In today’s marketplace the customer really has become the king. More than ever, your customers have the power to access vast amounts of information and a flood of products and services from around the world with the click of a button. The rise of digital has led to the need for the Customer Engagement Hub (CEH) as a way of meeting the ever-increasing demands, on time and in the right way, the first time. So, what is a CEH and how can it help your business?
Gartner defines the CEH as follows: “The customer engagement hub (CEH) is an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together to optimally engage the customer. A CEH allows personalised, 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 synchronisation of marketing, sales and customer service processes.”
In short, a system that connects all your channels with all your departments or functions to ensure a consistent experience across all your touch points. Managing different single-channel applications, and integrating them—with each other and back-end systems—while handling user profiles across many applications is awkward, error-prone, time-consuming, and an unnecessary expense. A CEH provides centralised administration of business and system resources.
The fragmented marketing stack and the data silos that result from it are two of the biggest barriers facing today’s marketing departments. By deploying a CEH that takes an open garden approach, marketeers are able to address both issues simultaneously, empower their teams to make better decisions with more complete data, and gain a flexible solution that will keep up with innovation of new technologies as they arise. By making it as easy as possible for your staff to deal with admin and data, you make it as easy as possible for your customers to do business with you, thereby attracting, surprising and keeping them fully engaged.
Along with the challenges of building a CEH such as getting the buy-in from all stakeholders and making sure the right people are on the build team to ensure a full picture of the customer journey, there are multiple benefits. The most obvious of those are gaining new customers through word of mouth and analysing social media data, retaining customers with more personalised content and broadening brand loyalty. Perhaps the most important benefit would be identifying opportunities for improvement. By scrutinising customer feedback through online forums, customer support interactions (e.g., chats and emails), surveys, website- and social analytics, you can identify sticking points in the customer journey such as disrupted delivery, bad customer service, etc. that lead to frustrated customers. Using these points as opportunities, you can improve on the overall service of your business.
Do you want to know more about Customer Engagement Hub technologies or are you considering taking the step to getting your own? Give Cursum a call today!
