The Key to Maintaining CX Quality in a Down Economy
Ada is a Business Reporter client.
No business is immune to economic downturn, but automation can help minimize the negative impact on your brand.
Business is cyclical: There are times of growth and prosperity, and times of recession and hardship. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that we’re better off preparing instead of predicting. Changes will happen, and they will be outside of our control.
Brand growth shouldn’t be at the mercy of shifting economic trends. Many companies, especially startups, are reacting to the current decline of external investment by reducing costs, downsizing the workforce and, understandably, shifting the priority from customer acquisition to profitability.
Brands that previously relied on headcount to scale their CX may find themselves scrambling to figure out how to keep delivering the same—if not better—service to new and existing customers. To keep CX quality high with limited resources, brands need to personalize at scale with a human-first approach—which is challenging, if not impossible.
Poor CX costs businesses over $75 billion a year. And 67% of customers claim they would switch brands based on a negative experience.
Your best ally to be prepared for anything is automation. Businesses that are growing rapidly need to embrace automation to reduce their overhead, stay in the black and continue to grow. And they need to do it quickly.
Despite widespread adoption, some businesses still worry that people find automation annoying and unhelpful. The chatbot industry is expected to reach $102 billion by 2026, but most chatbot solutions can’t deliver the VIP experiences that customers expect.
The problem is that many of the solutions—or chatbots—out there don’t deliver the core of what brands need to scale effectively; typical chatbots are a Band-Aid fix. But done right, automation can increase efficiencies and reduce costs without compromising the brand experience.
The keys to rapid time-to-value of automation are:
- Defining the tasks best suited for automation and those that require a human touch, so agents can focus on the high-value interactions that drive more revenue and customer loyalty.
- Choosing a modern AI-powered platform that allows you to build personalized brand interactions without code or developer dependencies. This means that the non-technical staff that knows your CX best can design and deploy interactions across any channel and in multiple languages, within weeks.
- Quickly automating the bulk of your interactions by answering your customers’ most common, basic and repetitive questions. This provides your company with support around the clock and controls costs.
- Leaning on your automation solution to help you set and achieve clear business goals in both the short and long term. When the economy recovers, you’ll want to move from simply resolving common questions to providing personalized responses to more specific questions—facilitating action and anticipating needs based on customer intent.
Today’s leading AI technology allows brands to understand and act on consumer intent in seconds. Real-time analytics enable you to continually optimize the experience for each customer or employee. And APIs unlock deep customization, empowering internal teams to achieve business goals.
Protecting CX in the long haul relies on your ability to scale interactions up or down instantly. And this can only be achieved with the right automation platform that empowers you to craft your automation strategy to weather any storm, and enables you to execute interactions that are consistently high-quality, effective and satisfying.
It’s time to remove the Band-Aid and find a sustainable solution that doesn’t allow company growth and CX to be dictated by economic instability.
Learn how BFA achieved $2.7 million in annual savings using Ada’s Automated Brand Interaction (ABI) platform.
— Mike Murchison, Cofounder and CEO, Ada
This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.
Image: iStock id1367616997
