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A More Seamless Customer Experience with Guided CX

Even before the pandemic, businesses were gradually transforming their sales and service processes to enable self-service for customers.  When COVID-19 hit, this gentle glide towards digital transformation accelerated quickly as companies of all types and sizes had to find new ways to engage with their customers, since face-to-face interactions became so limited.  Some organizations have been able to rely on self-service customer support tools easily, but others, such as the banking, tax advisory, wealth management, education, and healthcare sectors, needed more.  Businesses that operate in high-touch sales and advisory environments require a more sophisticated solution.  That’s what Guided Customer Experience (Guided CX) provides by injecting empathy and human assistance in an increasingly digital world.

“Guided CX is an emerging category within digital customer engagement that combines advanced innovations like AI-driven chatbots, intelligent self-service tools, and real-time human-to-human support embedded into digital customer service properties, such as websites and mobile apps,” says Heather Nightingale, executive director of The Guided CX Forum, an industry association that promotes awareness and understanding of Guided CX solutions.

Guided CX enables organizations to build empathy and trust with their customers in new ways.  There have been vast efficiency gains with digital self-service tools thus far, but there’s a gap when these features do not solve customers’ problem because they need tailored advice or support.  Often, end users need that guidance in the moment, which can be beyond the capabilities of existing AI and self-help features.  Bringing a live agent into the conversation in these moments is necessary to resolve the problems to the customers’ satisfaction.  

Guided CX is bridging this gap by using technology to help businesses combine human interaction with self-help features.  It enables businesses to create a seamless customer experience, as all the technologies are part of the interaction, whether it’s online chat or video.  The best Guided CX solutions integrate all communication modalities into a single platform, making customer service more efficient for the business, more productive for the advisor, and most important, more satisfying for the customer.

Visual Engagement solutions—including cobrowse, screenshare, and video—are important components of Guided CX.

“Embedding video, cobrowse, and screen share into an asset like a website or app can truly transform digital engagement and make it a much more complete solution,” says Nightingale.  “Video, in particular, will continue to take center stage, as financial institutions, healthcare, schools and educational facilities, retail, and other industries embrace digital customer service and support with their constituents.”

Businesses need to prepare for a future when face-to-face interactions are less common.  The pandemic highlighted just how many of those interactions needed to be reconceptualized, and customers may not want to revert to the practices of the past.  Businesses have learned they don’t set the rules; rather, it is consumers who drive engagement strategies.

“The consumer dictates where, when, and how,” says Nightingale.

The Guided CX Forum will host a series of panel sessions designed to explore the wide-ranging innovations and solutions that can deliver outstanding customer experiences in today’s digital age. The session will be held on June 23, 2021 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, as part of ITEXPO 2021 (June 22-25, 2021), which is one of the largest business communications technology conferences in the country.

The panel sessions will feature industry experts who will discuss strategies to satisfy customer needs in a digital world. The speakers will provide deep dives into the various technologies that comprise Guided CX and share specific examples of successful deployments in several key industries.  

Edited by Erik Linask