Where CX meets Technology - Intelligent Experiences

As the pandemic forced us to change our very way of living, consumer behavior also changed drastically. Overnight, many people who were “fence-sitters” when it came to transacting “online” were literally forced to online since in-person contact became the least preferred way of doing commerce. This online commerce forced organizations to really take a deep look at their customer journeys both online and offline. Digital Technologies, earlier often relegated to “coming in future” or “nice to have” became “essential” to survival. Retail was the hardest hit with this realization.

However, we find that now almost every area of the customer experience is being transformed by new technologies. Customers have evolved to anticipate new levels of perfection, performance, and just about everything in between as the possibilities of digital technology improve. Customers' expectations are continuously evolving; thus, the current customer experience must go above and beyond old customer care practices. Companies that give a meaningful but relevant experience that meets or exceeds their consumers' expectations will be successful.

To stay on top of these advancements and trends, we must grasp these new technologies and use them to communicate, interact, and promote in novel ways. Today's organizations need to discover the proper digital tools to provide a great customer experience, build brand loyalty, and drive sales growth. CX is taking advantage of today's technology and data to improve the entire customer experience. This involves sharing data amongst teams such as marketing and customer support, developing new roles to act on the data, and using new technologies such as AI, resulting in the implementation of a class of digital practices that leverage data to improve the whole digital trip for customers.

Leading firms in customer experience management are already utilizing these new technologies to achieve a competitive advantage. This ranking is topped by the utilization of artificial intelligence. According to one Research, by 2022, consumers would probably be handling 85 percent or more of their interactions with the organization without the need to be engaging with a human, at least for simple interactions. Many of the technological breakthroughs accessible to CX delivery teams are determined by how artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces, and robotic automation are implemented. There are two aspects to this. One is related to productivity and efficiency. By automating frequent and repetitive processes, these solutions save expenses and boost agent productivity. The other aspect, perhaps more important, is to do with delivering superior experiences through quick, efficient, and empathetic engagements during various segments of customer journeys. Conversational Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are another method for automating simple chores. Today's industry-standard chatbots offer an incredible step forward for organizations looking to automate and outsource easy, regular inquiries and interactions to an intelligent system, thanks to an algorithmic learning feature that allows it to learn from past discussions and adapt replies. Another widely used option, IoT, may boost a company's bottom line by cutting operational expenses, improving productivity, and assisting companies in expanding into new markets or developing new goods.

One technique, which seems to be gaining tremendous traction in understanding and delivering empathetic engagements, is speech analytics, which is being increasingly used to augment existing AI processes enabled processes by listening for heightened voice pitches and other emotional indications, analyzing the customer's sentiments, further contextualizing with backend order data and transferring them to an agent when appropriate. It also gives fresh sources of feedback by identifying emotional drivers and focusing on terms or themes that regularly provoke specific feelings.

Armed with this sentiment analysis technology and with comprehensive dashboards, agents can quickly acquire a full image of each client, their purchase history, and their expected goals for each engagement – and then take on a consultative role, alleviating emergent and even projected requirements as well instantly acquire a thorough understanding of each client. These new and continually growing technologies are assisting businesses not only to extend their client base but also to get a macro-level understanding of their customers. Adopting such technologies for one’s organization is providing a more competitive advantage over competitors that have yet to connect technology with customer experience.

For a few years, a huge focus of most of the organizations and service providers was to deflect a transaction or engagement towards a non-voice channel – with the hope that customers would find these easier and such channels also afford a lower cost to serve. However, as seen, most of the customers are not very comfortable using non-voice channels especially with an AI-powered bot behind the channel during a time of crisis or during a buying journey. In a country like India, literacy rates while climbing has also proved to be a challenge for a largely English-dominated non-voice channel scene. Hence, we see that voice is making a comeback, albeit in a different avatar for service providers! And Speech Analytics and related technologies are at the heart of this revolution.

This is not limited to service providers or call centers only! General use of such virtual assistants is happening on an increasingly wide scale. For example, Taxi and cab drivers in India are routinely seen using some form of voice-powered virtual assistant for doing routine things – hands-free! Mostly the interface is maps or google assistant. The next frontier in Speech-enabled virtual assistants would be real-time language translation capabilities, which would allow two humans to converse with each other even though they might speak different languages. 5G and increasingly powerful speech engines are the key. While we are far away from Star Trek’s Universal Translator, but such technologies, on a simpler scale can revolutionize the way we interact with each other and transact online.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for such technologies available through a variety of interface formats!

Virtual Assistants: Their Role in Superior CX & EX

The Digital era compels many companies to maintain continuous connections with their customers until the resolution of their queries or issues. As a result, with customer service as a top priority, the ideal customer experience allows consumers to communicate via the channel of their choosing while keeping the context of interactions intact. A limitless firm has a new operating system that incorporates a shift in thinking as well as the increased embrace of emerging technology. The conventional tethered and physical workflow is morphing into interactive customer communications through various digital channels.

The role of Virtual assistants is developing as businesses adapt to the Omni Channel experience which is increasingly being expected by their end customers. Though virtual assistants first appeared in the 1960s with ELIZA and IBM's Shoebox voice-activated calculators, this technology is now emerging as the go-to solution in the realm of customer experience.

A traditional virtual assistant may be conceived of as an application that responds to a user's voice or text command and does the work at hand. Emerging virtual assistants, on the other hand, are programs that integrate the use of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract information and complicated data from conversations in order to comprehend and process them.

Structured data with standardized rules can easily adapt to RPA solutions whereas unstructured data with less application of standardization utilized Cognitive automation, a virtual assistant is a next-level combo that can extract information and complicated data from a conversation using a voice and text-based interface.

Virtual Assistant algorithms develop the capacity to construct data models that detect and adapt behavior patterns by merging past data. With the inclusion of historical data, preferences, and other user information on a regular basis, a virtual assistant can answer difficult queries, offer suggestions and predictions, and even start a discussion.

Pre-programmed virtual assistants, which are more rule-based, with logic mapped out with a logical next step for various answers users might ask, are giving way to more complex and dynamic AI virtual assistants, which can be divided into two categories: NLP virtual assistants and machine learning virtual assistants. As a result, virtual assistants are becoming smarter by ditching automated chats and becoming more participatory, as seen by one of the most popular products on the market, Google Home, which knows each user's voice and issues a secure ID to each. The trend is also emerging to integrate different Virtual assistants, which can provide enhanced functionality to consumers and end-users.

However, there are certain privacy issues with AI-enabled virtual assistants that gather and retain user data indefinitely for better upgrades and user experience; this may be mitigated with strict data privacy rules from the corporations that provide this technology. After all, technology is a double-edged weapon that must be handled with caution.

Virtual Assistants have a chance to build a new digital workforce that will supplement human talents while also benefiting B2C and B2B end customers. Virtual assistant technology may be efficiently applied to external customer-facing use-cases using Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, assisting enterprises in meeting the demands of digital natives and growing omnichannel digital contact with Omnichannel digital virtual assistants. At the same time, with employee experience also becoming increasingly important in the delivery of holistic Total Stakeholder Experience, virtual assistants are playing an increasingly important role in enabling employees to perform their tasks with much more accuracy, speed, and efficiency. These assistants are used in a variety of formats including conversational text, guidance coaches, and even as “co-listeners” to a voice conversation and then providing guidance based on inferences derived from a vast database of previous interactions and persona-based profiling.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for virtual assistants available through a variety of interface formats!

Benchmarking Your CX Organization

 To develop your business, you must first improve the customer experience (CX)  that your business delivers to guarantee that your customers are well-served and have transformative interactions with your brand. For a fully connected, effortless CX that adds value to your consumers and business, you need a well-defined CX strategy and clear leadership.

It's good to see companies continuing to value customer experience as a key differentiator. Benchmarking assists businesses in understanding how these strategies and staff perform in comparison to rivals and what customers are truly saying.

Thus, for setting your organization up for long-term success, it's vital to take a critical step of Benchmarking.

The first step would be setting up KPIs such as Net promoter score, customer satisfaction scores, Customer acquisition and retention, Customer effort score, Average ratings across listing platforms, Volume and sentiment of online reviews, and Consumer engagement for Benchmarking Customer Experience that is important to compare to previous results both internally and outside.

Customer and Employees feedback - By interacting directly with your customers, blind spots in the organization can be identified and understood what’s not working.

Using reputation management software that uses natural language processing (NLP) can help you to evaluate client comments as one approach to gauge consumer sentiment. It might provide insight into the precise issues that need to be addressed in order to improve your client experience.

Another method is to use Voice of the Customer initiatives, which are aimed at gathering and evaluating customer feedback in order to find chances for operational or product changes, which helps to achieve the ultimate objective of increasing customer acquisition and retention.

Comparing the most recent available scores to these earlier scores can assist you to determine what is and isn't working with your client experience when you begin your benchmarking CX.

Competitive Advantage via Benchmarking – we must focus on our customer experience via Client satisfaction to create a loyal customer base and keep business away from our rivals. When we're evaluating our company's performance, look at how our rivals are doing via internet reviews and social media mentions to get a sense of how they're doing and what areas they're having trouble with. With this kind of study, we should be able to pinpoint areas where we can enhance our client experience and address some of their concerns, perhaps luring them to our company.

With at least one-to-one comparisons, the aim should be to figure out where your competitors are outperforming us, where we can improve, and how our customer experience stacks up against the competition.

Benchmark revenue measurements can reveal where our team spends more, less, or the same as comparable organizations of our size, and these insights can help us better allocate our company's resources.

Benchmarking in fact forces us to evaluate ourselves in comparison to other organizations in our industry, rather than our own prior success, and holding our firm to industry standards maintains the focus on becoming the best among competitors.

Identifying the relevant KPIs, gathering consumer insights, and evaluating our achievements against the industry are only the beginnings of a customer-centric organizational transformation.

Benchmarking and improving customer experience is a long-term marketing strategy which is a long-term investment after adoption

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

With an ever-expanding spectrum of digital technologies and tools at our disposal, the distinction between digital and physical customer experience is becoming increasingly hazy. For competitive marketers, digital channels are becoming increasingly vital in supporting their whole customer experience strategy.

In my opinion, companies will, increasingly, compete on customer experience as a focused area alongside their product or service, thus they will be prepared to pay more for a great customer experience.

A successful digital experience plan needs organizations to consider how digital interfaces fit into their customer engagement strategy, which utilizes customer data and provides businesses with customer insights to improve digital interaction across interfaces and boost customer retention.

In order to promote genuine gains, digital customer experience management must become an executive priority and fit with the overall business strategy. Delivering a seamless experience across individual customer contact points by leveraging unified communications as a service is a fantastic example of channel flexibility when consumers want to remain engaged with the same agent across digital channels.

This may be accomplished by deploying cloud management solutions that allow customers to switch between your brand's multiple channels, therefore addressing the growing need for response time, which customers rank as critical when they have a customer service query.

Companies must make the effort to completely map and understand their customer journey in order to increase customer engagement scores, where consumers are willing to share data with you in exchange for personalized experiences that make their journey easier, easy, and convenient.

When the objective is to decrease consumer friction and effort, it's critical to build complicated systems that simplify client interactions as every move in the firm has an influence on the consumers in some manner, hence companies must be aligned towards customer-centricity.

This is possible with the help of a specialized digital team that specifies alignment and synergies with other relevant business divisions. This team must define KPIs to push the organization's and culture's thinking toward digital transformation and customer experience, as well as simplify processes to generate efficiency and reduce redundancies.

When you simplify your digital journey and offer tailored digital experiences for your consumers, you achieve customer satisfaction with less effort, which leads to an increase in your customer lifetime value.

Brands that have a strong CX strategy make a concerted effort to connect company goals with these consumer expectations.