Customer engagement has never been more important. But while 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, businesses still struggle to meet expectations.
In fact, there seems to be a disconnect when it comes to CX quality: 85% of marketers are impressed with their brand’s ability to keep up with customer expectations — but only 63% of consumers agree and say their customer experiences are amazing.
So why is this? Many businesses rely on outdated, one-size-fits-all approaches that often lead to frustratingly irrelevant customer interactions. Traditional customer engagement technologies rely on automation, which can easily cause business processes to become generic and inflexible — whether in the context of outside events or the needs that vary from customer to customer.
We saw this play out during the pandemic. The unprecedented change meant customers had questions that needed to be answered, fast: How will my insurance change? Can I defer mortgage payments? Consumers turned to customer service centers for help. It was a chance for businesses to shine — but customer engagement fell flat.
Customer service centers quickly became overwhelmed. Rigid approaches simply couldn’t keep up with the rapid changes in customer needs, and consumers became dissatisfied. But there is a silver lining. Businesses have been forced to reevaluate how they engage customers and what they can do better.
This is why we think it’s important to take a look at the Gartner® Rethink Customer Experience for a Disrupted World With the CX CORE Model report. Gartner explains their reason for the report: “In this research, we present a model to do what CRM and other customer engagement technologies were meant to do before they got subsumed by their overhead and complexity: develop customer empathy and make the customer the starting point for creating business architecture.”
By focusing on the consumer, businesses can learn how to send every customer the right message at the right time with the customer first approach. Read on to learn why your enterprise needs to shift towards dynamic customer engagement and how to get started.
Transform Customer Experience With Dynamic Customer Engagement
Before we delve into a new strategy, we need to understand the issues surrounding the current customer experience. Traditionally, businesses have built technologies that deliver customer engagement automatically and at scale.
While this works wonders for operational efficiency, businesses have failed to notice that the customer is missing from the process. Internal teams may be happy, but this is rendered useless if the customer is not satisfied. Without aligning engagement efforts with the customer journey, you risk creating touchpoints that feel disjointed and impersonal.
This issue becomes incredibly apparent when you look at customer service and its current performance from the pandemic onwards. Think about it. When do your customers reach out? When they have an issue.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of COVID-19. When customers contacted customer service, confused about their change in policy or in need of an extension, they were looking for clear, quick answers. But businesses relied on lengthy FAQs or automated messages providing little to no help. The bottom line? Customer service is disjointed, impersonal and ineffective, leaving customers feeling disconnected and frustrated.
The lack of an omnichannel, personalized approach meant customers often faced fragmented communication when they moved from website to app to phone calls and so on. But this can be solved with a new strategy.
According to Gartner, “Dynamic customer engagement (DCE) is a strategy born out of customer service and support for using data and analytics to discover insights that drive highly personalized and contextual actions.”
It’s important to note that leveraging data does not mean prioritizing numbers over consumers once again. Rather, data is analyzed with the customer in mind in order to create a customer-centric CX.
“Gartner believes the path to DCE can be accelerated by leveraging the enterprise-level CX CORE model designed to help organizations construct experiences that put the emphasis back on individual customers. In this model, Customer Experience CORE helps customer service and support leaders architect for experience to build lasting and valuable relationships that can flex with ever-present disruptions affecting customers.”
– Gartner
By leveraging customer data to create a flexible, personalized customer engagement strategy, it’s possible to make existing customer service personal and proactively prepare for future disruptions. Ultimately, this positions your brand for long-term success — delivering experiences that not only meet customer expectations but also drive customer loyalty and business growth.
Next Generation Video for Dynamic Customer Engagement
We know dynamic customer engagement is critical, but what resources are available to achieve this? To deliver next-level experiences, we can turn to Next Generation Video, our term for video that goes beyond traditional, static viewing experiences.
Next Gen Video includes Personalized Video, which can be used to deliver dynamic customer engagement automatically and at scale.
For example, we still remember working with mortgage companies facing a flood of forbearance calls during the pandemic. Customers were confused, concerned and desperate for clarity. To help, we helped brands implement dynamic customer engagement via scalable Personalized Video.
By delivering tailored content that addressed specific questions for each customer, the mortgage forbearance videos provided a service experience that was relevant, dynamic and customer-first. The result? Reduced call center pressure and improved customer satisfaction.
Personalized Videos work well because they’re data-driven, which is critical to dynamic customer engagement. Powerful customer information is leveraged to personalize the video to the viewer’s unique circumstances. And it goes beyond mentioning the customer’s name.
For instance, a customer with a substantial banking account can be sent a video with additional tips for investing, while new customers can watch a video with bonus tips for saving. Even timing can be accounted for — Personalized Videos can be sent out a week prior to a customer’s specific deadline. This functionality enhances customer service on another level, providing dynamic customer engagement when needed most.
Pro tip: You’ve probably heard about how AI can be used to create full-blown videos. But did you know it can also be trained on your brand content? Thanks to retrieval-augmented generation, you can be confident that your content is accurate and on-brand.
Data-driven videos leverage the same powerful technology and data in existing customer engagement technologies, but the key difference is that they focus on the customer first and foremost. Take a look at how businesses are using them now to drive engagement on a dynamic level.
Questions Answered In Advance
To reduce friction, issues should be taken care of not just when they happen, but before they even occur. By proactively addressing your audience’s needs based on available customer insights, you can create a more seamless customer experience.
Take this timely renewal sent out to customers by Zurich, for instance. It’s a customer-focused message that changes according to the individual’s unique circumstances and where they are in the customer lifecycle.
In this case, viewers were sent a video prior to their renewal period, reminding them of the upcoming date so they’re not caught off guard.
In addition to their policy renewal date, the video also showed the customer’s premium, what their current plan covered and the contact information for a local agent. The upshot? By providing customers with a personal touch (and reinforcing the value Zurich brings) , the company increased customer retention.
Results: We’ve seen personalized customer service videos like the one above reduce call center volume in the financial services industry by over 70%.
Contextualized Data for a Dynamic System
A dynamic approach to engagement must also be contextual. Customers respond to the world around them — your customer service should do the same. As Gartner states, “The standard CX toolkit is not wrong – but it must evolve by leveraging real-time data that reflects the dynamic nature of your customers.”
It’s possible to create videos that are contextual with Next Generation Video.
Next Gen Video can leverage contextual data to engage customers with the most relevant, real-time information. A viewer’s context can include anything — from the current time to the weather to the device they’re using, as you can see in the video above.
Consider a video that changes the greeting from “good morning” to “good evening” depending on when the customer views it. It’s a simple but powerful way to personalize the experience. Your video can also auto-update via API. Sync it with anything from stock prices to retail inventory to airline flights so your video is always up to date.
This is especially useful for creating a more flexible approach to engagement, allowing businesses to provide an uninterrupted customer experience. This transformative technology can be leveraged for a variety of customer engagement applications, from personalized outreach to marketing campaigns.
Dynamic customer engagement with Next Gen Video may look like:
- A customer portal video that automatically updates to display patients’ new health insurance
- A video for a company that displays the viewer’s closest store location
- The language in the video changing based on the country where it’s viewed
With real-time adaptability and personalization, Next Generation Video takes engagement to the next level, letting businesses offer a CX that’s as dynamic as the world around them.
Interactivity To Encourage True Engagement
Next Generation Video isn’t just personalized and contextual — it can also be interactive, which can really transform different touchpoints in the customer journey.
One of the biggest areas where this tech shines is self-service. In fact, 39% of customers prefer self-service options and feel that it’s their quickest route to a solution over any other channel. That means it’s essential to provide support tools that put the customer in control.
With Interactive Video, businesses can give customers the self-service options they want in a dynamic, visual format they’re familiar with. Going back to that forbearance scenario from earlier, you can imagine how a video like the one below would be a huge relief to get — especially if the alternative is a long wait on the phone to get in touch with a representative.
This isn’t to say that people don’t appreciate a human touch. More than 60% of consumers value companies that are able to strike the right balance between self-service and human support.
The key is finding that smart mix of efficiency and customer empathy. By offering self-service options, you’re not only empowering customers but also freeing up your support team to address more complex issues with the attention and care they need.
Your sales team, too, can stand to benefit. You could use Interactive Videos to allow customers to explore different products or generate personalized quotes on their own terms.
Or like in the video below, have them customize a product to their liking and see pricing details updated in real time. Once satisfied, they can enter their contact information so that your sales team can follow up.
Hint: Click the lightning bolt icon in the player to customize the video yourself!
When integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, these interactive experiences become even more powerful, helping sales teams track customer preferences, tailor follow-ups and streamline the entire sales process for greater engagement.
More Data Means More Actionable Insights
When video is personalized, contextual and interactive, you get a much deeper look at your customers’ demands and behaviors. Which elements are they clicking on the most? What are the most popular devices people are watching from? These insights go beyond surface-level metrics and can help you improve your CX.
With Idomoo’s Next Generation Video Platform, you can track more than just views — you get a full picture of what’s happening in your campaigns. Our intuitive dashboard provides clear, easy-to-read metrics that show you exactly how your videos are engaging your audience.
This kind of data makes it easier to understand what works, streamlining the optimization process. By identifying trends and patterns, you can make smarter decisions for future
The Dynamic Customer Engagement Solution
It’s critical for businesses to create an engagement strategy that can evolve and change with their customers. Video is the perfect tool to engage customers with the data that matters most to them in a fun-to-watch format — driving customer satisfaction, retention and better business results.
But when you have a customer base spanning hundreds of thousands or even millions, all with different needs and interests, tailoring the way you interact with every customer can be a challenge. That’s why the top enterprises are leveraging our Next Generation Video Platform, a single platform able to deliver dynamic data-driven videos at scale.
With a fully open platform, you have the option to either let us handle the details — or DIY. Acting as your copilot, our solution excels at delivering tailored customer experiences without the complexity. And with existing integrations among the most popular CRM solutions, including Salesforce and HubSpot, it’s easy to streamline your workflow while revamping your business communications.
Ready to take dynamic customer engagement to the next level? Let’s talk.
Gartner, “Rethink Customer Experience for a Disrupted World With the CX CORE Model: A Gartner Trend Insight Report”, Don Scheibenreif and Marcus Blosch, 16 February 2022.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
