Three Reasons to Invest in CX
In times of economic headwinds, the natural inclination is to conserve resources and trim expenses. In reality, now is the best time to invest in your customers by elevating your brand experience to attract new business and boost loyalty.
Despite inflation, layoffs and nonstop speculation about a looming recession, consumers are still spending money. What’s changing is how and where they spend, with an increasing number opting for brands that reflect their values. Whether purchasing a physical product or an experience, everything surrounding that purchase—from the initial search and discovery to the packaging and who the customer interacts with—must deliver on their values.
The challenge is that values vary from consumer to consumer. To win in today’s economy, brands need to distinguish between these customers and provide a relevant and personalized experience to each.
Consumers are spending, and the right CX ensures they spend with you
Today, this is more easily achievable than you may realize. Nearly every brand has a mechanism to capture the interactions they have with their customers across all touchpoints. There isn’t a consumer conversation or scenario—across all brands and industries—that hasn’t already been recorded, and more are documented every day. This data may not yet be utilized, but the records and the information exist. AI can analyze these interactions to create personas, flows and automation opportunities that accurately assess a customer’s values and deliver an optimal experience.
Businesses across all industries are reaping the benefits of this strategy. For example, during the pandemic, countless homeowners wanted to refinance their mortgages and take advantage of lower interest rates, and banks struggled to handle all of the inquiries. One bank utilized AI to analyze the interactions between homeowners, agents and chatbots to reveal specific questions customers asked and exactly what constituted a successful interaction. With these insights in hand, the bank updated its self-service prompts to address specific personas and tweaked its customer journeys to ensure successful outcomes. This has reduced the volume of queries to inundated agents and created more successful self-service outcomes for homeowners, who have smoother and easier access to the information they need to improve their lives.
All past consumer interactions can help brands understand an individual customer’s intent, along with the paths and flows that lead to desired personal experiences.
Brands can scale empathic and trustworthy experiences
When consumers engage with a brand, regardless of channel, they desire multiple outcomes; they obviously want their questions answered, but they also want to feel heard and confident that their issue is being fully addressed. This is the definition of an empathic and trustworthy experience.
At first glance, it may seem as if only a human can deliver these types of experiences, and that to automate and scale such experiences would be a massive undertaking. But that’s simply not the case anymore.
Here’s one approach to achieving this: We’re all familiar with chatbots—conversational AI bots programmed to glean specific phrases from questions asked by users, and to point users to the right information. A challenge with chatbots is that they’re limited in how they can respond, as all responses are preprogrammed by humans. Bots can support a finite number of the most common user journeys (known as “happy paths”), all of which are useful to customers with more typical questions. But what about the frustrated ones who require more help, or those that leave the happy path, or were never a common use case to begin with? Every customer journey is unique, and the bots that support these customers need to be able to specifically adapt to each individual journey successfully.
Generative AI can be put in the service of CX to support thousands of bot-led journeys, all of which are fueled by intents and signals. This side of the chatbot involves language, readability and the ability to comprehend multiple keywords to fully understand what the consumer is asking.
When AI is combined with historical data captured from CX interactions (CXi), the result is a personalized experience that feels like a one-on-one interaction with a human.
AI-driven CX will enhance the work experience
Many people fear that AI will replace human customer care employees. These jobs will indeed change, but most people in CX have tedious parts of their job they’d rather not do, and ideally, their skill set will be better utilized elsewhere within their organization. If AI can perform these mundane tasks for them, they’ll be able to focus on the more exciting and impactful aspects of their job—improving both the employee experience and customer experience.
Getting there
Improving CX begins with running the required analysis to help brands identify the most impactful things they can do to meet their goals. The brand’s historical data, combined with AI, will provide the insights they need.
Next, brands must look at customer journeys to identify and fill gaps in process and workflow, and to create new customer journeys that achieve their CX goals.
None of these suggestions are particularly arduous to implement. And the effort will pay dividends well into the future.
