1)  AI Can Be Used to Predict Customer Intent:-

Your customers may contact you for a multitude of reasons. Some of these reasons are fairly straightforward, others are intricate, yet, rarely are they entirely novel.

With the immense data that you are collecting with every recorded phone call, chat interaction and email, you have a strategic asset that can be used to train machine learning models to understand customer intent within conversations.

Once you understand true customer motivations, you can then use AI to optimise interactions through:

• Smarter routing of your customers
• Presenting potential up-sell and cross-sell suggestions for advisors during customer conversation

Flagging interactions for fraud and compliance risk

2) AI Can Help You to Track Customer Effort:-

Customer effort is one of the leading indicators of loyalty. Analysing customer effort can guide companies in identifying emerging issues before they explode into major issues.

Traditionally, effort has been quantified through structured questions on a survey. However, AI and machine learning techniques, combined with text analytics, can aid in evaluating the level of effort expressed in any piece of unstructured customer feedback.

AI can do this through interpreting word choice and sentence structure, as you can quickly understand which aspects of the customer experience cause friction in any feedback source – not just in surveys.

3) AI Is Best Implemented With the Support of the Entire Team:-

Before you deploy AI, it is worth considering that one of the biggest risk factors in any IT implementation, system upgrade or system change are the human users of that system.

By failing to communicate in an open, honest, transparent way how this technology is going to benefit them, you will meet resistance.

If you simply say, we are rolling out this new robotic-led approach on Monday, your employees will inevitably be negative towards the technology and may even actively sabotage it.

Instead, you need to get people involved in the process. Ensure they can test out the technology in a safe environment and make sure they are comfortable with it, before you even start rolling the technology out.

4) AI Increases in Value With Good Knowledge Management:-

Any AI application will only ever be a good as the knowledge at its disposal. You need to ensure that when a question is answered in the contact centre, that knowledge is captured and delivered into the knowledge management system (KMS), so that customers, bots and advisors can feed off it.

After all, how can AI be used to make decisions when it does not actually know anything? It can learn but it needs relevant data to do that.

This is why it is so important to have processes and procedures in place that enable you to feed accurate data and intelligence into the KMS.

Many businesses are too reliant on their employees as a source of knowledge and therefore run the risk that if people leave the business, they take the knowledge and understanding that they have gained with them.

5) AI Is Driven by Customer and Employee Data:-

Any strategy that uses AI and machine learning should be considered within a broader customer experience AI strategy that considers how data will be leveraged across both the customer and employee journeys.

There are many opportunities to apply AI and machine learning across the customer engagement process.

For example, knowing the right moment to proactively engage with customers online, routing to the best agent based on the desired business outcome and assisting them to accurately handle enquiries – AI and machine learning can help drive all of that.

However, AI applies to more than just customer journeys. It can also help identify why specific agents are better than others at certain contact or customer types, increase the speed and accuracy of workforce planning and scheduling and automate task completion post-contact.

• It costs up to 25X more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
• Improving customer retention by just 5% can send profits soaring up to 95%.
• Loyal customers are 5X more likely to repurchase, 4x as likely to refer and 7x as likely to try a new offering.

With figures like these, it’s no surprise customer retention is a primary business objective, and the stakes are extremely high. Two-thirds of customers are willing to switch brands over a poor customer experience.

It’s no wonder, then, that customer experience is a top strategic priority for driving growth in 2020. The problem is, most companies are ill-prepared to execute on that strategy. While some 87% of senior business leaders say CX is a top growth engine, only one in three feel prepared to address it.

What’s holding them back? Poor data. Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to collect, pinpoint, and track, which makes it difficult to accurately measure customer sentiment, understand issues, and make corrections to drive appreciable improvement.
So, what’s the solution? It’s certainly not burdening customers with more of the same lengthy, generic surveys. If the data companies are producing now isn’t working to reduce churn, the solution isn’t more data–it’s better data with more insights in less time. Here’s how to get it:

• Make it quick.

  Customers are busy. If they feel it’s going to take too much effort to provide feedback, they simply won’t. Keep your feedback requests short and sweet: a quick 1-5 overall experience rating and a few easy-to-choose attributes will provide the specifics you need without burdening your customers with a lengthy survey.

• Be immediate.

  Send feedback requests immediately after an interaction and over an immediate channel: mobile devices. By sending quick surveys via SMS as soon customers leave your store or complete a transaction, the experience will be fresh in their minds, resulting in higher response rates and more accurate feedback.

• Tie experiences to specific employees.

  Give your customers the opportunity to name the specific employee they dealt with—or better yet, include that information in your request for feedback, so the customer can rate and describe the specific person who helped them. By tying the customer experience to the specific employee, you will get measurable, actionable data on each customer-facing employee. By connecting this to internal talent management systems and performance reviews, you can also set goals to improve CX at the individual employee level.

• Identify employees who impress customers.

  By capturing employee-specific customer experiences, you can clearly identify who interfaces well with customers and who needs training. Without this data, you’re operating on the assumption that no news is good news; i.e., no customer complaints means an employee interacts well with customers. This leaves you in the dark about problematic patterns until they manifest as major complaints or lost business. By tracking CX performance with hard data for each employee, you can correct these patterns before they become full-blown problems and reinforce behaviors linked to higher customer ratings.

• Reward performance.

  We hear about customer complaints all the time, but rarely do we hear about an employee doing a great job or going above and beyond to deliver superior service. CX isn’t just about how you correct problems– it’s also a function of how you encourage excellence. With an effective customer feedback program that ties CX to specific employees, outstanding performers can be formally recognized and rewarded for their impact.

• Monitor trends vs. isolated incidents.

  When customers report a bad experience, it can be difficult to determine whether their experience was an isolated incident, or if they’re a particularly difficult customer, or if their experience is indicative of a larger problematic trend. By tracking customer feedback as measurable data, companies can get a clearer picture of what’s happening at the point of every employee/customer interaction. This keeps you from catastrophizing one-off experiences and helps you focus on consistent issues.

• Intervene immediately.

  Customers can be quick to abandon your brand, so it’s crucial to respond to their issues immediately. However, most customer feedback platforms are cumbersome and slow which means the experience has long-since-passed by the time it shows up on your radar. By implementing immediate feedback solutions, companies can take swift action to intervene if a valuable customer relationship could be in jeopardy.

In an age where keyboard warriors can destroy a brand’s reputation with a single scathing review, and customers seem to be increasingly fickle, customer retention is both more challenging and more important than ever. Particularly in customer-facing industries like retail, hospitality and financial services, it’s imperative to gather actionable feedback to continuously improve upon the customer experience. By implementing a comprehensive people-centric feedback approach, companies can deliver the exceptional service that keeps customers coming back.

Is your company operating in chaos or clarity? The difference often comes down to creating a knowledge-rich culture.

Modern customers and employees want information on their own terms. In order to best educate employees and provide answers and tools to customers, many customer-focused brands create knowledge-rich cultures. These cultures pride themselves on offering learning and growth opportunities for employees while empowering them to solve customer issues. Many companies have knowledge-rich cultures in silos, which creates chaos and lost opportunities.

When knowledge is kept within departments and not shared with the rest of the company, it creates more escalations of customer issues. A customer could call the contact center with an issue that could be easily fixed by someone in the engineering department, but without that information being shared across the entire organization, the customer’s call is escalated and takes longer to answer. Hare says that companies that build cultures of knowledge sharing solve more calls on the first contact and do it faster with fewer escalations.

When silos are broken down and information is shared across the entire company, employees and customers benefit. Employees have the tools to help customers right away or know where to send customers to answer more technical questions quickly. That knowledge creates job satisfaction for employees and instills confidence in customers that the company knows what it is talking about. For customers, a knowledge-sharing culture creates less frustration as issues can be taken care of accurately and much more quickly.

One of the biggest aspects of customer experience is making the customer successful without regression or pain. That can only be done by instilling confidence in the customer that the employee is their advocate into the company. Employees, no matter if they are in the contact center, finance, engineering or anywhere else in the company, need to use every resource to resolve customer issues. That comes from building a strong culture of sharing knowledge.

Customer experience is the most powerful tool companies have. When customers sense chaos at a company, they will quickly take their business elsewhere. To turn that chaos into clarity, brands of all sizes need to build a knowledge-rich culture that breaks down silos and shares information across borders with employees and customers. Sharing knowledge and instilling confidence benefits everyone in the organization.

What Does the Future of CX Look Like?

If you know how critical Customer Experience is to the happiness of your customers and your team, you’re probably already trying to anticipate the next big trends in CX.

Things That Won’t Change Anytime Soon:

1. Customer Experience Still Reigns Supreme

More customers are stating that customer experience is a big part of how they make purchasing decisions. This means more of us are demanding better treatment and are willing to pay for it.

According to a large study by PWC, 73% of us say the customer experience is an important factor.

68% of business-to-business marketers agree that delivering a consistent, high-quality customer experience is very important in today’s marketplace.

Despite this, only 49% of Indian consumers say they’re getting a good Customer Experience from companies.

These numbers will keep going up, meaning that if you aren’t on board the CX train by now, you are already behind your competition.

But don’t fret — Instead, think of closing the CX gap as a huge opportunity. If your organization can address and close the gap, you’ll have a massive advantage in the future.

2. Employee Experience Will Remain One of the Top Influences on Customer Experience

There is no doubt the way employees feel influences how they treat customers.

But this isn’t just touchy-feely stuff. Engaged employees are in demand, and frankly getting harder to keep.

Investing in employees can pay off in big ways, like how Google gives employees 20% of their time to dedicate to their own projects. These independent, employee-driven ideas have created products like Google Maps and Gmail!

So it’s not terribly surprising to learn that the organizations who earned “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings in the State of CX Management 2018 report by the Temkin Group (now part of the XM Institute) are also much more likely to be ranked as CX Leaders.

In fact, the percentage of CX Leaders who earned “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings is more than 5-times larger than the percentage of CX Laggards.

Your employees matter more than most pieces of the customer experience puzzle. Don’t expect this to change in 2020 or the future beyond it.

So… What Changes Will Come to CX in 2020?

1. Customer Experience Will Become Part of the Business Operations in More Organizations… But it Will Continue to be an Unpredictable Journey.

More organizations are understanding the importance of customer experience, but they are still struggling with what to do about it.

Some are assigning CX as an additional responsibility to leaders like Chief Marketing Officers or Retail Operations leaders. Some are just asking everyone in the organization to “own” customer experience.

We need to mature past these ways to really start operationalizing CX in our organizations.

This means creating a dynamic loop of gathering customer feedback, assigning real responsibilities and treating CX like we treat sales, marketing or technology.

It’s not an extra part of doing business, it’s simply a part of doing business well.

More organizations will move to this phase in the coming years, but we still have a long way to go!

2.  Agile principles will be brought to CX Innovation

As we (hopefully) move into an era when we’re responding to customer feedback and allowing for more innovation around experience design, we’ll need to act a lot faster than we are today. Organizations that prioritize quick improvements using agile principles will move to the head of the pack.

While agile is typically used among development teams, these same principles to harness change on behalf of customers can be used to innovate around CX.

It’s not just about the technology, it’s about innovation for things like in-store experience and better customer communications.

3. Technology WILL replace some roles in customer service and other departments. New roles will be created.

It’s true that the robots are coming for (some) of our jobs.

Automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will drive real, lasting changes to the contact center structure and overall org charts of many brands. Already, chatbots and other tools are serving customers in big and small ways.

The latest prediction is a 136% increase in the number of organizations that use AI chatbots from 2019 to 2020!

While this can sound frightening, the role of these technologies will actually help customer service agents and others to provide better experiences for customers.

When leveraged well, this means human agents will have customer histories and relevant data served at the appropriate time. The agent can then provide more personalized, relevant experiences in a faster, more convenient way to customers.

It’s critical to provide a seamless transfer between human agent and bot as we learn just what this type of technology can do best. Now we need a different type of role for some of these agents. We need humans to train and supervise the automated experiences these bots are creating.

We can’t think we’ll simply “flip the switch” and replace our human agent force. Humans are still required to connect with customers when they need us the most. Humans are also the only way these tools will be developed and designed in ways that truly put the customer first.

4. Customers will not tolerate outdated technology, processes or communications.

Customers understand so much more than they ever did.

Because we all have access to so much more information now, brands can no longer hide behind press releases or advertising.

As customers, we want brands to respond not just to our needs, but the needs of the world around us. Outdated technology is a signal to customers that the overall experience might not be a priority. Watching employees struggle with processes that don’t make sense is a point of frustration for customers.

Communications with customers also have to not only be seamless, but updated in their language and tone.

Customers don’t want to interact with formal, stuffy brands using industry-specific terms and acronyms. They want to be in conversation with them.

This means reducing the jargon and replying as a human does. It also means reviewing your communications for outdated terms around our shared humanity, with terms referring to gender, race, and ability given particular care.

5. Soft skills will stop being seen as a nice to have and become the important “Empathy Toolkit” we need in CX.

Let’s make 2020 the year we kill the term “soft skills” in business. This vague description of ideas like getting along with others and listening doesn’t serve us or our customers.

These soft skills – listening well, responding with empathy and understanding, proactively reading the emotional state of a person or situation – are absolutely critical to great customer experiences.

And let’s not forget this applies inside the organization, too. Engaged employees not only serve their customers with this respect and compassion but also serve their colleagues and partners this way, too.

Using the term “soft skills” make them sound secondary and unnecessary. CX Leaders in the future will prioritize them and give them the respect they deserve to hire, train and empower employees.

Customer Experience often lives within Marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two are always aligned. There is even more room for disparity when CX lives in departments other than Marketing. Today we’re talking about your advertising and marketing versus your customer experience, and the importance of making sure that the experience being advertised to your customers is consistent with what your customers actually experience when interacting with your brand.

When advertising doesn’t align with experience

A lot of money and resources are spent on marketing and advertising — creating wonderful visions within customers’ minds about what an experience with any given brand is going to feel like and look like.

We’ve all been to hotels, restaurants and other businesses that provide incredible pictures and a feeling on their website, but then when we get there it doesn’t quite feel the way it did online.

This leaves us feeling like “Wow – our expectations from this brand’s advertising is very different than what the actual experience is.”

That’s an extremely dangerous place to be

When the expectation set by marketing is incongruent with the actual experience, it will not only deter people from returning to your business, but it will also drive those people to potentially go online and share it with the world.

When we say that customer experience is all about consistency across every channel, that includes marketing and advertising. Don’t let your marketing team or advertising agency position you in a way that you can’t realistically deliver. Customers will not be happy, they won’t come back, and you won’t get the ROI from your Voice of Customer program.