The potential of AI to optimize business is reflected in its growing popularity.  predicts that at least 90% of new enterprise apps will insert AI technology into their processes and products by 2025. In the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan), IDC says that the need for enterprises to apply AI to improve operational resilience and income generation has  because of the pandemic.

This brings us to the question: How can AI enable digital transformation in modern-day businesses?

With the help of AI, businesses can make better use of the data they collect and use it to improve their products and services, as well as to develop novel initiatives. Advanced analysis helps gain intelligent insights from an enormous volume of data, turning it into a competitive advantage. This helps businesses make complex yet accurate decisions in different fields, ranging from customer experience to supply chain management.

• Customer experience- AI helps match and exceed customer expectations

AI has gained prominence in the areas of customer service and customer experience. Businesses, particularly those in the marketing sector, can use AI to better understand their customers’ requirements and preferences and create accurate customer profiles. AI also helps understand customer behavior trends, purchasing history, and digital channel involvement.

Today’s customers need personalized experiences and will look for better alternatives if they feel that a brand cannot understand their needs. AI is critical for swiftly accessing customer information so that personalized experiences can be created and reinforced. Businesses who understand this have invested heavily in digital tools that allow them to understand the customers’ psyche and expectations at every touchpoint. According to a recent  study, more than half of the large organizations polled said that improving customer experience was the most important driver for AI deployment.

Cognitive Process Automation also plays a significant role here. Using AI technologies such as Machine Learning, Natural language processing and Advanced Analytics, systems can process abstract data and use that to make inferences, assumptions, expand their capabilities and learn. This technology is being used to create ‘digital co-workers’, enabling the organization to become lean and mean without compromising on superior customer service.

• Supply chain management- AI helps in reducing risk, increasing agility

Market volatility and changing consumer demands have made clear the need for agility and flexibility in supply chains. While modern-day supply chains are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, the demand for a sustainable and resilient supply chain has made the role of supply chain professionals more complex.

AI-based tools and solutions drive enterprise-wide visibility into all aspects of the supply chain. They weed out deep-rooted inefficiencies and uncertainties, bring in powerful optimization capabilities required for more accurate capacity planning, and promote safer working conditions. No wonder then that a  found that six out of ten supply chain professionals expect to use AI extensively in their operations in the next five years.

• Sales and marketing – Predicting the future is easier with AI

AI is the primary enabler for concepts such as predictive modeling, predictive data and forecasting. Combining CRM tools with the power of AI can enable businesses to analyze and detect patterns in customer sales data and identify, score and reach out to high-quality leads. Sales and marketing teams can also use AI-powered platforms to draw meaningful analytics and craft meaningful engagement strategies. And these tools are not replacing the human workforce; instead, AI is reducing repetitive work and freeing up human personnel to take on more intelligent tasks.

• Operations – AI provides actionable intelligence without burdening staff

By integrating AI algorithms into operational programs that support organizational activities, repetitive activities can be automated while information analysis will be more reliable and quicker. The time to search and process data will be cut down, and more data can be processed to inform judgments. This makes it easier to boost productivity and free employees to focus on higher-level tasks, improve operational excellence, customer happiness, and staff satisfaction.

• Cybersecurity- AI can minimize threat surface and keep data safe

Lately, bad actors have stepped up the use of AI in their cyberattacks, making these threats more sophisticated and dangerous. Traditional cyber-mitigation strategies can’t compete with such advanced methods. It is here that AI comes into play, as a key factor for improving organizational defense. No wonder AI in cybersecurity was one of  top nine security themes for 2020.

In the fields of cybersecurity and threat intelligence, AI has a wide range of applications.

• Facial and speech recognition, spam or phishing detection, and virus detection are the most popular use cases.
• Pattern recognition technology can identify regulated personal data in need of protection.
• Unsupervised machine learning can categorize websites and identify high-risk sites.
• Unsupervised machine learning can find near-duplicates in phishing and spam attempts.

Selecting the Ideal AI-Based Solution

Putting AI at the heart of your company streamlines your daily tasks and transforms the way you do business, both in terms of learning and performance. Yet, investing in AI is a risky affair. It requires significant time, money, effort and a deep understanding of the multiple options available in the market today. However, to harness the maximum potential of AI, organizations need a solution tailored to their wants and needs. 51·çÁ÷offers an array of  that can be customized to meet these specific business needs of organizations and strengthen your competitive advantage in the digital age.

The post In the Digital-First World, AI-Based Digital Transformation Initiatives are the Rage appeared first on 51·çÁ÷India News Center.

The disruptions caused by the pandemic have clearly shown that customers today, especially millennials, are not tolerant of brands that give poor customer service, and wouldn’t think twice to do the switcheroo. According to McKinsey, 75% of US consumers switched brands between March and August 2021. The millennial cohort – the largest and most influential of them all – .

Research shows that Millennials and Gen Z are driven not just by convenience and value but also by the overall brand experience. In other words, they expect personalized service tailored to their unique needs. This includes greater choice in when and how they communicate with brands.

With the rapid growth of omnichannel marketing, they have little incentive to stick to a certain company that they don’t find responsive enough. All it takes is for consumers to switch brands. From retail to banking, a high churn rate is a common theme today. It is here that customer care has a considerable role to play.

Businesses are changing their perspectives on their core priority – retaining customers and growing their customer base. And they realize that the old ways of attracting or retaining customers no longer work. For example, businesses now understand that discounts and offers alone aren’t enough to attract customers, given shrinking margins and a seismic shift in customer loyalties.

The traditional customer care model has evolved considerably over the last two decades. Most major brands now run omnichannel contact centers that manage customer interactions across touchpoints, replacing the single-purpose call center that focused on voice calls. However, most companies have a reactive approach to customer service. In other words, they try to resolve problems only after a customer has reported them. Another issue is the standard time for follow-ups, which remains two to three business days. And it persists even though contact center agents interact directly with customers and often have deep insight into their pain points.

Increasingly, customer-centric brands know the pitfalls of such a model all too well. They choose to tread a markedly different path in the times of omnichannel and personalized experience that customers are used to and demand. Brands are taking the initiative instead of staying reactive, and this starts from visualizing the customer journey to anticipating customer needs and delivering services and solutions proactively.

What is Proactive Customer Service?

Here’s a ‘then versus now’ comparison to put things into perspective:

March 2020: From e-commerce to healthcare, customer service teams witnessed a massive surge in contact volumes almost as soon as the lockdown was announced, and the world moved to the online space. However, many customers were left frustrated because of long hold times and poor follow-ups. This caused uncertainty in the minds of consumers and led to a spike in escalations.

Now: Businesses are introducing proactive customer service practices designed to detect and resolve issues before customers even become aware of them. Leveraging the power of data and analytics, customer service teams are optimizing IVR options, automating primary responses, and collecting feedback in real time. The impact has been significant; it has led to substantial improvements in resolution time and improved customer experience.

Proactive customer service can help businesses differentiate themselves from the competition and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Satisfied customers can, in turn, advocate your brand to others most authentically and cost-effectively.

How Can Businesses Deliver Proactive Customer Service?

The truth is that most businesses already have the building blocks in place for delivering proactive customer service. For example, since the pandemic, many companies have adopted cloud-based contact center management systems that are inherently scalable and quickly adapt to specific process requirements. These platforms also come with built-in integration support for plug-and-play compatibility with third-party enterprise apps.

However, complex inter-team dynamics – for example, between marketing, sales, and customer support departments – often create hurdles in this process. There is usually a significant amount of overlap between different processes. Turf battles between teams make it impossible to map the customer journey effectively and drive collaboration. Therefore, effective change management is a critical first step to delivering world-class customer service.

Integrating workflows across functions like sales, marketing, product development, and customer service can help businesses build an intuitive understanding of the customer journey, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty. To do this, individual functions must develop a shared vision for customer experience.

Mapping the customer journey from start to finish can help each team play to its strengths, ensuring seamless customer handoffs across channels. Customer service managers should also strive to better understand the processes followed by sales and marketing – especially about product returns, refunds and discounts. This has the potential to impact service levels positively while reducing escalations.

For example, frontline customer service agents often transfer customer calls to their colleagues in marketing or sales for in-depth information. The customer ends up spending a lot more time on the phone than they should have had to. By developing a joint knowledge base, teams from different departments can understand the context behind each other’s decisions and explain it to the customer.

Prioritizing Customer Experience Transformation

There are three major steps to consider when a business decides to take a customer-centric approach and transform the customer service journey. These are:

1. Leveraging customer data

Most companies collect a vast amount of customer data on a daily basis by analyzing purchase history, survey data, and customer service interactions. This data plays a critical role in helping businesses identify customers’ current and future needs.

For example, Net Promoter Score and CSAT data can provide vital clues into how customers perceive a product or service. Customer service teams can identify customers at risk of churning by correlating this data with average order value or usage rate. If the customer in question belongs to the high-value segment, customer service can work with product development to customize a product to better suit customer needs.

1. 24×7 engagement is key

In the new normal, businesses have come under increased pressure to maintain service levels. Customer service teams have been unable to cope with increased volumes, resulting in a decline in CSAT. This is no surprise considering long hold times have historically been a major irritant for customers. Secondly, the non-availability of service due to time zone differences has the potential to alienate international customers. The truth is that cost constraints make it impossible for many small businesses to provide 24×7 support.

Poor response time on social media is another area of opportunity for most businesses. While the average response rate is 5 hours, studies show that customers expect a response in as little as an hour.

However, by integrating automated tools like chatbots and self-service portals, business can continue to support many customer requests without manual intervention. Companies can also analyze search data to discover what customers want and optimize FAQ content.

3. Omnichannel customer support

Today’s digital native customers reach your brand through multiple touchpoints. It could be the website, online presence on social platforms (including Instagram and Facebook) or any of the e-commerce sites. So the customer journey isn’t linear, which means customer support should also be omnichannel.

These could range from self-service to an information-rich FAQs section on the website to a 24×7 support that could be an optimal mix of technology (bots) assistance and human assistance. Ensuring that customer service is omnichannel will give that edge in delivering service levels since your customer doesn’t have to wait till the beginning of working hours to get in touch.

4. Metrics and training

At its heart, proactive customer service is a philosophy that stems from the values of an organization as a whole. Businesses that genuinely care for their customers put equal emphasis on quality interactions and efficiency. For example, average handle time is not enforced at the cost of accurate information or empathizing with a customer situation. On the contrary, agents are empowered to bypass procedures in the interest of customer satisfaction.

However, adequate checks and balances are in place to ensure that refunds and credits are granted only in deserving cases. Ongoing training and development are a key requisite to equip agents in order to serve customers proactively. Skills like active listening and probing for information can be considerably enhanced through regular coaching and mentoring. In addition, sharing best practices in escalation management can also go a long way in driving complicated cases to resolution.

5. Pivoting on technology

Unlike earlier, customer service leaders these days can leverage technology to refine their customer service processes. For instance, technologies such as AI-enabled conversational intelligence platforms can help customer service leaders to understand how and where their agents need to refine their approach. Listening back to customer service conversations can help define best practices for service delivery. Top this off with soft skills training that help agents to lead conversations with empathy… and the customer service delivery process becomes an elevated, customer-first approach.

Remember, building customer service excellence is a long-term process. It is a better bet to implement changes to processes and systems incrementally, rather than rapidly doing it on a large scale. Proactive customer service is the bare minimum that customers expect from the brands they buy from. By aligning processes and people, this can allow companies to significantly improve profitability and growth and never lose a customer again.

The post Proactive Customer Service: 5 Steps for Success in 2021 and Beyond appeared first on 51·çÁ÷India News Center.

And for businesses to be able to develop such strategies, they need to consider the customer experience (CX). There’s ample evidence that highly satisfied customers are loyal customers, who will not only come back to you but will also positively amplify your brand presence across digital platforms. So, creating the right CX strategy is an important factor that can determine the future of a business. Developing customer experience strategies has, in fact, become a top priority for marketing managers and researchers, surpassing even products and pricing. This is because have proven that:

• 73% of the customers consider customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions
• 65% of the customers believe a positive experience with a brand to be more impactful than great advertising
• 86% of buyers are willing to spend to have a great customer experience

This goes to show that customer loyalty is now subservient to good customer experience more than the price or even the product. Customer experience has even become the fundamental basis for marketing management and the key brand differentiator for a customer, overtaking the product and other factors like advertising. If your business can provide the customer with a good experience through the service, you can expect them to spend more and stay loyal to your brand for longer. Better CX strategies can also enable your business to grow more customers. Nearly 71 percent of customers a business relationship due to a poor customer service experience.

A good CX strategy can therefore bring in big profits and help avoid losses through customer defection. Whether big or small, businesses can look at greater profits and greater customer loyalty by adopting . By implementing robust and unified processes, the customer experience can be improved, thus bringing additional business value with innovation, flexibility, elasticity, and simplification.

But developing a good CX strategy may be a little trickier than it seems. This is because different businesses have differing ideas about what customer experience entails. While some relate it to the services and offerings that businesses stage and manage, others associate it with the customer responses to the contacts made and interactions conducted at the businesses. This diverse conceptualization of what constitutes a good CX strategy makes developing these strategies difficult.

A good customer experience strategy promotes a frictionless experience for the customer anytime and anywhere – whether they are accessing a service offered by your business or interacting with an employee of your organization. CX strategy is centered on improving products and processes to meet customers’ expectations. To fulfill all these aspirations and create an optimal customer experience strategy, it is therefore essential to consider doing the following:

1. Review Current CX Strategy

Every process for creating something new starts from reviewing the previous versions. This helps in retaining the positives and removing the shortcomings. So, the first step towards creating a good CX strategy for your business is reviewing your company’s current approach towards customer service. A review of your current CX strategy helps you determine what is working well for your business and what is not. The review process may include steps like:

• Checking the data from your company’s feedback departments like call center data for key metrics. These may include parameters such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, and customer churn rate.
• Consulting experts and asking them for recommendations. such as the one integrated within SAP’s provide insights into what is working right and what is not. They also provide to maximize value and keep your strategies relevant. The knowledge from the field experts not only helps your business to draw a roadmap for further course of action, but also for driving adoption of suggested measures and solutions. Expert recommendations can also be used for deploying, integrating, and using these solutions.
• Formulating and adopting . The project frameworks describe the approach, phases, and deliverables for the implementation of each solution. The frameworks also provide you with the guidance to optimize the time-to-value for your projects, with the mindset of start fast, stay fast.

All these can help you determine the best course of action for improving customer experience.

2. Creating Customer Journey Maps

A customer journey map outlines the interactions and experiences between your customer and your business. This data helps to understand and analyze how the customer can be better serviced by reducing the friction within your customer experience and enhancing the satisfaction of the customer.

A customer journey map may be created through various pathways. These include gathering perceived and self-reported users’ responses. However, a more efficient customer journey map can be created through a dual approach. The dual approach involves gathering explicit and implicit data for understanding the dynamics between your customer and your business.

Explicit data may include self-reported information from within the business. In contrast, implicit data might include automatic and unconscious bio-physiological reactions obtained from tools such as sensors and IoT-based tech. This dual approach helps to understand better how the customer reacted unconsciously and automatically from an emotional and cognitive standpoint throughout their journey with your business.

A well-crafted customer journey map generates valuable information that can be used by different departments within a business. For example, the design and development department may design the product according to customer reactions. And the marketing and communication departments may use this data to create more effective marketing campaigns.

3. Determining Customers’ Expectations

Customer satisfaction is based on exceeding customer expectations, while customer delight means positively surprising customers beyond their expectations. It has been found that both customer satisfaction and customer delight are vital to deliver a satisfying and memorable customer experience. This becomes crucial to retain a customer and make the customer spread a positive word of mouth.

Therefore, to understand customer expectations better, it is crucial to know to whom exactly you are selling a service or a product. By defining your customer and understanding their demographic, behavioral and psychographic attributes, you can personalize your products and services to best suit their needs.

Customer expectations can also be determined through a better understanding of customer experience with your business. Customer experience can be defined as a consumer’s internal and subjective response to any direct or indirect contact with your business. This response may be:

• Cognitive- An experience with your business may create an impression of your brand in the customers’ minds.
• Emotional- The experience may induce an emotion in the customer. For example, a satisfactory experience derived from gratifying service may remind the customer of a good memory. It has been well-documented that customers establishing an emotional connection with a point of contact of a brand, such as a customer service agent, willingly continue to do business with the company. These emotional connections are especially important in a good CX strategy.
• Behavioral- The experience with your business may induce a particular behavior in the customer. For example, efficient service may persuade the customer to buy more than what they intended in the first place.
• Social- These include the responses stimulated because of how the customer perceives the reactions of other customers towards your brand. If the others are happy, the chances are that a specific customer may perceive your services to be gratifying upon noticing other customers.

Positive responses are triggered by positive characteristics of the product or brand or other elements, such as a company’s website or mobile application. This response, or a combination of them, can be intentionally triggered by the brand. The reactions may also be stimulated by other factors which may not necessarily be under the company’s control, for example, by online customer reviews, blogs and virtual communities. Keeping all these aspects in mind while creating a CX strategy can help manage customers’ expectations and ultimately lead to a fulfilling and engaging customer experience.

4. A Problem-Solving approach

Anticipating problems might be one of the most crucial benefits of a holistic customer strategy. An effective customer service strategy focuses on minimizing the hassle and remedying the problems for the customers. This approach also involves gathering both explicit and implicit data. This helps take remedial measures as soon as a problem or an error is detected and help prevent inconvenience to a customer. in the areas of project preparation and governance, design, solution, and readiness ensure that the customer feels safe and secure while interacting with your business as well as during transactions with your business.

Customer success teams are also an efficient way to prepare for problems and errors. A customer success team plans for worst-case scenarios, develops procedures for problems and continuously monitors the responses to issues arising. All these make it easy to plan and prevent problems. This type of proactive customer service reduces customer churn and increases customer loyalty and trust.

5. Self-Service Solutions

To maximize loyalty, a trustworthy customer experience requires carefully managing detailed information about individual customers and all customer touchpoints. A unified user experience across all touchpoints, therefore, requires .

One of the most important points to consider is allowing the customers to find solutions on their own with minimal intervention from your business. This entails the use of a broad range of technologies to support your company’s customer relationship approach. It also requires aligning product experts and including the client project team in planning discussions. Another critical factor in designing efficient self-service solutions involves understanding customer behavior and needs.

All these factors help to create an environment of trust between your customer service team. It also ensures a deeper understanding of the architecture of your services, resulting in the creation of an omnichannel service. With the help of these channels, your business can offer self-service support options like chatbots, leading to a saving up on resources and a better customer service experience.

6. Feedback

With greater interaction of businesses with customers, the customers have also become more vocal about their experiences with a business. This has led to the generation of massive amounts of customer feedback. This feedback, which includes both , can be highly beneficial for your business. Structured feedback is the one that is sought from the customer, for example, in a survey. While as unstructured feedback includes information such as customer suggestions, customer complaints and customer feedback left on social media sites.

Regular collection of feedback helps in :

• It helps to minimize the risk of developing unsuitable and irrelevant products
• Information on customer needs gathered from feedback helps to direct research and development (R&D) to launch new products and services
• Customers’ suggestions and complaints help generate ideas to determine product concepts
• Feedback gives your business an insight into customer expectations and the level of their satisfaction with your product or services

7. Monitoring your performance

Just like businesses and the technologies they use, the customer preferences keep changing consistently. Customers, just like businesses, are on the lookout for the best returns on their investments. This constant change in customer preference and behavior should be reflected in your business as well if you are to deliver a satisfactory customer experience. to customer needs and demands in providing the service is therefore essential. This requires maintaining a synergy between different departments of your business. Tools such as can be required for maintaining consistent data flow across multiple systems. They help keep your business operations smooth, as well as ensure that none of the departments are lagging in terms of performance.

There’s no doubt that businesses need to deal with many operational challenges, especially when unforeseen disruptions change how business is done. But keeping a laser focus on customer experience that is delivered through high-quality customer service can make all the difference. Businesses need to respond with empathy and agility, given the ever-changing customer needs in today’s world. And all these shifts make it essential to develop effective CX strategies that can help deliver greater customer delight.

The post 7 Things to Keep in Mind while Creating a CX Strategy appeared first on 51·çÁ÷India News Center.