As someone working in the Customer Experience field I see buzzwords come and go – customer centric and knowledge base have been ousted in favour of words like user-experience and self-service. Even the fashionable “Big Data” is feeling the cold shoulder, in favour of “Predictive Analytics”.

For me, the words don’t really matter, good customer service comes down to the same thing it has always come down to, giving customers what they want. By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Excellent customer service is no longer a differentiating factor. It’s not a question. It’s not an option. It’s a requirement. You need to engage with customers in the way they want to engage with you.

According to a recent study, the digital age has seen the average human attention span fall from 12 seconds in 2000 to now just 8 seconds. People, especially “Millennials” (sorry, couldn’t resist another buzzword!) won’t wait around to get the information they want. If you can’t help them when and how they want, they’ll find someone else that can. And make no mistake there will be a business out there that can, if not now, then soon. We face a reality – disrupt or be disrupted.

There are plenty of examples of how digitalisation has enabled major market disruption to take place, we can see it happening in almost every sector; Amazon in both retail and now cloud services, Uber in taxi hire, Airbnb in travel, Tesla in cars. These businesses are successfully capitalising on changing customer behaviours and expectations to break the industry mould and steal significant market share.

Digital disruption has happened in too many industries for any business to be foolish enough to think they are immune. And It’s not just the major transformational disruptors that we have to be concerned about, it is also the competitors that are making the incremental changes that are redefining how we engage and service customers and setting new benchmarks.

As customer service becomes the key differentiator in every sector, to be successful, every company needs to be a disrupter. Never satisfied with what they are doing today and continuously innovating new and better ways to service customers. For the contact centre, this means finding the right channels for our customers and making these channels work together seamlessly. But you will need some help to navigate your way to the holy grail of the Connected Digital Experience and there is no better person to help you find your way than a Confident Guide.

We are Natilik, we are that Confident Guide………………..Where can we take you? Read our new guide: The Connected Digital Experience