What satisfaction comes when the solution arrives before we experience the problem. Like virtual assistants or chatbots that emerge on a site or app as soon as they detect that we are starting a complaint or having trouble with a transaction, guiding us on the steps to follow or asking the right questions to resolve the issue.
When this happens, the main idea in the consumer’s mind is that it is beneficial to remain loyal to that organization providing such an efficient, empathetic, and personalized customer experience (CX). This is crucial in an era where consumers are more informed than ever, extremely demanding, and, thanks to the conveniences of e-commerce, highly volatile.
Intelligence can be applied at all stages of the customer cycle. Chatbots, voicebots, and other virtual assistants, for example, provide continuous and highly efficient service: they immediately solve frequently asked questions, improve their response capabilities as they handle more cases, and offer the option to escalate to a human operator – specialized in the specific point of inquiry – in atypical situations. Interaction improves daily: currently, many assistants understand natural language, can identify relevant data in a document or interpret the content of a photo, taking communication to new levels of efficiency and fluency.
Soon, they are expected to acquire greater predictive capabilities to anticipate problems or needs and proactively contact customers, already with the solution in hand and even interpreting emotions to generate more empathetic interactions.
Feedback from each contact can also be obtained – for example, through simple surveys conducted with Google Forms – which serves as raw material to advance continuous improvement processes: combined with a machine learning engine, this feedback can be analyzed to discover deviations and make decisions aimed at optimizing CX.
Meanwhile, forecasting tools allow predicting future purchases and offering customers promotions based on the products they want and the timing of their needs. Similarly, sales representatives can have very deep information about their prospects to improve the likelihood of closing a deal, while connecting with CRM data to know, based on accumulated information, the best time to call or the right date to propose an appointment.
Applied intelligence to customer experience delivers significant results in terms of loyalty: internal data from Zentricx shows that 75% of organizations implementing AI solutions improve customer satisfaction by over 10%. And not only that: 79% gain new insights into the business and achieve better levels of analysis that can also be used to understand consumer tastes, needs, and behaviors, and offer extremely precise proposals accordingly.
Is the consumer more demanding, informed, and volatile? Nothing better than intelligent, empathetic, and personalized experiences to ensure the charm of the first contact is never lost.
Manuel Allegue – September 12, 2022
