How to sustainably grow your business

As consumers, most of us will agree that receiving a timely sales call, relevant marketing communication, or speaking to a service agent who can actually see our previous interactions, leaves us feeling more positive towards an organisation. It makes us feel valued and remembered. These experiences become different because they are relevant and timed, driven by an understanding customer loyalty is made or lost one experience at a time. What they have in common is that they provided ‘knowledge at the point of action’ empowering us to either make a decision or resolve a problem.

Lack of knowledge is the root of most poor customer experiences and consequently must be the foundation for any attempt to deliver consistently great experience. By knowledge, we do not mean data, instead the collective knowledge of departmental customer interactions. Piles of ‘data’ typically make the problem worse. Knowledge could be an understanding of a customer’s previous purchase history, or insight into how they’ve responded to marketing campaigns. Generally, businesses are a maze of information but it’s only useful if it can be made immediately available to the customer-facing business operations. This is when data and information becomes knowledge, something meaningful and usable.

However, if the knowledge isn’t ready when the customer’s ‘at the point of action’ then the chances are the customer won’t be able to make an informed decision about a purchase. Just putting company knowledge into a database is not enough. It needs to be broadly accessible to staff and customers alike, so that every interaction is knowledge infused. The knowledge also has to be able to grow, change and develop. If it is static, it becomes stagnant – placing you and your customers at a disadvantage. To avoid this, there is cognitive technology available today that continuously self-learns from each customer interaction to immediately enhance the next customer experience.

Think of it like this; the heart pumps blood along arteries to the limbs and back again. In our scenario, the heart is the company knowledge, it pumps that knowledge along arteries, or in the case, purpose built, multi-channel applications. These applications are customer-focused, built to learn from customer interaction. What they learn is pumped back into the central knowledge repository to further improve the next customer experience.