the importance of customer identity. to find out more.

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Marc Emert, Solutions Specialist for 51ˇçÁ÷Africa Customer Experience, says, “Despite organisations’ best intentions, some customer experience projects simply don’t deliver on their promise and fail to drive business success. One of the biggest CX challenges posed by the lockdowns across the globe is how brands need to reinvent their customer engagement models, in the age of COVID-19.

“Through the survey, we hope to unpack how CX covers commerce, marketing, revenue, sales and service – and offer insights and flexibility around that. We will also highlight that by getting brands closer to their customers and delivering a great experience, CX can help cut costs, time and complexity, allowing organisations to focus on innovation and strategy as they venture into 2021 and beyond.”

The survey also seeks to uncover whether organisations have clearly defined customer journey systems designed to deliver effective, memorable CX, how they rate their ability to deliver CX as well as who is in charge of CX within the organisation.

We hope you’ll be able set aside a few minutes of your time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win a lucky draw prize, a Takealot voucher valued at R5 000. The detailed results of the survey, and the prize winner, will be published on ITWeb.

To play your role in compiling this customer experience trends report, click on the link below:

This article first appeared on .

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Any good organisation’s relationship with its customers is built over time, nourished by experiences along many online and physical touch-points in their journey, grounded in expectations, and confirmed through repeated interactions.

With this in mind, it becomes obvious that the coronavirus pandemic is not just any crisis, since the ‘locked down’ nature of the response to COVID-19 has meant that organisations have had to adapt to a digital or remote way of doing business, which has had a significant impact on the customer experience (CX).

According to Marc Emert, a solutions specialist at 51ˇçÁ÷Customer Experience, the COVID-19 pandemic has notably impacted on CX from two perspectives. The first of these is that organisations have had to adapt to the new world rapidly, while still providing high levels of service. For example, he says, a company that has suddenly shifted to online sales only still needs to ensure it can deliver products to the customer within a reasonable timeframe.

“Secondly, while this has created some new opportunities for the suppliers, such as opening up a new sales channel and driving rapid digital transformation, it is also worth noting that the customers are less patient than before and are demanding better service, but not always getting it,” he says.

“One of the keys to success in such a scenario is communications – stay in touch with the customer so they are aware of what you are doing, and if you do make a commitment to them, then you simply must meet it. In other words, if you say the delivery will occur within 24 hours, ensure it is done within 24 hours.”

Remember that the patience levels of most people are much lower than usual. Between having to suddenly work from home, while also undertaking homeschooling of children along with dealing with a wide range of new regulations, this should come as no surprise. The crisis is leading to a greater sense of frustration all around, and this can easily boil over in a service provider’s direction if they fail to meet their obligations. Moreover, adds Emert, frustrated customers are much more likely to move to a new service provider despite the additional effort this requires.

“People make time to undertake such a process if they feel sufficiently aggrieved, and of course most people in lockdown have found themselves with plenty of time on their hands anyway.”

Looking to the future, he suggests the impact of the pandemic will be seen in changing business models, such as a growing number of people shopping for groceries online, rather than at the store. He suggests that those businesses that have already focused on digitally transforming and can thus deliver a strong CX across multiple channels will be the ones to succeed in the longer term – those whose entire CX is based on in-store engagement with the client will undoubtedly struggle in the post-coronavirus world.

“Remember that personal service doesn’t only mean face-to-face contact – digital channels can also offer personal touches. For example, even if a client calls a contact centre, the agent should know who is calling and be able to call them by their name; it is these kinds of personal touches that go a long way towards improving CX.”

Ultimately, he continues, businesses need to be where the customers are. At present, they are at home and are eager to interact on a 24/7/365 basis – which means the business needs to be able to meet these demands.

“It is here that data becomes the critical element. From transactional and structured data, through to the various forms of unstructured data, like social media, and on to experience data – what the customer has been through in the past with the organisation – all of this must be analysed and understood, as it informs your interactions with customers. Thus, the more you can know about them, the better the CX you can provide,” he concludes.

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