The 2014 Gartner Customer 360 Summit delivered quite a bit of insightful material this year, all geared toward improving customer experience processes and business strategy. Want to know what true customer experience and effective management are? Answers and notable takeaways from the Summit below.

• Understand the top customer initiative challenges. Gartner lists these as: systems that have different sets of data and information, producing a vision for customer experience, effectively managing customer data and information, full comprehension of IT’s role in the customer experience, defining processes, cross collaboration between marketing, customer service and IT, designing a good CRM strategy and deployment of the technology.

• Data must be consistently read and reviewed. Through the use of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), all customer experience data must be disseminated throughout the organization to improve the customer experience. This is done to fully understand their wants and needs, taking the information to heart in order to develop systems that engage and comprehend customer complaints. The company should know who is complaining, what they are complaining about, and why.

• True Customer Service includes informed, motivated agents who are empowered to meet their goals to deliver a high standard of personal attention. A true customer service driven company demonstrates through action, while a poor customer service driven company does not.

• Social Customer Service is total engagement, which includes developing relationships, understanding, data gathering and sharing with colleagues to build brand loyalty beyond the listen and response action. Engaging customers must be a 360° process, sharing their purchasing habits and what they may need according to those purchases.

• Mobile processes are key. This includes engagement and service through mobile engagement for effective results. There must be dialogue via all channels, flexibility in the business model, good data analysis and reporting, effective content management and effective techniques in place to reach mobile customers.

Customer experience has always been a high priority at OneReach, and we’re glad these results reflect the importance of that. Engaging customers through the channel of their choice, whether it’s text or otherwise, is an industry standard that matters to us.

Overall, these insights have outlined what customer service management should encompass, and the challenges businesses have in delivering it. Creating a valued customer experience through active engagement can retain customers and build a strong customer base to enhance brand loyalty. This means that companies must take the customer experience seriously to gain traction within their market.