According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey last year, 60 percent of companies in Hong Kong believe they are performing above their industry average. However, 54 percent of consumers in Hong Kong are dissatisfied with customer service: These consumers are the most inclined to switch brands. To retain customers, companies have to deliver customer service excellence and increase top-line revenue. Some of the customer service trends we are seeing will change the way customer engagement is implemented.

Organizations are now challenged on how they put their operation (money) where their marketing (mouth) is. Customer service is a key barometer of this, and the recommendation of one customer to the next is not just about service and product, but also about experience, journey and fair value exchange.

Engagement reflects a choice by the customer to interact with an organization, its products and services - and to participate in the exchange of value on their terms, or as close to it as possible.

Engagement is built by moments, journeys, and experiences. It is about expectations, excellence and values.

Customers will explore new communication channels such as video chat with screen sharing and annotation. The rise of chat has been powerful and rapid as it embodies the human and the digital, and opens up multiple modes (webpage or app and textual conversation). Organizations must be adaptive, not only to consumer choice but also to the context. Successful chat installations have moved from merely selling to facilitating the consumer to buy.

Mobile will increasingly define how smartphone users communicate, shop and engage with brands.

Mobile is a multi/omni channel platform with voice, e-mail, web chat, video chat, SMS and social media capabilities. If a customer wants to communicate with a brand, it is increasingly likely to be via a mobile device.

An organization can show the customer the journey they are on and give them the points of control and preferences. The key to this is trust. Organizations need to earn it and with it will come partnership.

Organizations must use the "dark data" of process performance, mixed with customer feedback and intent, to fully embrace the entire customer journey. And they must have the agility to act on it. Intelligence must be actionable. Organizations will extend the power of predictive analytics to offer service tailored to the customer's profile, historical data of past interactions and transactions, and current situational data such as location, device, and browser.

Proactive process alerts have become the norm and are appreciated by customers. However this is not true for marketing offers. The difference here is about understanding consumer value rather than organizational value. An organization can monitor the customer journey and while choosing when to be proactive, the idea is to understand who the value is for.

The author is vice-president at Verint Systems for North Asia.

(HK Edition 06/15/2015 page1)