The importance of customer engagement in a digital-first environment

The pandemic forced many businesses to innovate quickly, placing a heavy burden on digital channels as consumer behavior shifted.

The following chart by McKinsey uses data from late April 2020 to demonstrate how US consumers’ are accelerating the adoption of digital channels, though this trend is global.

Source: McKinsey

The shift to digital adoption spans all categories of consumer goods and services, and all areas of business, as many employees have shifted to remote working and are using digital platforms to do nearly everything – including day-to-day communications, event management, teaching and training, and servicing customers. 

A strong digital backbone has quickly become essential for corporate survival, with the leaders leveraging machine learning to drive the new digital experience.

Content created in partnership with Pega.

Personalized customer engagement

Personalized customer engagement has been thrust to the forefront of digital transformation initiatives out of necessity. But customers have come to expect a high level of personalization and consistency across all touchpoints.

This is particularly true in the digital realm, where behemoths like Google and Amazon have set the bar extremely high when it comes to delivering top notch customer service.

Pega understands the importance of one-to-one customer engagement. Their platform integrates customer analytics and decision-making in real time, using AI to evaluate the context of each customer interaction as it’s happening – then recommending the next best action for that customer, at that moment.

Pega is hosting an online summit to discuss how some of their partners, including Vodafone, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the world are embracing the new digital experience.

Writes Pega, “At this interactive summit, you’ll learn how enterprises are using real-time technologies to centralize their analytics and make personalized, one-to-one decisions for every customer, at every touchpoint. You’ll see how organizations are unifying data, analytics, and channels into a single connected customer experience – leading to hundreds of millions in new customer value, every year.”

Best practices for digital customer engagement

As noted above, consumers have high expectations from companies who engage with them over digital channels. These expectations are the driving force behind best practices for digital customer experience.

Here are a few examples of best practices that should be implemented when connecting with customers online:

• Enable real-time customer empathy (at scale): Speed and precision driven by AI is a top CX trend for 2020, according to a report by Gartner. Writes Gartner, “AI technologies will enhance text, sentiment, voice, interaction, IoT and even traditional survey analysis. Pega’s work with Vodafone focuses on real-time empathy. Their session, The Empathy Evolution at Vodafone, explores how AI is making real-time empathy possible. Per Pega, the session will, “explore how the team at Vodafone is using real-time decisions to calculate propensities, arbitrate messages and offers, and constantly recalculate next best actions for each individual and moment.”

• Hyper-personalize across channels: Omnichannel customer engagement is a top CX trend for 2020, according to the Gartner report. Pega’s Summit includes a fireside chat featuring clients and partners who will discuss their own real-world approaches to implementing personalization across channels (and at a scale) with the help of AI. Per Pega, the fireside chat will address, “real-world approaches of how to engage with your customers and use AI empathetically – now and for whatever the future may hold.”

• Data centralization that enables team collaboration: Machines can only enable better customer experiences in conjunction with humans. That’s why one of the most important best practices for customer engagement requires empowering your employees with the right tools so that they’re in control.

Pega’s Summit addresses this best practice in a session titled, Designing a Real-Time, One-to-One Experience with Pega Customer Decision Hub.

Writes Pega, “In this session, we’ll showcase how real-world teams use Pega Customer Decision Hub™ to centralize their analytics, activate contextual data, and make billions of real-time decisions each day.” 

The demonstration will feature recently released capabilities such as Pega’s Value Finder, where the AI identifies and profiles dis-engaged customers, then recommends a strategy to build new offers and messages that are more relevant for their specific needs.

Spotlight talks

Inspiration comes in many forms. That’s the impetus behind Pega’s Spotlight Talks with thought leaders at Accenture, Ernst & Young, Infosys, and Capgemini—companies that help clients engage their own customer base in real-time, through the use of Pega’s Customer Decision Hub Platform.

The talks address each organization is implementing technology to meet a variety of customer engagement and customer experience challenges across the digital landscape.

These include:

• Intelligent personalization—How it works in the real world.
• Real-time decision making—What if you could apply what you’ve learned to your decision-making process in real-time?
• Achieving top line growth with hyper-personalization—How one-to-one personalization and channel optimization combine to drive growth.
• Adapting quickly to rapid change—Using artificial intelligence to adapt quickly to a rapidly-changing, post-COVID-19 world.

The virtual summit, Pega Discover: One-to-one Customer Engagement Online Summit, is free and takes place on October 7th, 2020. Visit here for more details about the event, or to register.