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.

In its simplest definition, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes the customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions. Some people question whether product and price are part of customer experience.

Customer experience is actually the “umbrella discipline,” so to speak, while customer service falls under that umbrella. Customer service is just one of those interactions, one touchpoint in the overall customer experience; servicing customers is one action of many that comprises the customer experience.

Journey maps are a way to walk in – and to capture – your customer’s steps and chart her course as she interacts with your organization while trying to fulfill some need or complete some task, e.g., call support, purchase a product, etc. The map (created with customers, from their viewpoint) describes what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in the journey. With the right data integrated into the map, you can identify key moments of truth, i.e., make-or-break moments or moments during which the customer decides if she will continue to do business with your or not, and ensure that those moments are executed flawlessly going forward.

Important to the journey mapping process is to have the right customers and the right stakeholders in the room to create the maps. The right customers are those for whom you’re mapping, obviously. We typically identify the personas for which we’ll map before beginning any mapping workshop; the right customers will represent those personas. The right stakeholders include individuals from the cross-functional departments that are either directly or indirectly involved in the journey that you’re mapping.

The customer service experience is one of my favorite journeys to map because it is such a rich experience; it affords such a huge teaching and learning opportunity.

People contact customer service when the product isn’t working right; the documentation isn’t clear; marketing set expectations that the product didn’t deliver; sales sold the dream and not what the product actually does; the invoice is not accurate or hard to decipher; or for a variety of other reasons. Something (i.e., the experience) broke down somewhere upstream, long before the customer even thought about calling – or even wanted to call – customer service.

In other words, when messages are misleading or confusing, when the customer has a complaint about an interaction or a transaction, or when something doesn’t work the way the customer expects, the experience is broken. The resultant action: the customer calls customer service to get help or to get answers.

This call isn’t customer service’s fault. This isn’t a breakdown in service; this is a breakdown in the experience. And so, customer service takes the beating and the anguish from the customer for something that could’ve been designed better upstream. Had that proper design occurred, the number of frustrated customers calling the call center would have been drastically reduced.

CXREFRESH revolves around the notion of a “Customer Experience (CX) Mindset.” High-end hospitality companies have owned the CX space for years because they maintain this mindset that every touch point they have with a customer has to be excellent. They want customers to leave their hotel or restaurant feeling like “wow – that was an amazing thing that I just experienced.”

Here’s the secret though – high-end hospitality’s mindset can (and should) be applied to every industry – it’s the way of the future.

Insist on a great experience

We work with a variety of companies in many industries at CXREFRESH, and we’re seeing that the companies thriving in their given sectors are the ones who have a mindset that “our customer is someone who must have a great experience.”

Whether that somebody is visiting a retail bank; having a field service agent visit their home to perform utility service, or even if that somebody is a patient on medication for a rare disease that requires additional support services from a case manager. What’s it like to walk into that retail bank; to have that field service visit the home; to experience that specialized drug?

Treat every customer like a house guest

High-end hospitality companies approach their customers as guests. Every touch point needs to go really well on every channel – whether it’s online, in-person, or calling a call center.

If you think of your customers as guests, and make every interaction with them feel like they’re a guest coming into your home, your business will change dramatically.

Think through your touch points

Again, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Start by thinking about how your customer would feel interacting with your company at any given point in time. How does your customer feel when they call into your call center and your agents answer the phone? Does the agent answer the phone like the customer is a welcome guest in their home, or are they answering with one eye on the clock with an attitude of “I’ve got to get off the phone in 30 seconds – I can’t talk to anyone for too long or I’ll get fired”?

To create a Customer Experience (CX) Mindset across your organization, make yourself think like a high-end hospitality company – even if you’re not one – and you’ll have an incredible competitive advantage going forward.

Journey mapping is a tool and a process. The process has six steps, which you can read about in 6 Steps from Journey Maps to Outcomes. The fifth step in the process is Ideate, in which you’ll ideate solutions to customer and backstage pain points and then design the future state.

Here’s a bit more detail about what this step includes.

• Set up and conduct future-state mapping workshops with customers, during which you’ll:
  • Ideate solutions for the current pain points your customers are experiencing
  • Design the ideal future-state experience
• Set up and conduct future-state service blueprint workshops with stakeholders and internal subject matter experts, during which you’ll:
  • Conduct root cause analyses
  • Ideate backstage and behind-the-scenes policies and processes to solve these (root cause) problems
  • Identify people, tools, and systems that are problematic, as well, and ideate solutions that will help you deliver the future-state experience
  • Design service delivery capabilities of the future experienceAs you probably already know, future-state maps are different from current-state maps. They:
    • Are used to design tomorrow’s differentiated experience
    • Are rooted in creativity and ideals
    • Use ideation to identify solutions for customer pain points
    • Add/incorporate listening posts into the experience, as needed
    • Are driven by the CX vision
    • Help you innovate new products and services
    • Allow you to envision and design how you’ll deliver new value for your customers at minimal risk because you’re testing them on paper first

Too many companies stop at current-state journey mapping – assuming it’s been done right – and never move on to service blueprinting or to future-state design, choosing instead to make tactical and cosmetic improvements identified in the current-state map and leave it at that. Future-state mapping is an important piece of the journey mapping process and cannot be overlooked if you want to design a better overall experience – and deliver new value –  going forward for your customers.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.

Are you familiar with all the different ways your customers interact with your business? Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or you’ve never heard of CX, chances are you at least have some basic notion of the areas, or touchpoints, where customers interact with your organization. Your website, call center or storefront are all examples of possible customer touchpoints.

When mapping out these touchpoints to better understand the customer journey, some companies will identify 5 to 10 touchpoints, while others might identify 50 or 100. Numbers aside, though, companies often tend to overlook one vital touchpoint when conducting these mapping exercises: the touchpoint of asking their customers for feedback.

We will reveal why it is essential to include customer feedback collection as a part of your overall customer touchpoint map, as well as a few quick tips for optimizing the feedback collection experience.

Touchpoints vary

Touchpoints will vary depending on the type of business you’re in. If you’re a B2B company, you may think about the first interaction prospects have with your sales team. If you’re a hotel, you may think about the first interaction guests have with the doorman, or the team at the front desk. If your business makes frequent home visits to customers, a touchpoint might be your customers’ first interaction with your field reps.

The forgotten touchpoint

The one touchpoint that most people forget about, however – and it’s a very important one – is the touchpoint when you reach out to your customers and ask them for feedback. That is a touchpoint in and of itself.

The experience that your customers have as they’re providing feedback affects their NPS score going forward in the same way that your other touchpoints, like your website or call center, affect NPS.

If a customer has a negative experience providing you feedback, it affects their likelihood to come back, their likelihood to buy more, and their likelihood to continue using your products & services.

Optimizing the feedback collection experience

Think really hard about how you’re interacting with your customer when you’re asking them for feedback. Are you doing it on their time, in a way that they would want to provide feedback? Are you asking for feedback in a way that’s as short as humanly possible so you’re not wasting their time?

Customer experience is cumulative. Every touchpoint counts towards the bigger picture. Be sure to dedicate time to optimize this vital piece of the customer journey, and your overall customer experience program will reach greater heights.