“By 2020, 60% of large organizations will try to design a customer engagement hub, yet only half of them will select the correct technologies to make it work.”
Customer engagement is still commonly delivered in silos even though it’s widely known to be the root cause of serious customer experience issues. The lack of sharing customer context and information across departments usually results in greater customer effort and prevents the success of holistic customer engagement strategies.
According to a recent Gartner publication, “Technologies for CRM and the Emerging Customer Engagement Hub”, Gartner explains why architecting a customer engagement hub (CEH) type framework is necessary to break down these silos and deliver a consistent and contextual customer experience. The maturation of the CEH concept is something that Gartner has been predicting for years, yet is gaining momentum due to advances in service architectures that can connect and modernize existing applications.
In this newly published research piece, Gartner predicts that over the next three years, enterprises and IT specifically, will need to “overcome departmental barriers and politics” to develop a working model of a dynamic, enterprise-wide customer engagement hub.
Why a Customer Engagement Hub?
The customer engagement hub is not a product you can buy today, but an architectural framework that facilitates the delivery of a unified and seamless customer experience – allowing a customer to execute a journey that travels across an enterprise. The intent is to bridge silos and allow the customer information to reside at the center of the enterprise.
Gartner Definition of Customer Engagement Hub (CEH)
“A customer engagement hub (CEH) is an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together to optimally engage the customer. A CEH allows personalized, contextual customer engagement, whether through a human, artificial agent or sensors, across all interaction channels. It reaches and connects all departments, allowing, for example, the synchronization of marketing, sales and customer service processes.”
What are the technology building blocks of a CEH?
Gartner has long prescribed that a “consistent, orchestrated, cross-channel customer experience across all engagement channels” will drive satisfaction and growth. The recent publication provides insights on the technologies that will play a crucial role in the evolution of the CEH. It elaborates on how the ideal “Customer Engagement Hub … ties together the communication infrastructure, business rules, relevant information and analytics…” to orchestrate an integrated customer journey.
Next in this series of blogs on the customer engagement hub, we will cover some of the methodologies and technologies available to bridge silos across three areas: user experience, process and data. In the meantime, we are pleased to provide access to the Gartner report “Technologies for CRM and the Emerging Customer Engagement Hub”