Takeaways from our ‘Delivering customer experience at scale leveraging digital innovation’ webinar

West Monroe recently hosted a webinar with some of the top customer experience leaders in the software industry—Salesforce, Anthology, Palo Alto, Celonis, and Momentive joined us—to discuss how their companies leverage digital innovation to deliver customer experience at scale. 

Their discussion surfaced five key insights for companies looking to do the same:

1. Digital engagement programs should solve a specific problem 

Palo Alto has defined and established their digital-first program because they want to ensure customers engage with the company through their digital channels as the primary method before contacting an agent or CSM. 

The guiding principles that Palo Alto has leveraged to build their program include:  

• Establishing clear goals and understanding what you’re trying to solve for 
• Supporting the ongoing process of moving to a more digital engagement model, beginning with a focus on the support ecosystem 
• Making customer engagement easy by incorporating micro-learning opportunities into workflows so customers can better understand how to serve themselves 

2. Data doubt cripples businesses 

Anthology knows that until data doubt is removed and “signal-to-noise” ratio of incoming data is improved, teams won’t be able to get creative with how they analyze data and solve problems. That’s why Anthology has identified a few ways to overcome data doubt: 

• Establishing data definitions to better understand its parameters 
• Designing automated processes to drive control of input into the system 
• Addressing the ongoing battle of data quality by establishing a data quality team 
• Creating a data governance council represented by all key stakeholders  

3. Digital innovation isn’t just for digital channels

Momentive.ai started with a digital-only customer engagement model that served smaller companies and delivered on less complex use cases. As Momentive.ai moves upmarket to serve enterprise customers with more highly customized and specific approaches, their team looks to find ways to enhance their in-person dialogues between CSMs and clients by leveraging data on interactions that those customers and other customers like them have had before. 

This strategy allows the digitally supported "Super CSM" to drive the same value for their customers while expanding the channels through which they meet them. 

4. Customer segmentation is foundational to building a digital experience 

Celonis’ segmentation model enables their team to focus on developing a comprehensive model which lays out the customer journey and drives adoption, retention, and expansion. For each customer segment, there are a range of engagement models that need to be understood regarding how to engage with customers, which channels to use, and how to serve customers specifically, in order to create a thoughtful digital experience for customers.  

5. Enabling your people is critical 

Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova noted that as companies digitize their businesses, it’s critical that the training and enablement—as well as the metrics used to measure the team—are aligned to deliver customer value. CSMs not only need to have ready access to customer data and the proper training on how to leverage it; they also need the structural support from the organization to use metrics that measure their team in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the experience of the customer for efficiency. 

Implementing these kinds of people process changes is critical to empowering agents and CSMs to innovate on how they serve their customers and to understand more fully the role that they play in the customer journey. 

Digital innovation programs ultimately represent a full-scale journey for companies looking to transform how they interact with their customers at scale. These programs need to take into account the customer—and employee—experience as data and insights are leveraged to rebuild how companies interact with their customers.