This post is co-authored by Tony Lorentzen, Senior Vice President and General Manager Intelligent Engagement, Nuance.

Since Microsoft and Nuance joined forces earlier this year, both teams have been clear about our commitment to putting our customers first. Microsoft and Nuance are dedicated to ensuring our products complement each other, accelerate better business outcomes, and continue to deliver value well into the future.  

We have never been more confident in our ability to continue offering organizations exceptional AI-powered customer engagement solutions. There’s a good reason why a majority of the Fortune 100 companies worldwide rely on Nuance customer engagement solutions, and we are excited by the significant potential Nuance’s pioneering, industry-specific technology has in the Microsoft ecosystem. Nuance solutions complement and enhance Microsoft’s portfolio, delivering value across every engagement channel. Microsoft’s continued investment in cloud and AI innovation offers massive opportunity to bolster Nuance solutions with new capabilities.

Nuance customer engagement solutions

We are investing in Nuance’s proven customer engagement solutions that combine advanced conversational AI with a full spectrum of technologies to achieve market-leading accuracy and containment rates. Nuance has the unique capabilities to enable organizations to automate, personalize, and secure customer interactions, only now with the power of Microsoft behind it. This spans Nuance products and services inclusive of:    

• Nuance Digital Engagement Platform (NDEP): The powerful functionality of NDEP comes from deep expertise in conversational AI and experience delivering AI-powered innovations in key vertical markets. Nuance digital engagement solutions are vendor-agnostic, offering complete flexibility and investment protection for organizations that: want to integrate best-of-breed virtual assistant or live chat solutions with a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) from any vendor; have a third-party virtual assistant, but need to integrate it with an industry-leading live agent platform; want to add powerful new messaging capabilities to a third-party agent desktop; or need to surface third-party product recommendations, next-best actions, knowledgebase information, tech support, or order management systems to their agents on a unified desktop. 

• Nuance Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Nuance has deep roots in delivering powerful IVR solutions and shares Microsoft’s vision for enabling an intelligent, personalized, and secure customer experience through advanced AI. Customers should expect Nuance Conversational IVR to continue to deliver innovations in automation to enable self-service with high containment rates while further increasing the speed, efficiency, and ability of agents to resolve most incoming calls successfully using real-time data and context. Our shared goal is to enable enterprise-grade, secure, conversational applications for the IVR that are capable of handling everything from straightforward customer queries to complex, demanding interactions. And we are committed to flexibly working with our ISV and channel partners to make our market-leading, vertical-specific Natural Language Understanding available to global organizations.  
• Nuance security and biometrics: One of the most exciting things that Nuance brings to customer experience engagements is its market-leading biometric authentication and fraud prevention solutions. These technologies are helping enterprises make customer interactions not only more enjoyable but also more secure while helping to prevent fraudboth critical to successfully providing the outcomes-driven customer engagement Microsoft and Nuance are committed to delivering together. Cloud-native Nuance Gatekeeper is a differentiator in the market, and we will continue to invest in advancing its capabilities, while exploring its huge potential in the Microsoft ecosystem. 
• Nuance Mix: Microsoft and Nuance share a vision to provide the most complete and compelling AI-driven customer engagement and contact center portfolio, with secure tools that span no-code, low-code, and pro-code to accelerate transformation. Nuance Mix makes it easier to create sophisticated, human-like engagements that enable customers to self-serve with a chatbot, speak to the IVR in a conversational way as if they were speaking to human agents, and help maximize self-service adoption and containment across any channel.  

Learn more about Microsoft and Nuance

Our goal with “Microsoft + Nuance: Better Together” is to deliver lasting business value to the market. Together, with our trailblazing customers and partners, we will bring to market new innovations, while also ensuring our customers’ existing investments are protected and continue to flourish. As we look at adding new capabilities, together, Microsoft and Nuance will ensure clear paths forward providing customers future-proof solutions that continue to deliver outcomes today and tomorrow.   

We are excited to share more about how we’ll bring the full power of Microsoft and Nuance to organizations worldwide.

Join us at Microsoft Inspire to learn more.  

The post The future of customer engagement is bright with Microsoft and Nuance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We understand that for chief marketing officers (CMOs) everywhere, it feels like a precarious time to be a marketer. COVID-19 has upended supply chains and inflation spikes have accelerated a wave of digital transformation across all aspects of business. Additionally, culture is politically polarized, forcing brands to take a stand or risk alienating customers.

Disruptions to customer engagement are adding similar instability. Customer interactions across digital channels are dramatically increasing at the very same time that marketers’ ability to track and understand those interactions is rapidly decreasing. 

This is creating the Marketer’s Dilemma, urging marketers to navigate the trade-offs between optimizing individual channels and investing in cohesive end-to-end customer experiences.

The problem: The digital marketing ecosystem has become less reliable

Although the term “omnichannel” marketing has been trending for more than a decade, marketing channels remain largely siloed operations. Discrete platform partners have offered marketers powerful reach and valuable services spanning adtech, search, social media, and e-commerce. Individually, each has been invaluable in enabling marketers to manage campaigns, engage customers, and track results, especially for companies that lack sophisticated in-house data and the analytical know-how. But partnerships that once offered exciting opportunities are evolving into potential vulnerabilities:

“The services that these advertising platforms provide have been particularly advantageous for less technically advanced companies that may lack the in-house data (an organization’s first-party data and/or operational data) and analytical know-how to conduct independent analyses. On the other hand, they curb the relative advantage of more sophisticated companies who may be limited in the tools and analytical techniques they can use on these platforms. This can disincentivize innovation and concentrate overall ecosystem innovation within the data platforms themselves.”¹

Meanwhile, customer demand for greater privacy, transparency, and control of their data, along with the pressure of regulatory compliance, is disrupting marketers’ access to granular customer data to generate relevant insights.

Browser cookies, which once offered the ability to track users and “sidle right up to the creepy line”² will deprecate in 2023, forcing marketers to pivot to a cookieless future even as consumers live more of their lives online.

Simply put, an over reliance on third-party relationships is putting marketers at risk of losing access to the customer data that their very survival depends on.

Marketers struggle to overcome learned helplessness

Customers expect brands to deliver digital experiences that are personalized, relevant, and consistent across touch points,³ and we can no longer afford to outsource customer relationships to third parties.

The lack of interoperability between platforms, datasets, and views of the customer makes it very challenging for marketers to reclaim ownership of their customer relationships and responsibility for orchestrating consistent experiences across journeys. Advertising platforms are effectively walled gardens and have grown so powerful due to network effects that marketers are effectively locked in. This combination of powerful but limiting capabilities encourages a dependence that leads to a sense of helplessness in marketing teams. 

“The current marketing ecosystem is characterized by the concentration of significant first-party user data in a handful of advertising platforms. The data shared with marketers is carefully limited, in part to preserve data privacy. A consequence of this, however, has been that innovation has been constrained to the capacity and capabilities of these advertising platforms.“¹

Tasked with delivering short-term key performance indicators (KPIs), teams are incentivized to focus on what they control: leveraging investments with current vendors, maximizing performance of individual channels, and unknowingly perpetuating a cycle that all but ensures a fragmented ecosystem.

Taking ownership of customer relationships and overcoming this dilemma is essential for long-term growth.

The solution

Marketers cannot risk falling short of current goals, nor can they continue to depend on an ecosystem of unreliable third parties and walled gardens. While it won’t be easy, marketers must build the business case, right fit the talent, and execute a strategy to establish data autonomy.

Data autonomy gives organizations the power to own customer relationships, understand customer needs, manage customer experiences, and create raving fans at the scope and scale necessary to succeed in an era where nearly all of business has been digitized.

Data ownership is the key that unlocks the Marketer’s Dilemma. And there are four questions that every marketer must address on the road to data autonomy.

1. Who truly owns your customer relationships?

Direct customer relationships should be a top imperative for every marketer. There is no perfect solution, even for large enterprises, but owning your customer relationships is critical; the value of controlling your own data cannot be understated.  

Customer activity online generates enormous amounts of data, which also turns out to be an organization’s most valuable asset. As marketing leaders, how do we gain control and leverage our customer data to manage successful customer relationships? There are three steps worth considering: 

• Start with the data you currently own or will purchase and leverage solutions like customer data platforms (CDPs) to aggregate and analyze customer data.  

“In an ideal world, you want to track the customer decision journey at the individual level, but even at an audience level it can be impactful. We are trying to build that, but a big chunk of our digital advertising goes through walled gardens. We are hoping that a CDP can help provide us with our first-party data and will be able to link with walled gardens.”Marketing Vice President, CPG Company.¹

• Next, take steps necessary to build your customer knowledge graph. This will entail reframing your thinking from marketing funnel to customer pyramid and establishing goals that move audiences from unknown, to known, to well understood, as you increase your level of first-party data.  

• Finally, employ AI to accelerate new insight and learning capacity. With the world segregated between the data-rich and the data-starvedAI-haves and AI-have-notsthe companies who are left out or cut off from the data access will likely be disrupted into oblivion. 

2. Are you diversifying your portfolio?

Investments with platforms may have generated outsize returns over the past decade, but companies can no longer afford to risk relying on a small number of walled gardens. Just as disciplined investors diversify financial portfolios, so too must marketers act as disciplined data investors, diversifying their data portfolio to manage risk while balancing returns.

In practice, this will require companies to make decisions that feel riskier in the short term, while increasing the probability of success over the long term. Much as characteristics like agility and resiliency seem wasteful right up until the moment they are needed, as will a portfolio with a wider variety of players seem inefficient until the moment that adaptability, responsiveness, and self-determination prove critical. 

3. Can you activate customer knowledge across all relevant channels and touch points?

Most enterprise data remains scattered across silos. As you take ownership of data relationships and diversify your portfolio, it is imperative to connect your customer knowledge graph to and from all sales, service, commerce, and marketing channels.

Internally, this means building bridges across organizational functions and acting as a kind of “customer engagement champion,” taking on responsibility for customer experience management spanning organizational divides. Externally, this means partnering with open platforms that enhance customer knowledge and are committed to the open web. To drive personalization and AI-led interactions at each moment of the customer journey, it is important to access and manage your data in open, interoperable systems.

4. Have you redesigned how you build brands?

Marketers of the past could be brand-centered and idea-obsessed, but marketers of today must learn to be human-centered and experience-obsessed.

It seems deceptively simple, but the shift from “brand drives the experience” to “experience drives the brand” upends the decades of history, tradition, and superstition that make up the unwritten rules of marketing.

Cultivating lasting relationships will require an evolved set of written and unwritten rules. Marketers should aim for a virtuous cycle between customers and brands. Great experiences facilitate a fair exchange of data. Data enables deeper insight and greater personalization to improve the experience. Improved experiences facilitate greater trust and a larger exchange of data. Distinctively helpful experiences build uniquely beloved brands. In a world where customer relationships operate through personalization, automation, and journey orchestration, data-starved companies run the risk of losing to the competition. 

Summary

The responsibility of today’s CMO is no enviable task. Against the backdrop of shifting customer behavior, shrinking job tenure, and a fracturing ecosystem of media and technology partners, marketers often feel they are locked into an impossible dilemma.

Data autonomy is the key to unlocking this dilemma and paving the way forward to a more proactive and empowered future. By establishing agency over customer data, marketers can better understand customers, participate in deeper customer relationships, and build capabilities to innovate across the journey.

Data autonomy is poised to become a make-or-break achievement for marketers to succeed in the experience era. Marketers can no longer afford to risk relying on a small number of walled gardens, even if the benefits to date have been large. When experience drives the larger share of brand, it’s time to prioritize deep customer relationships.

Take your first step toward solving the Marketer’s Dilemma by going to the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform webpage and downloading the Data Autonomy: The Key to Digital Marketing Transformation PDF.

¹Keystone.ai Data Autonomy: The Key to Digital Marketing Transformation Era Mallick, Nimo Suleyman, Caroline Adelson, Cate Tompkins, Gayatri Nair, Ellora Sarkar, Mary Scarpulla, Tom Kudrie, March 2022

²Washington Ideas Forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, October 2010

³Appnovation, The Digital Consumer, Unnamed, February 2021

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