That you need to provide a great customer experience is a given. But, are you providing it to your customers and prospects? Maybe you do. Maybe you believe you do. You may have a great product serviced by a great customer service team. You may have automated your systems. You may have also gone digital with social and mobility capability. All this is a mouthful, but let’s say you have done most of this or more.

Let’s switch over and ask your customers or prospects. For all you know, they may actually be switching over to your competitors without telling you. The problem? Despite all your automated systems and motivated people, your customers are not getting the experience they want. It’s not about serving an end-to-end transaction efficiently any more.

Let’s take examples.

For some reason, say, a customer fails to complete a payment, posts something on those lines on social media and records a complaint. However, your collections team, unaware of the happenings at the other nook in your organization, keeps sending reminders and nudges to the same customer. The outgoing communication is plain and simple, ignorant of the customer’s specific issue at the time. Leave alone two different parts of the organisation, the complaint management system in itself is often found terribly ill-equipped to handle the context of a customer.

Let’s say, in another case, a prospect has a conversation with one of your sales teams and conveys an interest in one specific line of products. Chances are, this prospect still continues to get marketing push messages that are generic and broadly targeted. It’s also not uncommon that once a particular sales team is already working on a prospect, your partners continue to approach the prospect based on the target database.

And, how about a scenario where your customers have a consumption pattern and a series of transactions with your organisation, all individually distinct. But your up-sell and cross-sell efforts continue to confuse them with a barrage of unrelated push messages over various channels including text, whatsapp, emails or direct cold calls.

It’s also not uncommon for organisations to buy out additional time on social channels with messages such as ‘we will get back to you’ or ‘your request has been registered, our representative will call you’, and so on. Despite this automation, the customer or prospect is held waiting and often later contacted without the context of original communication.

So, what’s missing? You may have gotten the drift. It’s about the context. It could be personal context, or situational context, or demographic context, or just plain and simple transactional context, but without it the engagement is frustrating to the customer to say the least. Today, customers and prospects expect more than transactional efficiency or mobility enabled apps or socially accessible services. They expect a complete and contextually relevant conversation with you. They expect Contextual Customer Experience.

How do you achieve a contextual customer experience? You need to be able to do four things and orchestrate them well.

1. Tap Customer Conversation. Grab customer conversations, transactions and events from across channels and devices be it emails, social platforms, blogs, conversation threads, CRMs, text, images, and web chat systems. An automated processing and sentiment analysis of incoming inputs and events is critical, and an omni-channel capability is key.

2. Discover Full Context. It goes without saying that identification of context is what differentiates an effective response to business opportunities from typical automated processing. 80% of data flowing into organizations are unstructured. Analyze this unstructured data and discover context using advanced analytics. Effective context discovery can be achieved with a combination of transactional analytics, content analytics and business rules management.

3. Identify Right Action & Trigger Appropriate Process. Trigger business processes driven by well-defined and automated business rules. The biggest obstacle to an effective and timely response to business moments today is the siloed and disparate nature of systems and functions. A robust business process management system that automates the workflows and also allows for intelligent routing and workforce engagement is critical.

4. Engage with Unified Communication. Instantly send relevant and targeted communication via multiple channels through a unified communication platform. A communication mechanism that taps the intelligent routing and messaging system by leveraging integrated context is what differentiates a great response from a mediocre one. A unified communication platform helps not only in dispatching highly contextual and personalized communication to the customers, but also in tracking delivery and responses of messages which results in enhanced customer engagement.

What Businesses need today is an end-to-end communication platform. From servicing front-end customer touch points to initiating back-end processes, Digital Sensing Platform converges customer interactions from across-channels, utilizes advanced analytics to discover sentiments and context from conversations, triggers appropriate back-end processes and sends timely and relevant communication to customers-all from one single platform.

While companies focus on developing mobile and social capabilities, the real leverage comes from being able to connect systems, processes, people and things of the organization and operate in the right context. That’s how you can provide the real contextual customer experience to your customers and prospects.