“Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the entire business landscape. Gartner predicted that in 2018, AI would create more jobs than it eliminates, and in 2020 it will become a positive net job motivator, creating half a million new jobs. The link between digital transformation and the customer experience is an imperative—and 2019 will be the breaking point.

As companies implement new AI-driven technologies such as chatbots and voice search, they neglect to think about the impact on the customer experience. Customers will become increasingly frustrated with the lack of human interaction and a fractured customer journey as businesses struggle to tie together channels. Customers expect to seamlessly switch from self-service options on web and mobile to chat, email or phone.

Businesses should take a step back, plan customer-centric technology implementations and consider how it ties into the whole customer journey. To win, they must offer customers the right mix of new technology and traditional service. This includes maintaining the human touch by making it easy to access the best person for more complex issues.

“Companies know they must adapt to change in order to grow and stay relevant, but they aren’t relying on enough data to inform change. In 2018, we discovered a discrepancy between the value executives place on analytics and the extent to which data is actually analyzed.

We surveyed 1,000 executives and found that while nearly all agree that data and analytics are integral to informing sales and marketing changes, more than half of them currently rely on only one data point—such as revenue figures or social media interactions—to inform decisions. They aren’t getting to voice-of-the-customer data to understand what their customers want.

In 2019 this will change. IDC estimates enterprises will spend in excess of $2 trillion on digital transformations in 2019. Companies who lead successful change initiatives will do so by implementing omnichannel analytics from the contact center to get to the root of what customers want. Improvement of data integration and reporting across the business will give the C-suite easier access to the data and knowledge needed to fully optimize customer experiences.”

“In the midst of what many call the fourth industrial revolution in which digital, physical and biological worlds are colliding, companies must consider the impact technology has on the customer experience.

While consumers expect a quality product for a reasonable price, they also want an emotional tie to a brand, and that comes through a human connection.

2019 will see companies finally learn the art of listening by developing a strategy that engages customers in the right way, at the right time and on the right channel. Leveraging analytics, smart companies will monitor the entire customer journey across channels to ensure a consistent experience that drives loyalty.”

What drives customers to be loyal to a company?

Every year we hear a new statistic about the growing number of customer touchpoints, whether customers are communicating with companies using instant messenger, the latest smart home device or one of the ever-expanding self-service options. When it comes to customer experience technology, companies often think more must be better. But there’s a catch.

In our recent report, The Danger of Digital, we found that 58 percent of companies have a set process to follow to add a new communication channel. It’s so easy to add new options that, in the rush to adopt, companies are failing to understand how they will affect the entire customer experience. While many have channel-specific implementation strategies, they often lack a coordinated strategy across channels—and the result is a fragmented customer journey.

To mitigate channel chaos in 2019, companies will take a step back and finally lay the right groundwork for omnichannel success. Not only will they audit existing channels to understand which options customers prefer, they’ll apply analytics to determine which channels are most effective. Additionally, companies will enact quality assurance metrics across all channels—not just on the phone. With these cross-channel insights, organizations will gain a firm understanding of customer preferences and create a complete view of the customer journey, making it easier for customers to move between channels or be transferred to a live representative.

From there, they can use analytics to extract critical insights that will help them adapt hiring and training strategies to ensure a consistent customer experience. With this integrated approach, companies will finally deliver on customers’ expectations and drive key insights across the organization.”