Analysts predict the global Customer Experience Management marketplace to explode to a staggering $33bn by 2025. This fills me with supreme confidence, and a huge amount of excitement, as Upland’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) division primes itself to deliver our customers with a significant opportunity to leverage solutions that help them to continue driving loyalty and advocacy from their customer base.
As these end-customers become more discerning and better informed, their demands are evolving. Expectations are being stretched further still by the levels of service achievable through automation - a technology which is set to take precedent on ‘the agenda of the Enterprise’ in 2019, according to analysts. With this in mind, it’s more important than ever for Upland to continue providing applications to our customers that enable smarter engagement and measurable outcomes, in a truly personalized way. Cue our recent acquisition of Adestra and the inception of Upland’s CXM division…
With Adestra as part of the Upland family, we’re able to further enhance our market offering by providing organizations with the opportunity to deliver outstanding multi-channel experiences through outcome-driven conversations, spanning the entire customer journey. This acquisition, coupled with Rant & Rave’s real-time sentiment analysis and our enterprise grade messaging capabilities, will allow brands to not only compete by delivering an outstanding customer experience, but to win. Upland’s CXM solutions don’t simply enable personalized, proactive communications, but increase operational efficiency and drive engagement for consumers and employees. All this whilst also gathering real-time feedback across the customer journey, enabling brands to increase retention by learning, reacting and responding to customer needs in the moment and beyond.
So, what will Upland’s CXM solution look like and what will Adestra bring to the party?
Adestra have been facilitating personalized customer experiences for over 15 years. Through their enterprise grade, cloud-based platform, it brings together email, marketing automation, customer data and analytics to enable over 400 leading brands to understand and engage with their customers. At the heart of this is the ability to deliver and manage a truly personalized customer experience across the total customer lifecycle through relevant, timely, and effective communications. Augment these capabilities with our existing solutions – Rant & Rave, Upland Mobile Messaging (UMM) and our knowledge management solution, RightAnswers – to produce a suite that will deliver sustainable success for leaders from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer and HR. By providing organizations with the solutions they need to engage their frontline staff and optimize customer engagements, we’re achieving exceptional customer outcomes that lead to long-term customer value.
The CXM suite is a hugely exciting offering that hones in on our core belief of delivering long-term customer success for our clients, who believe in working with a trusted, best in class partner that will continue to deliver solutions to meet and exceed the ever-changing demands of their customers. Central to the suite is a set of guiding principles that provide more intelligent and immersive experiences, smarter customer and employee engagement on a truly multi-channel level, deep process automation and a continuous cycle of analytics and insight to continually drive a business forward successfully.
Let’s expand further on the real-life examples from my previous blog, where I talked about restaurants and retailers using UMM to drive automated mobile conversations with consumers. By adding Rant & Rave to the mix, those businesses are able to unearth customer sentiment and emotion as they interact with the brand across their multi-channel journey, enabling them to surface insights that tell them how their customers feel about their experience with the brand, from the people they were served by, right through to the product they’re purchasing, at any point in time. With Adestra’s powerful email platform to bolster the proposition, there’s even the possibility of soliciting personalized marketing messages.
Imagine the customer has received a mobile coupon to redeem in-store. They head in-store, make a purchase using the voucher and are asked – in real-time – how they felt about the experience. They respond to the NPS question with a 9 (they’re a promoter – awesome!) and go on to give very positive feedback about the staff they engaged with, as well as how much they loved a new line of shoes. Now here’s a chance for Adestra to really shine! The customer has replied to the NPS with a 9, has said they’d recommend you to a friend or colleague and that they also love your shop staff – all great so far.
Adestra can not only leverage this data to target that customer with a personalized ‘refer a friend’ offer (which is easily forwarded via email and earns them a reward once claimed) but also send a personalized upsell email based on customer’s feedback about that new line of shoes. If you extrapolate this scenario across the customer base or adapt it to fit another industry, whether that be Finance, Utilities, Hospitality or Non-profit, this automated process is unlocking a secret salesforce of advocates from within your customer base, that you can nurture, engage and amplify for sustainable, long-term customer value.
2019 and beyond… bringing it all together
2019 promises to be a fascinating year for all professionals with ‘customer’ or ‘employee’ in their remit. With customer choice and knowledge growing exponentially, the consumer switching epidemic, cited in Accenture’s report from 2017, is set to continue costing businesses in excess of $6 trillion per annum with over two thirds of customer churn being linked to experience, as opposed to product or price.
Add to that conundrum Michael Dell’s statement, which talks about how we are now entering an era where 5 generations of employees - and customers - will converge in the workplace for the first time ever. With Gen Z’s, born after 2001, joining the rest of us in the pursuit of happiness and exceptional customer outcomes, enterprises need to tailor communications and experiences now more than ever – not only for their customers, but also employees, candidates and their supply chain.
Our excitement at Upland around CXM is born out of our firm belief that the division will enable organizations to deliver the holy grail of outstanding customer experiences. By delivering outcome-driven conversations that are dynamic, personalized and engaging across all channels, spanning the entire journey, our customers will not just compete by delivering outstanding customer experience, but win hearts, minds and wallet share.
To find out more about the Upland CXM solution suite, just click here.
