The Customer Experience Industry Wants You To Feel Stupid

I recently came across the term “customer engagement hub,” and was intrigued to learn more. According to Gartner, “The customer engagement hub (CEH) is an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together to optimally engage the customer. A CEH allows personalized, contextual customer engagement, whether through a human, artificial agent, or sensors, across all interaction channels. It reaches and connects all departments, allowing, for example, the synchronization of marketing, sales and customer service processes.”

Wait. This is what contact centers have been doing for years, integration of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data across multiple systems into a centralized place for information sharing and analytics. The “CEH” is simply a new name for the same old thing. Granted, the CEH may be broadened in scope with additional enterprise systems and channels to collect from, but it’s still just consolidated data and system integrations

A Gartner report goes on to say, “Only 5 percent of organizations will have the technologies and processes in place to provide a consistent customer experience across departments and channels. The need to support the anytime-anywhere customer and heightened business awareness is making this a top issue among customer service and IT leaders.”

The reason businesses are unprepared to provide multi-channel customer experience is because traditionally, contact centers have been disconnected from the rest of the organization. What’s more, many organizations are operating multiple, disparate internal contact centers with separate CRM tools and ad-hoc technologies with little or no integration. I can tell you from more than 25 years of contact center experience that interaction between marketing, sales, e-commerce and contact centers seldom happens.

The result is the creation of silos that aren’t able to gather insight across all channels and enterprise systems like CRM. This makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to deliver the seamless, meaningful experience customers have come to expect. In fact, Gartner research predicts that by 2020, customer engagement silos will be one of the top three leading causes of customer dissatisfaction for businesses across all industries. The disconnected nature of silos creates artificial barriers in a customer’s journey, forcing them to change context, re-enter data, go back in the process, create a work-around, or completely start their journey all over again.

Amid the gloom and doom, however, there is hope. At its core, the Customer Engagement Hub is simply a new way to describe enterprise database consolidation and integration in order to provide a business world view. CH Consulting Group has been helping clients do this for years. Contact centers have always had to pull data from different, disparate systems like CRM, QA, back office, accounting, etc., and then make sense of it to help organizations make informed business decisions. In other words, we work to bridge the gaps between the silos of customer engagement in order to provide seamless omni-channel customer experience.

I fear the customer experience industry is doing what the marketing industry has tried to do over time: make you think a process is so complicated that you can’t possibly understand it, and therefore you have to invest thousands of dollars in services, tools and advice that provide no tangible ROI. I know that when it comes to customer experience, businesses want clarity not new jargon and overly-complicated systems. Contact me today to learn about the transparent, proven CX solutions we have provided to clients for years.

Read more:

• Two Ways to Leverage BI for Improved Cx
• CH Consulting Group Case Study: Operation Optimization