Home › Posts tagged journeys

Tag: journeys

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Journey Beyond, a part of Hornblower Group, is Australia’s leading experiential tourism group. Headquartered in Adelaide, it operates 13 brands and experiences spanning the country. The company’s overall strategy is to “have a customer experience that’s second-to-none — from the moment they first engage with the company to plan their experience, to when they return home at the end of their travels — regardless of what Journey Beyond adventure you are booking.”

However, the company’s disparate technology systems were proving to be a hinderance in its commitment to consistently deliver unmatched services and experiences to customers. As its business diversified, including its own acquisition by Hornblower Group in early 2022, Journey Beyond inherited a range of disparate technology systems, including six different phone systems and an outdated contact center that was only servicing Journey Beyond’s rail journeys. The remaining brands in the company’s portfolio were using basic phone functionality for customer enquiries and reservations.

Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond

istock

“The different communication solutions were unable to provide an integrated 360-degree customer view, which made it difficult to ensure a consistent, unrivalled customer experience across all 13 tourism ventures, and any other brands Journey Beyond may add to its portfolio in the future. The absence of advanced contact center features and analytics further prevented us from driving exceptional customer experience. Besides, we couldn’t enable work-from-anywhere, on any device capability, for employees,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond.  

These challenges forced the company to transition to a modern cloud-based communication platform.

Multiple communication solutions cause multiple challenges

Because Beyond Journey operates in the experiential tourism market, providing a personalized, seamless customer experience is essential — something its previous communications systems lacked, Mazumdar says.

“For instance, our train journeys get sold out a year prior to their launch. Therefore, when we launch a new season, there is a huge volume of calls from our customers and agents. The existing system lacked callback mechanism, leading to callers waiting in queue for as long as 40 minutes, which adversely impacted their experience,” she says, adding that there was also no way to prioritize certain calls over others.

The existing system also lacked analytical capability to provide any customer insights and it wasn’t integrated with Beyond Journey’s CRM. As a result, representatives interacting with a customer didn’t know whether the customer had traveled with the company before. “The communication between us and the customer was transactional instead of being personalized,” Mazumdar says.

Since the existing systems were very old, they couldn’t be managed remotely. In case of an outage, the company had to send a local person to rectify the on-site phone system, which could take a couple of hours. During this time, customers were unable to call Journey Beyond.

“The IVR was also not standardized across the company. As the IVRs were recorded in voices of employees from different business units, a caller had no idea they were part of the same business,” says Mazumdar.

Incoming calls to Beyond Journey’s toll-free numbers were also adding to the operational cost. “We paid per-minute on the calls received to our toll-free numbers. The high call volumes meant huge costs for us. Even if the call was hanging in the queue, it was costing us every minute,” she says.

Implementing a consolidated communications platform

To overcome the bottlenecks and drive customer engagement to the next level, Journey Beyond launched a contact center transformation, the first step of which was to establish a common unified communications (UC) platform across the business and integrate it with a new contact center (CC) solution. After evaluating several UC and CC solutions, Journey Beyond chose RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms — RingCentral MVP and Contact Center.

“We started evaluating multiple vendors in the first quarter of 2021. The software evaluation process took three to five months after which the implementation started in August 2021. We went live in October 2021,” Mazumdar says. The entire SaaS solution was hosted on AWS.

The company took this opportunity to shift to soft phones and headsets by getting rid of all physical phones. “We purchased good quality noise-cancelling headsets, which was the only hardware we invested in significantly,” says Mazumdar. “Although we had premium support from RingCentral, we decided to learn everything about the solution and take full control over it. So, while the integration and prebuild was completely done by RingCentral, over time we trained multiple people in the team on the solution. In hindsight, this was the best thing we did,” says Mazumdar, who brought in two dedicated IT resources with phone system background for the new solution.

“Different business units within the company work differently. For instance, the peak hours for one business could be different from those of another business, which impacts how you set up the call flows. It’s not one basic standard rule that could be set up for all businesses across the company. With in-house understanding of the solution, we had full control over the solution and were able to make changes, refinements, and complex prioritization rules to it ourselves without depending on the solution provider,” she says.

Cloud-based solution delivers customer visibility and value

Connecting multiple businesses with a common communications platform to deliver consistent customer service across the group has yielded compelling business benefits to Journey Beyond.

A key advantage of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer service operation’s accessibility for the entire Journey Beyond team.

“At a national integrated level, we now have subject matter experts in each of our experiences available to deliver unrivalled customer experience, with economies of scale. So, if one team is under duress in terms of call volumes, the call can be overflowed and picked up quickly by a consultant with secondary expertise in that brand,” says Mazumdar.

Journey Beyond is supporting its customer experience drive by integrating the CC solution with its CRM to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and build towards a 360-degree view of the customer.

“We are building up our ‘Know You Customer’ strategy, which starts with our customer service agents knowing who you are when you call any of our Journey Beyond brands,” says Mazumdar. “Callers who have travelled with us before, have their phone number in our CRM. When they call, their records pop up. The executive can look at the customer’s history with the company and the communication between them becomes a lot more personalized. The integrated view of the customer also helps to cross sell. For instance, if a person is booking a train journey from Adelaide but our executive knows that he is coming from Sydney, he can sell him another trip in Sydney.”

The other major advantage is the scalability and remote capabilities of the cloud-based platform. The solution allows Journey Beyond to run operations 24×7 with centralized administration and distributed users, working from anywhere, on any device. This has also given Journey Beyond the opportunity to recruit for talent in other locations outside the market around its Adelaide office.

Journey Beyond has also rolled out the solution’s workforce management functionality to better align agent availability with customer demand. The advanced feedback capabilities allow Journey Beyond to measure customer net promoter scores (NPS) right down to the consultant level. That NPS functionality will then be integrated into Salesforce, enhancing the 360-degree view of the customer experience.

The solution’s quality management functionality is providing Journey Beyond with a level of automation to ensure the contact basics are being completed, allowing leaders to focus on scoring the more complex or intangible components of customer engagements — delivering a recording of both the call and what is happening on screen at the same time. “Quality analytics completes the picture in terms of everything we need to see from a skills gap perspective,” says Mazumdar. Journey Beyond has deployed the UC solution to all businesses nationally. The CC solution has been rolled out at the company’ rail division and Rottnest Express while onboarding for the other businesses is in progress.

Unified Communications

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Organizations have seen tremendous digital transformation for several years now, but especially in the past year, we have seen many accelerate that digital journey. From navigating the new world of remote-first work to deploying modern apps in record time while strengthening cybersecurity, cloud adoption has made businesses become more agile and resilient.

Multi-cloud is no longer just a buzzword – it’s here to stay and growing at a rapid pace. More enterprises are delivering code across private and public clouds and increasingly using Kubernetes to scale apps. In fact, IDC predicts that in 2022, 90 percent of enterprises around the world will rely on a mix of multi-cloud and legacy platforms, and the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2022 report found that nearly half of the organizations surveyed are utilizing Kubernetes in multiple public clouds. 

However, managing apps and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment comes with added complexity – teams have to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments. By implementing platform teams, organizations can drive modernization and accelerate their multi-cloud journey while balancing moving fast and managing risk.

How Platform Teams Can Support Modern Application Platforms

To help with multi-cloud complexity and streamline software delivery, organizations need an application platform. For that, they need platform engineering teams. Platform teams provide consistent, end-to-end management and enable business leaders, security personnel, and other members of the organization to communicate business needs and meet business challenges. A team of experts focused on running your platform as a product is essential for delivering world-class developer experiences and delivering applications to production quickly and securely.

Platform teams are integral to a DevSecOps practice by not only building and running the platform developers use to create new applications that drive business revenue, but also acting as a communication link between your dev team, IT operations team, and security team. By having a team of experts devoted to running your platform as a product, organizations can improve the developer experience and get applications to production quickly and securely. Tools such as VMware’s Tanzu portfolio can elevate app development and the DevSecOps experience for platform teams, while VMware’s Cloud Management solutions can enable infrastructure teams to embrace infrastructure as code and empower lines of business to optimize resources across clouds.

How to Cultivate a Successful Platform Team

When done well, platform teams provide exponential value for software development organizations. By using a modern application platform team, developers and stakeholders can experiment and solve business-critical problems faster, in more innovative ways, without sacrificing reliability. This, in turn, creates immediate value for your business.

If you want to hire the best people for your platform team, make sure they have the right combination of business, technical, and people skills. To be successful, team members must possess a data-driven mindset, a willingness to learn, and an ability to adjust to change. Platform teams that are confident and capable of adapting to change are better equipped to succeed as more application teams migrate to their platform.

Above all, platform teams should have excellent communication skills. Fostering a culture of open communication is necessary to ensure that developers, IT ops, and business units such as human resources, marketing, and finance understand the platform and can help to champion it. Platform teams must demonstrate how their platform adds value to stakeholders in order to justify platform changes, funding, and staffing

At the end of the day, business capabilities and outcomes are not solely tied to technology or tools used. It is important for employees in an organization to focus as much as possible on creating value for the organization. As a result, attention needs to be paid to the individuals supporting this toolset. The ultimate application platform is supported by platform teams that help elevate the developer experience and makes app deployments frictionless.

To learn more, visit us here.

IT Leadership, Multi Cloud

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Consumers now expect personalised customer service experiences, whereby a website or app retains personal details in order to deliver tailored messaging, offers, and relevant products. Meeting these digitally-driven demands is crucial if brands want to keep pace and maintain their competitive edge.

Businesses, after all, are built on the success of their customer service, yet ensuring a truly personalised customer journey is no easy feat in the post-pandemic age. With a new generation of customers looking to operate on emerging channels – such as social media platforms and digital messaging services – businesses across every industry need to utilise their customer data to modernise the contact centre experience, both for the customer and the agents who manage customer questions or concerns.

Organisations which can’t meet these expectations risk losing or alienating customers.

While businesses have sped up digital transformation journeys as a result of the pandemic, many are still forced to contend with legacy technology and processes, frustrating data silos within their organisation, and data protection concerns, which can make providing a personalised customer experience frustrating and costly.

I: The customer service revolution

Historically, customers have expected basics like quality service and fair pricing, but modern customers have much higher expectations that include personalised interactions and connected experiences across digital channels.

The importance of offering such an experience can’t be downplayed in today’s digital-first business landscape. Microsoft data shows[1] that a positive customer experience can lead to a 10% to 15% boost in sales conversion rates. However, consumers not only want a positive experience, 80% want it personalised.

This means personalisation is no longer optional. It’s expected that consumers will continue to want personalised experiences for the long haul. Not only does make them feel more valued, but it, in turn, inspires greater brand loyalty.

 “Hyper-personalisation”

Customer expectations don’t just stop at personalisation, as many consumers increasingly reliant on digital interactions are now demanding “hyper-personalisation”.

Traditional personalisation focuses on personal and transactional information such as name, organisation, and purchase history; for example, including the first name of a customer in the subject line of an email. Hyper-personalisation, on the other hand, is more complex and takes into consideration behavioural and real-time data such as browsing habits, in-app actions, and engagement data. Making use of this data can help organisations engage in more contextualised communication with customers, and help tailor products, services and experiences according to their wants and needs.

Netflix’s personalised recommendations engine, for example, draws data from multiple real-time sources. The company tracks: how the users interact with a show or movie; how long they watch it; whether they rewind, fast forward or stop watching and, if so, at what point.

There are numerous benefits to hyper-personalisation, both for the consumer and the organisation offering it. For the former, it saves time and eliminates the problem of feeling overwhelmed with options. For businesses, delivering hyper-personalised experiences to the customer allows them to tailor their marketing efforts at the individual level, which ultimately can boost revenue.

A new generation of customer

The growing demand for personalised customer experiences is being driven by a new generation of customers. Millennials – who make up almost a fifth of the population – are the first generation to have spent their entire adult lives with access to technology, such as smartphones and the internet. They have witnessed the positive effects these technologies can have on people’s lives, which has resulted in the most tech-savvy generation that values accessibility and convenience.

This reliance on digital services has further escalated as a result of the pandemic, which has seen new channels emerge for customer services. Digital messaging, for example, has grown faster than any other channel within the last year and is transforming how customers interact with brands. Digital natives flocked to messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter Direct Messages to engage with businesses, as well as chatbots.

The reason lies in the convenience of messaging. Connecting with businesses through messaging doesn’t interrupt people’s schedules, and enables customers to get their issues resolved while doing other things, be it while in a work meeting or while working from home. Ultimately, messaging provides a faster, more efficient customer experience.

Importance of evolving

The importance of evolving customer experience has never been more important. Not only are we facing a new generation of customers with greater digital demands, but this same generation also has more choices than ever before as a result of an ever-widening choice of goods and services.

As a result, customers have become more demanding and expecting more, empowered by social networks and digital devices that are increasingly dictating how they engage, which can make it harder for businesses to keep up. They expect organisations to connect with them wherever they are, easily and securely, with an understanding of their individual needs.

Cloud and AI enable agility

Customer service tools have evolved greatly over the past few years as a result of big data, the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. They have become vital components in enabling a next-generation customer experience as organisations seek to make holistic changes quickly, with limited to no downtime, and scale resources to deal with the unexpected.

For example, AI can help organisations use data to drive business insights quickly, make decisions faster, and become more agile. Using AI will also help optimise processes and streamline operations.

Since the pandemic, 73% of customers expect to continue to incorporate different brands they’ve tried into their routinesIncreasing retention rates by as little as 5% could increase sales by over 25%.A positive customer experience can lead to a 10% to 15% boost in sales conversion rates, but consumers not only want a positive experience, 80% want it personalised.

II. Challenges faced in delivering hyper-personalised experiences

Technical debt

In many industries, businesses have significantly outgrown their IT environment. Some, for example, remain steadfastly off the cloud, making it difficult to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities. Leading experts discussed these challenges at a recent CIO roundtable hosted by Microsoft.

“Legacy businesses, trying to do this stuff is sometimes a different challenge to ones who are born in the cloud,” said Rob Smithson, who is head of business applications for Microsoft UK, said at the event.

For some organisations, the issue of technical debt came to light during the pandemic. As consumers rapidly shifted to digital services, this showed up structural weaknesses that negatively impacted the customer experience. For others, it revealed disorganised data architecture that led to incomplete or inaccessible analytics. Such data is vital for informing business strategy and enabling personalised experiences.

In a bid to overcome this debt, new issues can arise too. Organisations can find themselves rushing to develop and add new features, often making temporary trade-offs along the way, which can result in yet more technical debt that puts a strain on resources.

That’s why it’s critical that an organisation’s technology stack is built with a unified approach rather than simply reacting to customer expectations with one-off, siloed fixes. Technical debt isn’t inherently bad, but if it’s not properly managed, it can weigh heavily on an entire business – not just the IT department.

The back-end technology shapes the overall customer experience, which is why technical debt can get in the way of a seamless customer experience.

Data silos

Personalisation requires vast amounts of good data. But sometimes a company strands data in a silo, an isolated storage place inaccessible to the rest of the organisation. Similarly, data silos can occur when data is sectioned or compartmentalised in such a way that it is kept separate from other data assets, making it difficult to leverage for decision making and to create a complete picture of the customer journey.

These silos often arise from organisational silos – when solutions are designed in isolation and not with a common, coordinated goal. While it might seem logical for an IT team to use different systems and processes than the customer service team, and for the product team to use another set of tools altogether, this fragmented approach can create challenges when the company tries to deliver a personalised customer experience. 

Customers, after all, see a business as a singular entity and expect a consistent experience, no matter which department they are dealing with.

“I think we’ve learnt a lot during the pandemic, such as how important it is that our systems work more collaboratively with each other,” said a representative from the travel industry at the Microsoft CIO roundtable. “We’ve now got a really different kind of strategy about how we integrate our systems, and it’s much more cohesive.”

“It’s all about consolidation and getting a single view of the customer, whether they come in physically or whether they come in via the website,” said another attendee at the roundtable. “So it’s really a case of trying to make sure we can get as  much information to them as possible. We’re trying to make sure our systems talk to each other, and that seems to be the biggest challenge at the moment.”

Distributed workforce

Consumer habits aren’t the only thing that has changed due to the pandemic. The way most organisations function has too, with employees now splitting their time between the home and the office as a result of the widespread shift to remote working. Microsoft data shows that in 2022, hybrid work has increased seven points year-over-year (to 38%)[2], and 53% of people are likely to consider transitioning to a hybrid working model in the year ahead.

Not only has it become clear that hybrid working is here to stay, but for many organisations, it’s hit home that many pre-pandemic systems and strategies are simply no longer viable in the long term. For example, if information is not easily shared within a business, then it is difficult to harness a holistic and up-to-date view of customer interactions. That makes difficult to know precisely where each customer is in their engagement journey.

Other difficulties have also emerged as a result of having a distributed workforce. Some see a lack of communication as a big challenge to delivering effective customer service from home, while others have seen a lack of training as an issue in getting to grips with new technologies and systems.

Cost

Another hurdle for businesses looking to deliver personalised customer experiences is cost. Organisations suffering from technical debt might believe a “rip and replace” strategy is the only option, when in fact this would be unnecessary – not to mention costly and disruptive. Rather, it’s important that businesses get the balance right. The advent of AI means there are tools that will work with existing systems, and effectively collecting and making use of customer data doesn’t necessarily require brand-new systems.

Businesses instead need to think about getting the balance between what things can be automated and how they can leverage the power of AI and automation to help drive customer service.

It’s also important to remember that taking these steps can potentially increase revenue. Personalisation can deliver increased brand loyalty, but it has also been shown to drive impulse purchases and lead to fewer returns.

“We try and think top down ‘what’s the key data and how do we enable that data from an enterprise perspective, rather than on a case by case basis?’ said a representative from the IT industry.

III. Connecting lines of business while remaining secure

Another obstacle businesses face is balancing personalisation with data privacy. Meta’s recent data privacy lawsuit[3], in which the company was forced to pay $90M for its use of proprietary plug-ins to track users’ internet browsing on third-party sites, shows how serious the implications can be.

The new generation of consumers are more tech-savvy than ever before, which also means they value data privacy and transparency with utmost importance. A recent study has shown that 86% of consumers “care about data privacy” and want more control, and 79% of consumers are willing to invest time or money to better protect their privacy[4].

Organisations also have to ensure they are compliant with various data privacy regulations. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires businesses to have the customer’s consent before they can capture, store or process any of their personal data. This means organisations must be prepared to answer questions about how, why, and when your it collects data from customers.

While this helps to meet the needs of privacy-conscious consumers, the challenge with improved privacy measures is that data is at the core of any great personalised experience. Unless you know something about your customer, you cannot truly personalise an experience in any channel – on your website, in your mobile app, through your email campaigns, or in your advertising.

“Our interpretation of data security rules are quite severe,” said one representative from the IT sector. “So therefore with some solutions, if data is not encrypted, we can’t use it. How do you how do you get to this heightened level of data security both with the data at rest and in transit? It’s proving a bit of a blockage for some of our work.”

“We started our transformation programme just before the pandemic,” said another representative from the travel industry. “We’re looking at chatbots, and we’re looking at speech analytics. The slowest part to mobilise has been our data stream because of some very explicit regulation. My challenge has not been to embrace the tools, it has been understanding the data as a result.”

While personalisation and privacy may seem hopelessly at odds, new technologies have made it possible for businesses to achieve both and thrive

IV. How to create the contact centre of the future

For most organisations, meeting customer expectations for hyper-personalised, secure interactions means improving the contact centre experience, both for customers and the agents who manage customer questions or concerns. Enhancing the customer experience requires advanced AI, automation, and security in the cloud while continuing to draw value from existing investments.

AI is fundamental to the success of the contact centre, can deliver personalised experiences, and can help organisations overcome many other challenges. It enables brands to connect with customers securely on voice and digital channels, reduce fraud, coach live agents, and automate the post-call wrap-up.

For those interactions that require a more sensitive or human approach, AI can serve to complement and augment human agents.

The cloud, too, is a vital component for a successful contact centre strategy as organisations need the ability to make holistic changes quickly, with limited to no downtime, and scale resources to respond to the unexpected.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help your organisation digitally transform your customer service by enabling omnichannel, personalised and seamless experiences.
Our platform enables you to transform all aspects of your customer service, from assisted and self-service channels, augmented with conversational virtual assistants, to a single agent desktop providing a single view of your customer that empowers your agents to deliver first time resolution.

Collaboration is also key in today’s modern hybrid working environment.  That’s why with Microsoft Teams, we’re empowering your service agents to deliver faster resolutions by getting to the right person within your organisation faster.

Click here for more information about how Microsoft can help your business deliver the contact centre of the future.

Download our latest e-guide: Five Keys to Future-Proofing Your Customer Service Success and discover insights on how your company can ensure the best possible customer service experience in an ever-evolving business landscape.

[1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2022/05/04/how-to-foster-customer-loyalty-through-personalized-experiences/

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-million-settle-privacy-lawsuit-over-user-tracking-2022-02-15/

[4] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/trust-center/docs/cisco-cybersecurity-series-2021-cps.pdf

Microsoft, Microsoft 365