Customer loyalty is your best asset, particularly during periods of market unrest. According to McKinsey, brands with superior customer experience bring in five to seven times more revenue than those that lag behind in customer experience. Customer experience leaders had three times higher total returns to shareholders over the 2007-2009 recession than laggards.
So as we enter yet another phase of market unrest and economic uncertainty, customer experience should be high on the agenda for leaders seeking to navigate change, drive loyalty and improve customer lifetime revenue.
But the crux of customer experience – the conversation – must not be forgotten.
The best enterprises run on conversations
Every hour, there are more than 100 million conversations happening about brands. Yet, it only takes one bad one to influence long-term brand perception.
The businesses that invest in understanding – and harnessing all conversations – including human to human, human to machine, and machine to machine, will reap long-term rewards. Customer conversations and expectations have shifted, just like businesses have. The virtual economy we now live in demands real bridges between the physical and digital worlds, so customers can engage in the way they want with minimal friction across each touchpoint, and businesses can quickly meet and anticipate their needs.
As many businesses struggle to handle the enormous volume of conversations taking place within the contact centre and beyond, they face the challenge of implementing processes to understand and act at scale to the indicators of customer needs and intentions revealed by those conversations.
The promise of AI: delivering better customer and agent experience
AI and automation can transform the contact centre by redefining how firms run, manage, and optimize their customer conversations.
Harnessing the power of conversations through AI is an effective way for businesses to gain better insights into their customers’ voices and needs. Conversational AI is a highly effective tool for businesses; one of the building blocks of understanding the total customer intent, sentiment and experience.
For example, a contact centre agent equipped with the right conversational AI technology can effectively and efficiently answer and resolve customer issues, saving valuable time for the customer and the agent too. Using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP), a conversational AI technology understands every conversation before, during and after an agent is involved. It provides significant value such as lower time to resolution and better post-call promise management (making sure promises made on the call are fulfilled). This results in improved agent productivity, better up-sell opportunities, and ultimately superior customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The goal of the software is not to replace contact centre agents who are absolutely fundamental to the customer experience – the technology is there to support, augment and enhance the human experience. An ideal balance of human and machine responsiveness, convenience and empathy, all whilst reducing operating costs.
Conversations are a powerful currency for the enterprise. They can be the ultimate drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, in good times or in crisis. Employing customer-centric approaches to harness them effectively will not only enable business leaders to better meet the needs of customers while reducing costs, but to also offer a gateway to better long-term connection.
