We live in a time of plentiful choices. Making the most of it, many organisations or start-ups in globally are creating their impact, in the shortest possible time, by means of integrating multiple channels of customer service in their businesses. These channels include phone support, email and chat support, social media support, or even text support.
Nowadays, integration of multi-channel customer services is one of the most important factors for a business to consider, due to many reasons. By providing a range of options to the customer, businesses in globally are attracting and growing their loyal customer base significantly. They build high value by affecting the way in which people are making purchase decisions nowadays.
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In addition, offering abundant choices to your customers is a forerunner for a business to maintain its presence, meet the customer needs round the clock irrespective of their location, and empower customers to take the right decision. To assist you further, let’s have a detailed look at the concept of multi-channel customer service.
Business Efficiency through Multi Channel Integration
Multi channel customer service holds huge potential in delivering business efficiency and excellent customer experiences. The customer experience offered by integrating a multi channel strategy creates a more personalised, optimised and responsive outlook of a business in competitive and transforming industries.
The primary channels that attract the maximum investment of various small or big organisations are 83% online or self-service – digital, 62% mobile apps, 34% email and surprisingly, 57% of investment is focused on the phone or voice channel while 18% towards face to face channels.
This clearly emphasises on the potential that opens up for a business with the integration of multi channel customer service. Along with that, the level of exposure of the customer base to your business improves, as you cater to the needs of your customers by all means, and without falling short of their expectations.
Are you increasing the investment in multi channel customer service this year, to attain higher business value in your particular industry?
If you too, plan to join the forces of digital transformation and differentiate your business from the existing competitors, then you must make the most of these consumer channel preferences, and make only the right decisions, most importantly in the right direction, to optimise your customer service experience.
The top most channels utilised by Australian consumers, to avail customer service, are through phone conversation – 62%, via self-service website – 41% and in person – 45%.
The Prospective Channels of Customer Service and their Importance
Organisations that believe in delivering exceptional customer support, reach out to their consumers through all of those channels where their customers are present. Thus:
If your existing customer base includes avid user of emails, opt for an instant email support.
If they like to reach your business on Twitter, make this platform as your potential channel of customer support to access your customers efficiently.
In continuation of the above stated Fifth Quadrant research, keeping a strong grip on all the available channels of customer support will be the only key factor in differentiating your business and moving it along to a true market leader.
Email: This is undoubtedly the most non negotiable channel for all types of businesses. Almost 91% of consumers utilise an email service, everyday. This is the easiest means of building instant rapport with your customer base.
Social Media: Social networks are now the most excellent means of accessing your customer and to grow your business. Companies who use social networks as customer support channels have 15% lower churn rates than the ones who don’t.
Self-service Knowledge Base: As the name depicts, the self-service knowledge base is extremely useful to help your customers get to know you better, without being present for their assistance, through a live channel of customer support. You can deliver exceptional assistance 24/7 with just a small team.
Voice or live Chat:Phone support is old-fashioned but considered as the fastest means of communication between your business and the customer base. In fact, phone assistance accounts for almost 68% of the speediest interactions. Similarly, 44% of customers say that having a live chat support during an online purchase creates a trustworthy relationship with the service providers and is accounted for, as the top feature a website could offer.
Multi Channel Customer Service – A mean of seamless consumer experience
Your customer wants to be able to contact you with whatever device they hold in their hands and that is what your business needs to do – make itself accessible, by all possible means, for your customer’s satisfaction.
Integrate many digital platforms and provide seamless consumer experience through different channels. If you manage to reach out to your consumer base through numerous channels, your business will be providing fantastic experience to its customers, which is hard to give up.
Gain more loyalty and trust with your instant customer service. Stay responsive to your customers and effectively provide them with updated information and flawless support.
In today’s fast paced and transforming world, a business that shows itself invested in providing exceptional support to its customers, by making the most of the multi channel customer service, will go a long way in building long lasting relationships with its customers and successfully make its mark.
There’s an industrial revolution under way in businesses across the world, and it is all about automation. Businesses are embracing machine learning and artificial intelligence to make better decisions automatically. And the reason for this revolution is the comparative strengths of humans and computers.
Computers are strongest at repetitive tasks, mathematics, data manipulation and parallel processing. So long as a task can be defined as a procedure, a computer can do that task over and over again, without getting tired, giving the same results each time. Computers can manipulate numbers and data in volume much faster than any human.
Several years ago I went back to university to do a masters degree, and after a 25 year break from university I was out of practice at mathematics. Imagine my excitement and relief when I discovered that now there is software that will do algebra and calculus for me! And computers can do more than one thing at a time. Have you ever tried to rub your belly and tap your head at the same time? I can’t do both actions simultaneously. But modern computer networks are powerful, able to routinely do dozens of different processes at once.
This does not mean that humans are obsolete. What humans are much more skilled than machines at are communication and engagement, context and general knowledge, creativity and empathy. When I have a frustrating problem, I want to talk to a human. Someone who will understand my exasperation, listen to my experience and make me feel valued as a customer, whilst also solving my problem for me. Humans are much better at common sense than computers, instantly recognizing when a decision doesn’t make sense. And humans can be creative. I recently heard music composed by a computer, and I’m sure that song won’t make it into the Top 40!
Customer Service
Recently I had a conversation with the manager of a call centre that dealt with hundreds of customer service issues each day. In order to ensure the quality of the service and advice, the call centre operators were given scripts and were commanded to follow those scripts without changing a word. The problem was that both staff and customers became frustrated. Staff felt bored and unchallenged, and customers with non-standard problems felt like they weren’t being heard. Staff turnover increased, and customer satisfaction levels dropped.
Customer Satisfaction
The manager then tested using chatbots to answer simpler questions from customers, freeing up the human operators to deal with non-standard enquiries. This was a situation where computers had a comparative advantage over humans. The call center processes were fully defined, operating at scale, and the scripted answers were correct. The results spoke for themselves. Computers were much better at helping with the repetitive enquiries, and humans were better at dealing with the unusual enquiries. Staff engagement increased, as did customer satisfaction.
This has implications for human resources and process innovation. Processes that require humans to do repetitive, well defined tasks can be replaced by artificial intelligence. This frees up staff to do what humans are best at:
asking the right questions,
applying common sense,
creating new solutions,
evangelising new ideas, and
generating sales and profit.
Let your humans be human. Free them from repetitive tasks. Change job descriptions to focus on human strengths, and hire people who best embody the comparative advantages of humans. Look for human processes that are well defined and repetitive, and enhance the process by introducing artificial intelligence. Some ways company have started to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their processes include:
There are even some companies out there that have started automating the automation, like DataRobot. Instead of hiring and training up a data scientists, the arcane process of building predictive models, once the sole domain of data scientists, can all be automated. The system automatically builds predictive models based on your data, freeing up your humans to be human, to be better conversational AI specialists.
Based in Singapore, Colin is the Director, Customer Success and Lead Data Scientist, APAC for DataRobot, where he advises businesses on how to build business cases and successfully manage data science projects. Over his career, Colin has held a number of CEO and general management roles, where he has championed data science initiatives in financial services, healthcare, security, oil and gas, government and marketing. He frequently speaks at various global conferences. Colin is a firm believer in data-based decision making and applying AI. He is passionate about the science of healthcare and does pro-bono work to support cancer research.
A must-read guide for enterprises with billions of conversations and millions of customers.
Modern call centre with millions of customers.
Enterprises are much more overwhelmed with conversations than ever before. Not only do they have to actively respond to customers over a myriad of channels like email, phone, social and livechat, they’re expected to give personal, relevant and fast responses. To tackle this problem, many organizations are looking at new technology to help them meet customer expectations. Some of the most notable are AI chatbots, self-service knowledge bases and good old Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. The problem? These all aim to lessen the time customers spend with agents.
While people do like self service for speed and convenience, majority still want to be able to talk to a person in times of need, or at important turning points in their life. Curiously, while we’re moving more towards a more digital and self-service world, most consumers still want the ‘human touch’ in their service communications.
Human touch is more important than just automation.
The challenge is to provide highly personalized and relevant offerings to meet both customer and business goals, all the while delivering the experience through the customer’s natural mediums of interaction. Counterintuitively, the likeliest solution to bring the human element back into customer conversations is though technology and big data. So, what should you look for in a technology that will give you both customer satisfaction and maximize revenue?
Multichannel Conversations
At the basics, an organization’s communication channels should be in one view. That means a business should be able to see and reply to customers by email, phone, livechat, social media, forums and wherever they could be talking to you, or about you, on one platform. Why? Convenience and transparency.
Convenient Conversations
A single platform for the entire range of conversation channels is much more efficient for customer-facing agents. Often, they have to switch between multiple channels to check for new customer interactions, and unfortunately, miss some communications here and there. With one view for conversations, they save on time, and reduces the chance they will miss communications from less monitored channels.
The convenience isn’t just for agents. Customers want to interact with brands through their medium of choice. 51% of U.S. consumers are loyal to brands that interact with them through their preferred channels of communication. Younger consumers especially, want to interact with large organizations via instant messaging channels where they can use natural language. Having all channels on one platform allows agents to have visibility across all channels, instead of doing well on a few and lagging on others.
Transparent Conversations
In so many organizations, a different team handles a different channel. They are responsible for that channel, and that channel only. But the customer is dynamic. They might reach out on one channel, and upon finding that it isn’t fast enough or substantial enough to resolve their problems, they will switch channels.
The ‘different team, different channel’ approach doesn’t account for the customer’s flexibility, resulting in multiple replies or inconsistent replies from two different people, both creating bad customer experiences. With multiple channels on one view, conversations are transparent. Conversations from the same customer are stitched together, and the same person can handle issues without making the customer’s journey difficult.
Holistic Customer View
In an enterprise with multiple departments, systems and channels, it’s necessary to have a collective view of the customer. A single customer view (or a 360 degree view) is a complete profile of a customer, created from aggregated data points within an organization’s systems and channels. It collates data from multichannel communications and customer data platforms (like CRMs, analytics, marketing and legacy systems).
Customers often complain about the lack of continuity in their conversations and having to repeat themselves. Problems like this arise because agents have no visibility on what customers have said on a separate channel, or what customer information exists on a separate system. As such, interactions are treated as a completely new “ticket”, and in the worst cases, existing customers are seen as a new customer. With a single customer view, an agent can see a given customer’s conversational, transactional and behavioral data in one place. This not only improves time-to-answer by 20% – 80%, it also ensures customer information flow is consistent and continuous, reducing awkward moments like the ones above.
The use of a single customer view can even go beyond customer care activities. Integrated systems mean that there could be a seamless blend of sales, marketing and service activities through conversation. Having this feature marks the start of being able to use critical sources of data collectively. The key however, lies in how the customer intelligence is used. The following presents ways customer intelligence can be used to take control of conversations in providing exceptional customer experience and maximize revenue.
AI-assisted agents
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in enterprises is not new. For decades they have been used to automate heavily manual processes to increase efficiency, accuracy and decrease costs. What is new, is the use of AI beyond processes to interactions. Use of AI opens up the potential to deliver personalized interactions and hyper-relevant offerings that are scalable.
Whether it’s the AI itself doing the talking, or an algorithm providing assistance to a human representative, online, or face-to-face, AI holds incredible potential to re-establish the human-to-human connection in an increasingly digital world. Check out some examples below.
Deliver relevant content and information with AI
Many organizations have invested heavily into user experience, self-service and knowledge management tools. Yet, it is still difficult and time-consuming for customers to find the right information when they need it. Companies like Zendesk have developed AI-powered virtual assistants that help customers self-serve. By processing natural language, the technology suggests articles in the knowledge base to help them resolve their problems on their own. Research has found that most people are open to using self-serve AI technology like this, and see it as faster and more convenient.
Other organizations like Woveon have built AI-powered response assistants to help agents have more productive conversations in real-time. As agents talk with customers, the response assistance helps guide conversations so better results can be achieved for both the customer and the business. It would suggest opportunities like ‘other customers like her also bought’, or ‘he mentioned credit cards, link to these articles from our blog to help him decide’.
Speed up resolution times
On average, a customer care specialist spends 20% of their time looking for information and context to resolve a customer’s problem. That’s one whole day in a work week! AI can help organize information so that it’s easily digestible and relevant to a customer’s enquiry. Woveon’s Intelligent Response framework for example, will change the information it displays to assist agents based on the flow of conversation. If a customer talks about their personal loan, their loan details pop up. If the conversation shifts to their lost credit card, their shipping details will surface and agents are prompted to cancel the lost card.
Instead of wasting time looking for information, AI assistance leave agents more time to build a relationship and take up on untapped customer opportunities. Customers also love a quick and productive interaction. 69% attributed their good customer service experience to quick resolution of their problem.
Reduce repetitive admin tasks to open doors for higher value interactions
Administrative tasks like After-call work (ACW) have been a constant headache for employees in customer-facing roles. Though they are necessary, it’s tedious, repetitive and and takes up too much time. Technology can help to reduce time spent on these menial tasks, leaving agents more time to build customer relationships and, in the process, make their jobs more productive and meaningful.
For example, Avaya has a natural language summarization tool to help agents process customer information post-call. Talkdesk automates call routing, where the customer is automatically paired with an agent with the best ability to solve their problem. Woveon can prioritize conversations real-time, based on customer importance, value, urgency, or a mixture of all factors.
Freeing up employee time away from menial tasks allow them to participate in higher-value activities.
Intelligent Analytics
There’s no doubt that data analytics is incredibly beneficial for customer conversations. The trick is knowing what data to use, how, and when.
Whatdata is being used matters because not all data is created equal. For example, rather than looking at metrics at a point in time (customer rated the agent 4 out of 5 for resolution), it’s much more important to look at the larger picture (that it took 3 calls and an hour on hold to get there).
Howdata is used is arguably more critical to conversational success. The key lies in knowing what datapoints to tie together, and what analysis to draw from it. A mesh of marketing and service data can show how a recent marketing campaign has affected conversation volume and NPS. A cluster analysis of related keywords in customer conversations can lead to discovery of a huge logistics flaw.
Whento use what data is of particular importance to customer-facing agents. 74% of Millennial banking customers for example, want their financial institutions to send them information about services exactly when they need to see it. This could be information about personal loans when they’re starting to look for a house, or travel insurance before they intend to travel.
Companies these days have a wealth of data on their customers. In theory, organizations should have the ability to know who they are, what they need and what makes them defect to another company. However, lack of visibility on the holistic customer journey and customer intelligence tools stunt their ability to provide such excellence.
The following section will delve into three types of analytics particularly useful for managing customer conversations — predictive, clustering and revenue-generating.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics provide foresight into potential customer problems and opportunities. Extracted from existing historical conversational, transactional and behavioral data, it can help agents better prepare for customer outcomes and trends.
A pretty common example is prediction of when influxes of customer conversations come in. For eCommerce businesses, holiday seasons generally see a spike in customer conversations and steadily reduces till the next holiday season. In a more complex scenario, predictive analytics can find that customers with a particular occupation, a certain concern and at a similar stage in their lives is actually a niche the organization hasn’t capitalized on.
Cluster Analysis
Now this one isn’t as common in a conversational technology, but is definitely worth mentioning. Cluster analysis involves conversations and customer information to be tagged, then for similar or related tags to be clustered together to draw insights.
Cluster analysis can draw out how topics in conversations can be relevant, or how particular customer segments can be feel about a product. This customer intelligence can then feed into other parts of the business. It could be used to help create a new automated customer workflow for upsells, or contribute to a new marketing campaign for a newly discovered customer segment.
Revenue-generating analytics
As repetitive and menial conversations are moving towards being solved by self-service solutions, agents must also move from a traditional support role to a hybrid service-to-sales model. This category of analysis is as the name suggests, analysis that serves to generate revenue for the business within conversations.
For example, Woveon’s Intelligent Response Framework suggests ways customer specialist representatives in banks can sell more products to their customers. A customer who fits the profile of ‘customers who typically get a black American express card’ will prompt a suggestion for the agent to talk the customer into an upgrade from their current card. A customer who is at a stage in their life where ‘customers like him are looking at buying a property’ will prompt a suggestion to link some home loan webpages, or a free session with a financial planner.
In the best possible scenario, this analysis is also delivered at the right time for an agent to capitalize on the opportunity, like in an intelligent response framework.
Be a data geek, not creep
Of course, it’s important to know that use of data should be “cool”, not “creepy”. There’s a fine line between the two that should never be crossed. Also, everyone’s fine line is drawn differently, so what one customer may think is cool, can be perceived as creepy by someone else.
Enterprises should have enough data about their customers to track and understand individual preferences, and see how customers respond to different use of their information at different points in the customer journey. Conversational intelligence and analysis tools can help create better relationships without overstepping the customer’s boundaries.
On a whole, customers don’t mind companies using their data for personalizing their experience and suggesting products and services that benefit them.
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While human contact is diminishing in volume, the quality and importance of each interaction increases. Forward-thinking organizations should be balancing quantity with quality to maintain a competitive advantage in customer experience. Technology can be a great booster to that end.
Have more ways you think businesses can improve on their customer conversations? Reach out to us to add to the article. We love chatting to like-minded people!
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is all the buzz right now, and rightfully so with the significant contributions it has made to redefining many aspects of business. However, many people are still skeptical about the application of AI and ML to enhancing customer experience.
Some would argue that machines cannot possibly take over customer service, something that has a heavy focus on human interaction. Machines lack the empathy and emotional intelligence core to providing a great customer experience. On the other hand, many also see the benefit of applying AI and ML to automate repetitive tasks, allowing humans to dedicate more time to, well, being human.
We reached out to some experts from Oovvuu, Canva and The Minerva Collective to pick their brains about the issue.
What is the current state of customer experience, and how do you see it evolve with AI & ML technology?
Present customer experience is “all over the place, with wildly varying results. Two customers using the same service can have completely different impressions of their experience, and in many cases the service is clunky and poorly structured” says Anthony Tockar, Data Scientist and Co-founder of The Minerva Collective. The unfortunate reality is that 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of poor service experience. In fact, companies only hear from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. With so much choice available to consumers, it’s much easier to find another company with similar offerings than spending time complaining or calling about a problem. Which is why there is a very real need to focus on customer experience, a factor that is becoming increasingly important to retain the modern customer.
Paul Tune, Machine Learning Engineer at Canva, believes “there are two trends in improving customer experience:
A trend towards tailoring for the individual, as more data is gathered about each customer at a large scale, and;
A trend towards providing a smooth experience for customers across multiple touchpoints by anticipating their needs. “
To demonstrate how customer experience has evolved, Paul continues with an example. “Early recommendation systems, such as the recommendation engines developed at Amazon and NetFlix in the early 2000s, provided recommendations at a much coarser level, chiefly for specific groups of customers. The granularity of recommendations in the near future is going to be much finer. For instance, an engineer from NetFlix I spoke to recently, mentioned that a subscriber’s favourite character for a TV series would appear in the menu when the TV series is selected. This means having to learn more about each customer and predicting their habits. We also see this in the form of smart personal assistants, such as Alexa and Siri” he says.
Ricky Sutton, Founder and CEO of Oovvuu, adds on that whilst AI and ML “certainly has an element to play [in customer experience], it also lacks a key element…empathy. So my thought is that it will evolve. The more AI is used, the more it learns and the better it gets, but human-level empathy remains a pipe dream for now.”
What is the biggest lesson you have learned from applying smart technology to customer experience?
For Anthony, the lesson has been the need for people using smart technology to properly understand it – “My experience is that people often don’t trust what they don’t understand. The latest technologies have been great for grabbing headlines, but only the most forward-thinking businesses are serious about applying them to derive value. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – domain knowledge is essential for good data science, and blindly relying on new approaches has many inherent risks. There is a lot that has been learned about customer experience over time and there is a need to explain smart technology to business people using the right language to allow them to fully realise its value.”
To Paul, what matters most, is the customer’s end-to-end experience. Meaning that all the touchpoints with the customer should be seamless. For him, “the challenge with integrating smart technology to improve user experience is similar to managing any other complex system: with more moving parts, there is a higher chance of failure in the system. Naively applying machine learning to improve customer experience is misguided. Machine learning works best if it is complementary to the customer experience, serving to enhance the experience of a great product.”
“At Canva, our goal is simple: we want to give the customer the best experience in empowering them to create and design. To that end, there are two aspects that we focus on. Firstly, how do we make the content that they need for their designs easily accessible. Secondly, how do we anticipate what resources might be helpful for them in the future. We achieve these goals by improving our search and recommendation services to enhance customer experience.”
The biggest lesson for Ricky is that “AI turns humans into super-humans, but only for certain tasks.” – “When we started Oovvuu, we hired editors to read articles and find relevant videos, and they were able to read one publication each and find 40 relevant videos per day. That same person using the AI tools that we created, can now read 100,000 publishers, and 300,000 stories a day, covering 26 million topics and find relevant videos from more than 40 global broadcasters. AI is mind-blowingly powerful for automating manual human tasks, but humans remain better at all the things that, well, make us human.”
What are some challenges for businesses who try to integrate AI & ML technology and customer experience?
Anthony, Paul and Ricky all agreed that a huge challenge for businesses is not having a solid data infrastructure, or a deep understanding of what exactly should be measured to achieve business goals and customer satisfaction.
“Many companies approach us seeking to use conversational AI as a ready-made silver bullet for a business problem. Others come to ask to play with AI, so they can find a business opportunity. Neither really works.” Ricky said. “For us, the solution was to know what business problem we were trying to solve: namely, to put a relevant video into every article being published worldwide. We then used AI to solve it, but what we started with was very basic and not up to the job. We have had a team nurturing the teaching for almost 1,000 days to get it where it is.”
Anthony went on to add that “there is no silver bullet – good data scientists are required to translate these algorithms into business value. Having a solid data science strategy is essential, and through good leadership, increased data literacy and an understanding of how to build a high-performance data science team, businesses can harness these technologies to forge a competitive advantage.”
Paul concludes with another common challenge many businesses face when adopting AI & ML into their processes – the volume of data. “Present machine learning techniques rely on a relatively large amount of data to provide good predictions” he says. “While there is fundamental research being carried out presently to (hopefully) reduce the amount of data required to train these machine learning models, the current main technological limitation of requiring a huge amount of data is here to stay for the foreseeable future.” But “fortunately, this effect can be mitigated if the data collected is of sufficiently high quality.”
Are you implementing AI and ML technology in your business? Share your story with us in the comments below!
About the Contributors
Anthony Tockar
Anthony is a leader in the data science space, and has worked on problems across insurance, loyalty, technology, telecommunications, the social sector and even neuroscience. A formally-trained actuary, Anthony completed an MS in Analytics at the prestigious Northwestern University. After hitting the headlines with his posts on data privacy at Neustar, he returned to Sydney to practice as a data scientist while co-founding the Minerva Collective and the Data Science Breakfast Meetup. He also helps organise several other meetups and programs for data scientists, in line with his mission to extend the reach and impact of data to help people.
Paul Tune
Paul Tune is a Machine Learning Engineer at Canva, responsible for developing solutions for tailoring and personalising content for Canva’s customers. He has several publications in prestigious computer science conferences and journals, including the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 2015. His interests include deep learning, statistics and information theory.
Ricky Sutton
Ricky is founder and CEO of Oovvuu, an IBM and Amazon-backed start up that uses artificial intelligence to match videos from global broadcasters with publishers worldwide. It’s mission is to use AI to insert a relevant short form and long form video in every article. In doing so, it aims to tell the news in a new and more compelling way, end fake news, and in doing so, repatriate billions from Facebook and Google back to the journalists and broadcasters who make the content.
Recently I wrote an article for LinkedIn titled “Can we maintain the human touch with customer service?” I couldn’t help think about how fast we are moving with Artificial Intelligence that the question still remains, I am not worried about 5 years from now or what new customer interactions will be digital, but how will businesses maintain the reality check with their customers? Surely digital chat bots and automated ticketing systems will ask random customers surveys about what they thought about their service response and the level of happiness to refer another customer. To implement is very easy but to keep the human connection with your customers will be the challenge.
Deliver Smarter Customer Service Solutions
At Woveon, we watch and analyse through thousands of conversations all uniquely handled by diligent customer service agents who, assisted with technology, work tirelessly around the clock to acknowledge, understand, listen to and resolve the incoming customer conversation. Clearly customer service has the human touch here! Even with today’s conversational AI technology surpassing standards in reliability, accuracy and now business intelligence the human touch in AI must not be far away? This is an important consideration looking at the technology landscape today, companies are working on delivering smarter customer service solutions, from chat bots that understand your sentiment and can adapt to your tone and writing style to automated enquiry systems that can help recommend products while you shop online. Yet still, customer service and particularly conversation management is still a human “touch”, something that is defined intrinsically in the term “customer experience”.
Let’s take the example of creating an outstanding customer service experience. Data tells us that outstanding customer service increases brand loyalty. Examples include begin a conversation with a podcast, send personal messages, create a lifestyle and get back to your customers. We’re not talking about getting back to your customers via a bot or automated reply email, but rather using an actual person who understands your customers and can understand the fine details and semantics of human feelings. Remember, customer service is all about listening to your customers and putting yourself in their shoes. Great customer service professionals can quickly adapt and understand the customer’s frustrations and calm their emotions. Being present and responding quickly in human is very different to doing this via a scripted automated response. However, in the enterprise world, a study by Oracle put it at 8 out of every 10 businesses who are already implementing or about to implement AI as a customer service solution by 2020. Nearly 40% of all enterprises are already using some form of AI technology with Forrester predicting a 300% increase in AI investments, the disruptive power of AI will impact every part of the business from customer service to sales and support. So are businesses going ahead at this the wrong way?
Having interviewed several CTOs and CMOs working with the technology, there is no rushing into the game looking for the holy grail. For most, the best step moving forward is in assistive and adaptive technology or to assist with data collection and analysis. AI technology is encapsulating more and more human qualities as technology advances. Bots are often deployed to collect data based off human input and use it to optimise the customer’s experience. This is particularly applicable to personalisation. Human teams then need to help filter, sift through and make sense of all the personalisations so the system can make better judgements in the future. Artificial intelligence predicts and prioritises the user’s interests according to their searches and similar inputs given by other users. This, when compared to the pros of human service, has similar benefits to empathy and experience. For example the human touch can continue on more serious, complicated customer challenges whereas standard, mundane everyday enquiries can be handled by AI bots. An example is AI assistance to lessen waiting periods for customer inquiries. KLM, the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands, used DigitalGenius’ AI system to answer customer’s questions faster. The AI units interpreted the questions and answered them with a quick edit of the preformed answer to relate directly to the language used by the customer. It was also able to adapt to the platform for the inquiries, pumping out longer responses to emails but limiting Twitter responses to 140 characters. Digital customer service seems to be directed towards matching human interaction but with the removal of prominent flaws.
So can we maintain the human touch in customer service? Having been a product manager and worked in technology since the first dot com (no I am not that old, I was just young when I first got into technology), we can expect to see customer service significantly enhanced with AI bringing the human touch to a new level. The amount of data that AI and ML will help sift through to help “advise” and “suggest” to a customer service team will break new boundaries. Customer service teams can then be deployed to work on escalated or prioritised items that result in a big sale or help close the deal. Customer service, intuitively is tied closely with the human touch, a computer cannot learn years of successful customer interactions without first being taught and guided by humans. This is a realistic fact.
The hype around Artificial Intelligence technologies is at its peak. According to the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and virtual assistants are at the “peak of inflated expectation”. Cognitive expert advisors have passed this peak and are now descending towards the “trough of disillusionment”. This occurs when interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.
The benefits of AI for customer experience management are potentially game changing. AI has the capability to analyse vast amounts of data in real time from various sources, including human behaviours and emotions. Expectations are high because this capability can then be used to create seamless and personalised customer experiences that are optimised to the device and channel of choice.
Pragmatists and battle hardened cynics will recall that when automation was first introduced into customer service channels, the results were often spectacularly underwhelming. So, is the application of AI to customer experiences destined to fall into the trough of disillusionment before climbing the slope of enlightenment? Or is there a path to follow to avoid the pitfalls of unmet expectations?
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Intelligently using Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience
In order to find out whether the application of AI to your business’ customer experience will take a downturn, it is necessary to first ask yourself: What is driving your organisation’s AI strategy? Is it because:
AI is all the rage in your industry and your organisation is fearful of being left behind?
If you take the lead in implementing AI, it will make you look smarter/cooler than your colleagues?
It sounds like a cool and fun toy to experiment with?
Your organisation needs to catch up with your competitors who have been early adopters of AI?
AI is a great opportunity to reduce the cost to serve our customers?
If the answer to any of the above is Yes, then the trough of disillusionment beckons.
Alternatively, if you are deploying or considering AI because…
AI can enable your people and optimise your processes to operate more intelligently and efficiently, in order to provide individualised and predictive experiences for your customers at scale
…..then a brighter future awaits.
For these technologies to have any chance of success you should have a clear sense of purpose of how to you intend to deploy AI to drive CX in your business. Here are three ways you can use AI in a purposeful way to create meaningful customer experiences.
1. Use AI to Enhance your Knowledge of the Customer
An example would be using data analytics to anticipate the needs of individual customers at each moment of truth and key stage of their journey. Some specific examples oh how businesses are using AI to enhance customer knowledge:
2. Use AI to create stronger emotional connections with your customers
Using AI to recognise a customer’s emotional state helps agents better respond to the customer during an interaction, thereby creating stronger emotional connections.
Not only can AI empower agents with emotional intelligence to reply appropriately to customers, it can be used as a tool to connect service agents with the right information in the organisation’s knowledge base in real time. Examples of why this can be powerful to a business:
As a result, nearly two thirds of CX leaders say their organisation’s revenue growth outperforms their industry counterparts, compared with only a quarter of CX laggards. The proof is therefore clearly in the pudding: when applied in a purposeful and meaningful way, AI technology can enable organisations to increase agility and overcome competitive threats and leverage this advantage to drive acquisition.
Written by Dr Steve Nuttall – Head Of CX Research, Fifth Quadrant. Steve has worked in various leadership roles as a market research insights professional for over twenty years in Europe, Asia and Australia. He leads Fifth Quadrant’s program of CX strategy research and is an international speaker and presenter on best practice customer experience. Steve assists organisations to deliver their customer-centric strategies and business performance goals including designing and implementing programs to help optimise the customer experience.
Sometimes perfection fails to exist at an individual level; but when individuals who are not perfect, come to work together as a team, they can create magic. For a team to succeed it does not require flawless employees with everything being perfect. It just requires a bond between workers which allows them to work together to provide fruitful results.
Customer support is an important aspect of business which helps in turning every customer into an advocate for the brand. Even for brands that do not have high sums of money up their sleeves, customer support is a method they can employ to out-support the competition they cannot out-spend.
A great customer support team is an amalgamation of numerous shared characteristics and vision.
Here are some qualities that make a great Customer Support Team:
Operate as a Company
For a brilliant customer support team, their work is just not limited to a department. They work for the company and as the company. We have seen and heard of countless instances where customer support teams have saved the day for an organization at the hour of need. A customer support team vying to achieve greatness should think of themselves as representatives of the company to the outside world.
It is them, who is in contact with customers 24/7. Top level management is not present at all times, and they have to make instant and result-oriented decisions in the heat of a moment. The liberty to make these decisions should be provided, which would help the team keep the interests of the customer above anything else.
Everyone Should be Kept Updated
Another important trait of a successful customer service team is to keep everyone within the team in the loop. Unity comes from clarity. There is bound to be friction and differences within team members if information is provided to only a few and hidden from the rest. Everything should be laid down in front of all team members, and all the team members should be directed towards achieving the goals in unison.
Study Data Carefully
Customer trends are every-changing, as there is no single trend which can be called everlasting. To remain on track with all recent and updated trends, it is best to study trends and reach conclusions based on the fluctuations. The latest trend in customer service is that customers want to know how their concerns and feedback are being addressed by the organization.
Many a times, organizations ask customers to give their feedback, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. Customers that provide the feedback now want to know how exactly it is being catered to. Have their concerns been taken care of? Are there any incentives being offered on the feedback? These questions need to be answered for the customers to trust the organization. A customer support team, wary of all the latest trends and details will realize what the customer exactly wants and will deliver that to them. On the contrary, another team which fails to do the homework will not provide the customers with what they want and would later rue the low conversion rates.
Know How to Turn Complaints into a positive Experience
A good customer support team should know the art of turning a complaint or a bad experience into a positive experience. They should know that customers calling in with complaints are not frustrated with them but are just irritated because of the situation.
There are two ways of handling a complaint. You can either worsen the situation even more with ignorant reasoning or you can give the customer the understanding they require and go towards finding a solution with mutual agreement. The latter is without a doubt the better stance and an trademark of great support teams.
Handling a complaint might look like a hassle, but there are few directions you can follow to reach consensus. The CARP formula is considered as the best method of effectively solving a complaint and turning into a positive experience for both the company and the customer.
Control by owning the situation
Acknowledge problem or the issue
Refocus the conversation
Problem solution
Reach Out to the Level a Customer Wants
The worst customer support teams are those, which follow a script and do not do anything out of their comfort zone. A customer support team should know when and how to step out of their zone and to reach out to the customers level. This is exactly where the team’s communicative skills come into perspective. They can be developed and coherently taught during training sessions. Instead of using negative connotations such as ‘We can’t’ the team members should use phrases such as ‘Here is what we can do for you or offer you.’ With the proper use of positive terms, the customer will feel at ease and eventually adjust to the warm conversation.
Wondering how to generate more leads successfully? You just have to go where the people hang out. With 1.23 billion users on Facebook and 271 million users on Twitter, you clearly have to make your presence felt on social media. Not only is it the most effective means of business promotion, but is also very cost-effective. If you know to how to effectively leverage this medium to your advantage, you can retain your customers and attract new ones. Interacting with your customers directly and fostering relationships results in your loyal customer base expanding. Polls indicate 63% of small business owners find social media an effective source of promoting their business and that it is a successful means of creating more loyal customers.
Below are the Ways on How to Utilize Social Media to Enhance Customer Service
1. Regular Interaction with Customers
You probably already have a social media profile on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. However, in order to interact with your customers, you must have a separate social networking profile for your business.
2. Start Blogging
Create a blog for your business to share news about new products, latest promotions, or simply share useful information related to your products or services.
Related: Blogging — Just What Your Business Needs To Boost Your Online Marketing
3. Ask For Feedback and Respond To It
Encourage your customers and followers to give your feedback regarding your services and products. Create polls and surveys and ask your followers, friends, and regular customers to provide feedback. Furthermore, it is essential to always respond to whatever feedback you get from your fans or followers. If there is any complaint, immediately act on it and provide solutions to the customers. Ask for suggestions. This will make the customers feel important and involved, subsequently resulting in an increase in their loyalty towards your business.
4. Regularly Monitor Online Feedback
There are several other mediums online where your customers can give feedback about your services and products besides your official website, blog, or social networking profiles. You must be aware of what individuals are saying about your products and business. Use tools or search engines like Google Analytics to look for reviews and feedback.
5. Know Your Competition Better
Keep an eye on review sites where people provide their feedback about products and services they used. This is not merely to see what people are saying about your business but also to know what they are saying about your competitors and determine what you can do to improve your business. For example, if they are providing special offers which the consumers love then maybe it is a wise idea for your business to launch a special offer as well.
6. Understand the Needs of Your Customers
If your customers are regularly sending your queries or complaints, then maybe it is time to really look into the problem and find its root cause. Change or modify the processes, if needed, to satisfy the needs of your customers. For example, you can add a FAQ section to answer the most regularly received queries.
Through social media, you can effectively promote and market your business in order to reach maximum number of your customers. It is better to have a strong social media plan to ensure that your business maintains a positive presence on the web and bring positive results for your business.
A customer service team which values its customers usually correlates to successful and profitable businesses. Companies such as Amazon, Zappos and Dollar Shave club immediately come to mind. And while the task is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, there are some customer service teams which pride themselves on their ability to churn out brilliance despite being kept on their toes by picky and hard-to-please customers. With internet customer service growing rapidly, managing all the various facets of customer service can indeed be a hassle. Despite the complexities present, there are a few organizations which have risen up to the challenge and have catapulted over all hurdles to provide exemplary customer satisfaction. Here we take a look at some of the busiest and world class customer service teams during the last couple of years.
10 Companies with Incredible Customer Service Teams
1. Amazon
Amazon boasts of a customer service team extended over numerous channels. It is indeed their ability to provide immeasurable assistance to customers throughout their buying process, which ranks them as one of the best customer service teams.
With a refund policy that exudes perfection and a transparent shipment process, Amazon is one of the few organizations that value customer satisfaction as a primary goal moving into the future. With their recent stand against incentivized reviews, Amazon is currently a darling among customers of all kinds looking for genuine products. Their emphasis on customer service has resulted in consistent growth in revenues and reputation.
2. Spotify
Webby Awards have been known to honour organizations which provide ‘excellence on the web’. For the last two years, there has been one specific company which has stolen the show. With the best customer service award from Webby under their belt, Spotify has proved to be revolutionary in the way it handles its internet customer service.
Customers have not shied away from posting their admiration of SpotifyCares, which is a separate customer support team from the music giant. With such brilliant customer service, Spotify has indeed built a reputation – a reputation which will reap fruits in numerous sales opportunities down the line.
3. Apple
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs believed that success was guaranteed if the start is made from focusing on customer experience. Whatever product you market, make sure that you do not compromise on the experience of the end consumer. By providing customer service which has perfection written over it, Apple has inspired unbelievable loyalty to its brand.
The employees at all of their workshops have a positive attitude and discuss product details with customers more like fans of Apple than employees of the company. Not only is the after sales service engaging, but the internet customer service provided by Apple is well above par.
4. Dollar Shave Club
What makes a recent start-up rank among the organizations offering the best customer service? Just recently Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for $1 Billion. Dollar Shave Club does offer great products, but it is their brilliant customer service which attracted the likes of Uniliver. They boast of funny and playful ads which captivate user interest in a single beat. With their ads and customer service campaign, Dollar Shave Club has achieved customer loyalty no one would have expected.
5. Zappos
A service company, with the motto of selling ‘ shoes and lot more,’ Zappos has put the needs of its customers above anything else. The Zappos team has on numerous occasions displayed proficiency in caring for all their customers irrespective of how little or big their problem. With Zappos well on its way to establishing a brand that will last for a long time, the customer service team deserves all the credit for this meteoric rise.
6. Nordstorm
Much like Zappos, Nordstorm is also well known for a few occasions when their customer service team went out of the box to think up creative ideas. With growth on the cards, their customer service team has a very important role to play in the future.
7. Samsung
Samsung, the tech giant must be appreciated for improving its once-flawed customer services. By investing in its team and realizing the benefits of customer service, Samsung is on the right track.
8. Google
One sure thing about Google is that it goes to borderline insane levels to check every single feature of its products before they are implemented. Their success cannot be doubted, considering their special emphasis on users and their preferences.
9. FED EX
The air freight company has displayed perfection in maintaining its reputation of taking care of all packages and instruments. From regular packages to a 320-pound sea turtle, FED EX has always made sure to surpass customer expectations.
10. Trader Joe’s
They do not boast of the most comprehensive range of products, but this retail’s emphasis on providing just what the local community wants, placing them on top of the ladder for customer services. Trader Joe’s started with a limited amount of products and stock levels, but eventually they started catering to what the people living in the local community wanted. By placing customer needs on top Trader Joe’s has certainly set a brilliant benchmark.
Brilliant customer service teams do not compromise on customer experience. For them, nothing comes in between delivering the perfect product or service to the customer.
Think that maintaining the confidentiality of consumers is only a consideration for business giants like Sony or Facebook? Think again.
In recent years, numerous small and big organizations have not only lost their customer base due to privacy issues but were also sued due to these privacy mishaps. In the modern world, organizations are, morally as well as legally, obligated to deal with the private information of their customer base fairly and respectfully.
Customer Privacy: Comcast Vows to Respect Consumers’ Privacy
Comcast – a big name in global telecommunication recently pledged respect for the private information of the customers. The giant decided to distance itself from ISPs like Verizon or AT&T that lobbied the Congress to dissolve internet privacy protection.
Complying with federal privacy protection laws, Comcast first supported the removal of newly-imposed regulations. However, it clearly stated that it has no intention of selling the customer’s histories or web browsing data, and will ensure the privacy of consumers’ data.
Wonder how Google always show results and advertisements that match your current or existing interests?
Just by visiting a website, you may be unwittingly sharing your personal information, in terms of your IP address, the page that led you to this current website and the websites you have been visiting over and over again, or the searches you have been making over the internet.
And by collecting cookies and with various advanced tracking mechanisms, companies are gathering enough information to shift user priorities and experiences pretty easily, and without directly communicating with the end user.
Eventually, what you are most likely to find on the webpage in terms of advertisements, news, and updates is everything related to your current interests!
So isn’t it good to get such kind of personalization as a user?
Yes, it is, except in the situation when your personal information is misused, through various means and for many reasons. There is a lot of consideration, amongst many big and small start-ups in Australia, for the privacy issues and what users are actually risking while reaping this kind of personal experience.
With the increasing level of awareness amongst users about this cyber threat, companies are now forced to shift their business strategies to maintain the confidentiality of the information along with meeting their customers’ expectations.
Consumer Privacy as part of an Organisation’s Business Strategy
Every business strategy is now focusing on keeping customer privacy as their prime consideration in establishing laws and policies. Some businesses, however, fail to understand the importance of the data acquired by them, as well as the risks attached, and the responsibility that lies on their shoulders for its protection.
With the endless possibilities of using this data, consumers’ data is one of the most effective tools and a golden opportunity for companies to build their goodwill. Majority of the time, businesses take consumer privacy in account, only after witnessing an incident, which is why many organizations in Australia, are now changing the way they do business – keeping a good and fair balance between marketing strategies and protecting consumer privacy.
To keep it all transparent, companies are now also making these moves;
Better and clear communication of the organization’s privacy policies through different channels and ways that would keep it easy for customers to understand.
To foster trust, companies are now striving to ensure that a secured online environment is provided at all times.
Giving customers a better choice through various features and permission options, about sharing their private information or allowing collection of their data. Many websites are now including well-designed opt-out pages to give full control to the user for allowing or declining the collection of data.
Company websites are now using short term cookie timelines, also making the collected data anonymous frequently. Creating anonymous data requires masking of IP addresses and cookie identifiers, after a short while, or storing the information related to the account separately from the logs, to ensure improved security and privacy for their users.
There are some privacy changes coming soon, in the next year, and organizations in Australia must be ready to adapt to these changes that establish a strong control of consumer privacy.
Some of these changes may include;
Data breach notification is becoming mandatory from February 2018, for all organizations/entities, which are required to act in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988. Following that, in May, the GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation – is also coming into force.
Together, both of these amendments, or let’s say requirements, are going to demand fundamental changes in all Australian organizations, in terms of handling consumers’ personal information, also setting the stage to introduce some of the largest privacy regulation changes in the last decade.
Based in Singapore, Colin is the Director, Customer Success and Lead Data Scientist, APAC for DataRobot, where he advises businesses on how to build business cases and successfully manage data science projects. Over his career, Colin has held a number of CEO and general management roles, where he has championed data science initiatives in financial services, healthcare, security, oil and gas, government and marketing. He frequently speaks at various global conferences. Colin is a firm believer in data-based decision making and applying AI. He is passionate about the science of healthcare and does pro-bono work to support cancer research.
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