Customer context refers to a set of factors that allow agents to understand a customer need. Brands need to know how customers will use their products in order to provide the best customer service possible. Businesses have to answer questions like: Who will our customers be? What barriers will they face? Why will people want to use our products? How can we help them meet their goals?
Sometimes, customers don’t completely understand the problem they’re facing and they find it difficult to articulate what they’re dealing with. To combat this, contact center agents learn how customers interact with a product before they ever reach out to customer service. Agents then have more context to work with by the time they’re contacted by the customer.
Creating Artifacts to Understand Context
To understand customer context, businesses often create artifacts, or bits of information that are used to map out and understand context. Customer personas and scenarios are two examples of context.
1. Customer personas describe the people who are likely to use a product. Businesses have to determine who will use the product, where they’ll use it and why they’ll use it. Certain questions are answered during this stage, including: Where will the customer use the product? Why will they use the product? What are the skills, preferences and demographics of the customer?
2. Scenarios can only be developed after customer personas are laid out. Scenarios build on the customer persona as the business asks questions about customer interactions, like: What are the customers doing? Where are they when they’re trying to carry out certain tasks? How are they communicating with or accessing the brand? “What if” questions are also asked to round out scenarios and to take into account varying conditions.
Using Technology to Manage Context
What’s the point of tracking and logging communication at each touch point if that intelligence isn’t going to be used? Customers are connected to companies in a variety of ways and companies are constantly collecting data, but what are they doing with it? To uncover actionable steps, some companies opt to use software that will track and correlate customer interaction across all channels. The customer journey is then analyzed, providing customized combinations of actions and recommendations. The context engine can adapt those recommendations as the customer continues along their journey.
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