By Martie de Beer, Chief Revenue Officer at Telviva

We live in an era of personalisation, where businesses seek to provide the best possible customer experience (CX) precisely because consumers have more options than ever before. Yet, many businesses are suffering from operational amnesia without even knowing it. The good news is that it is entirely possible to overcome. 

Imagine walking into your local corner shop where you have spent money on milk and bread at least once a week for a decade. You make your way over to the counter and the owner looks into your eyes and says: “Hello, my name is Sam, what is your name and why have you come in today?” 

It would surprise you, and depending on just how long you’ve been supporting the store it may even offend you. You may leave and not bother returning. This example may seem extreme, or even humorous, but it is exactly what South African organisations are doing to their customers every day.

What is operational amnesia? Despite millions of rands being poured into so-called omnichannel digital transformation projects, the reality is that very often a customer journey for South Africans is a disjointed, frustrating loop of self-introduction. Everyone can relate to this: You move from a WhatsApp query to a voice call, only to find that the person on the other end has no record of the context of your call. 

To the customer, the business feels like a stranger they have to keep dating for the first time. Besides being frustrating it slows down the time to resolution. To the business and its staff, it's more than just a bad experience, it’s commercial hemorrhage. 

The hidden “toggle tax”

Behind every frustrated customer is an equally exhausted employee. Precisely because of the digital world we find ourselves in, employees are trapped in an inefficiency crisis. Right now, as you read this, thousands of South African contact centre agents are juggling between six, nine or even more different tabs and screens, navigating between online platforms and legacy systems, just to answer a single query. The agents are not being customer-centric, they are playing a high-stakes game of digital detective. This toggle tax is costly.

When an agent has to ask the same question for a third time it’s usually because the CRM system is not talking to the communication stack. And so this constant toggling between screens wastes time, leads to poor employee morale and high staff turnover, while the first-call resolution rate ends up being poor in a competitive global market. 

The WhatsApp trap

In South Africa, WhatsApp is the optimal channel. It’s where people choose to communicate. However, businesses are walking a fine line between service and harassment.

The country has seen the rise of “ad-hoc” business communication, where brands risk spamming customers with daily messages because they lack the data intelligence to know when to stop. Without CRM integration, WhatsApp becomes a privacy nightmare and a trust-killer. On the other hand, if a customer sends a sensitive bank statement via WhatsApp to a sales agent at a car dealership, for example, where does that data go? If it isn't centralised, it’s a POPIA disaster waiting to happen.

The voice paradox

Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of our digital-first world is that a good old fashioned phone call has become more important than ever. It’s a high-stakes environment because by the time a customer picks up the phone to call a contact centre, they are likely already at their wits’ end, having tried the bot and the FAQ, and they’ve hit a wall. 

At the moment the contact centre agent answers the call, it could be argued that it is a point of no return. If that call isn’t contextual, in other words if the agent doesn’t immediately know the history of the customer’s struggle, the relationship is at risk, with the best-case scenario being an increasingly frustrated or even irritated customer and in the worst-case scenario, the end of the relationship. 

It’s really simple. You cannot close a deal or save a customer if the business has forgotten the conversation it started ten minutes ago on another platform.

Winning the battle for memory

The solution isn't more technology; it’s better orchestration. It’s the pursuit of synchronicity.

Omnichannel is no longer a differentiator. The real winners in the South African economy, the businesses that build and retain valuable customer relationships, are the orchestrators. These are businesses that realise their technology stack must adapt to their business processes and not the other way around. Whether a business is using a 20-year-old legacy system or the latest cloud CRM, the goal is always the same: A single pane of glass.

With communication channels’ integration into the CRM being a non-negotiable to achieve a single plane of glass, it could be argued that the amnesia effect is a choice. Businesses can continue to frustrate customers and force their employees to pay toggle tax, or they can finally connect the business’s brain to the business’s eyes.