Glassbox has today revealed the top trends organisations will be focusing on in 2017, to improve customer interactions and transactions across digital channels, as well as cross-departmental improvements to optimise customer service and meet pending changes in regulation.

Based on our close work with many leading global organisations, we’re able to foresee that digital transformation will continue to be the overarching theme of the coming year, with mobile strategies, compliance and the move of business (big data) analytics from a siloed to a more cross-departmental approach also being major trends.

• Web and mobile strategies will converge

It is no longer enough to have a dedicated mobile website – in fact Gartner predicts 20% of brands will have abandoned their apps by 2019 – and some Enterprises are even taking a “Mobile First” approach. Separate versions of a site are unwieldy and introduce unnecessary confusion, both when a visitor accesses a site via a different device, or a company is trying to fix a bug on the back end.

• Total recording of digital customer journeys

Contact centres have always recorded telephone calls for training and compliance purposes. More recently, many have introduced analytics to gain insight in to the experience, needs, wants and expectations of customers. Digital teams and marketers are beginning to understand the benefits of adopting the same approach across their digital channels.  Technology from organisations such as Glassbox is making it possible to retrieve and replay in full, the exact journeys customers took with them online – exactly as it was experienced by the customer.

• Business analytics will no longer be a siloed solution

Traditionally, analytics has been a way to break down silos and uncover insights. However, these initiatives have been done in isolation with IT, marketing and compliance all running their own analytics systems. We are seeing a strong desire from organisations to move away from this approach, to a more holistic way of viewing digital operations and the customer experience.

• A drive towards compliance ahead of new regulation

In 2018, there are several pieces of major new regulation coming in to force, with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) in January and then the EUGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May. The next 12 months will be a frantic time for many organisations who will need to pick up the pace to ensure they have the right systems and process in place to avoid substantial fines.

• A step toward machine learning and prescriptive analytics

As Enterprises are becoming better at understanding online customer behaviours and what drives them, they will start moving to the next step, which is not only to detect and alert you about anomalies, but also to predict if they will become major issues and how to remedy them, via machine learning.

Yaron Morgenstern, CEO at Glassbox comments: “By working with world leading brands, we are confident digital transformation will continue to be a strategic process, looking to the past, as well as what is happening in real-time and making improvements, both at the front-end and in the back-office to deliver performance gains. We at Glassbox are excited to have the privilege to be working with the largest organisations in the world, helping them to meet needs that are driven by new regulations, the continual pressure of market forces and the understanding of the capabilities new technologies present.”