As we enter into a new decade, the focus is on increased customer retention through improvements to the customer experience. Success will come to businesses that provide not only a meaningful but relevant experience that meets or exceeds the expectations of their customers.
As the abilities of digital technologies develop, customers, have started to expect new standards of excellence, performance, and pretty much about everything in between.
In today’s digital world, exciting new technologies like virtual reality, big data, live video connectivity, cloud computing, and intelligent chatbots are redefining the way in which companies connect with their customers.
Staying on top of these developments and trends will involve mastering these new innovations and utilizing them to communicate, engage, and promote in innovative ways. Those businesses that are willing to adopt creativity offered by technology and go beyond the ‘norm’ will stand out from competitors and provide their customers with richer customer experience.
- Artificial intelligence
As per the Research presented by Gartner, customers will manage 85% of their relationship to the company without interacting with any human, by the end of the year 2020. Presently we are seeing many of the technological advances available to contact centres come down to how you choose to implement artificial intelligence and robotic automation. These applications reduce costs and increase the productivity of agents by automating common and repetitive tasks. Customers are empowered to quickly and easily solve their own transactional issues; however, it is important that the use of artificial intelligence be transparent to them as part of establishing credibility and trust.
- Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots are one way to automate simple tasks. Successful chatbots are constantly fed by powerful datasets that collate huge amounts of data taken from various company-wide systems. The stock of answers of a chatbot is only as good as its store of prior customer interactions, common questions and their answers, and documentation of successful problems resolutions. Nevertheless, CCW recently found that implementing automated engagement tools like chatbots and voicebots are among the top priorities of a business.
- Speech-enabled Voice Recognition
Natural language processing and understanding functions permit customers to have complete conversations with bots, which provides another method of handling common interactions and letting live agents spend their time helping customers with more complex issues.
- Speech Analytics
As we know, every interaction with clients is not normal or calm. Speech analytics capabilities can overlay other AI processes to listen for elevated voice pitches and other emotional signs, assessing the feelings of customers and transferring them to an agent when appropriate. Speech analytics can also provide new sources of feedback, revealing emotional drivers and zeroing in on keywords or topics that consistently elicit certain emotions.
- Channel Integration
Customers need to be able to switch easily between channels, depending upon their own context such as where they are, what action they want to take, what device they’re using, etc. Moreover, channel integration is not just a tool for improving customer experience, but also an important component of improving your work experience of your employees. However, seamless, or omnichannel, integration is something of a contact-centre holy grail because of the extreme complexity of successfully combining the activities of all available systems and channels in real-time. An agnostic solution that rides over the top of all your existing systems and draws up-to-the-second information from all of your channels, aggregating data and matching it to your customer identifiers is one to strive for.
- Location-Based Computing
With location service technology turning into standard functionality on smartphones, today many individuals are walking around with location service enabled gadgets in their pockets than ever before. This presents interesting opportunities that companies can explore to offer more personalized services to customers in a way that enhances the customer experience.
Example;
- Location-Based Promos – Companies are already using Location-based services to reach out to customers at a particular geographical location with personalized offers based on their location, such as theatres, and other such venues can target consumers in their vicinity and provide them with last-minute offers on tickets and products.
- Navigation Services – Companies have launched an application which allows customers to navigate their large warehouse-like stores, helping them find products faster and easier.
- Video Chat
Sometimes it is not enough to read or hear about the issue of a customer, sometimes it is more effective to be able to see it. Providing visual customer support can cut straight to the root of a problem and get it solved in an efficient, frictionless manner that will also turn your casual customers into loyal customers of your brand.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.