- Customer engagement hubs, customer service analytics, voice of the customer, chatbots and virtual customer assistants are technologies gaining significant attention in optimising service experience.
- Customer service and support technology investments need to be scrutinised to deliver on customer experience goals.
- Many organisations are increasing their investments in automation and robotic workers to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency.
Dubai: Customer service experience has changed due to the lockdown and organisations are looking at ways to create more personalised products, experiences and building trust with them.
According to research firm International Data Corporation, market demands for tailored experiences will double every six months in more than two-thirds of all industries by 2022.
At the same time, CEOs are looking at building a closer relationship with its customers and communicating with its customers during the life cycle of the pandemic is critical but organisations need to build new capabilities around an intelligent organisation, software capabilities to deliver innovation and dynamic work models to attract customers.
According to IDC, 40 per cent of the data collected from the customer journey will be to create a better product and better-personalised experience for the customers by 2023.
Meredith Whalen, Chief Research Officer at International Data Corporation, said that the contribution of digital coworkers will increase by 35% as more tasks are augmented by technology.
By 2024, enterprises with intelligent and collaborative work environments will see 30 per cent lower staff turnover, 30 per cent higher productivity, and 30 per cent higher revenue per employee than their peers.
Many organisations are increasing their investments in automation and robotic workers to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency.
Workforce transformation
The current crisis will accelerate workforce transformation as more non-human workers are expected into the workforce as the economy expands, building dynamic and hybrid workforce in the future.
Research firm Gartner said that customer service and support leaders must scrutinise all technology investments for their ability to deliver on customer experience goals.
Drew Kraus, Vice-President for Customer Service and Support practice at Gartner, said that organisations’ customer experience priorities have changed, not only from year to year, but also in response to the pandemic.
“As a result, service and support leaders need to approach the broad range of service and support technologies as an integrated ecosystem of functionality, rather than as a set of separate, compartmentalised systems. In doing so, they can better analyse investments that will provide consistent, effortless, intelligent and holistic customer service experience,” he said.
Karan Dixit, Vice-President for UiPath Middle East and Africa, said that organisations across the sectors have had to cope with activity peaks during the pandemic and the lockdowns without being able to rely on extra resources to answer citizen and customer demands.
“The frontline industries, such as healthcare, public sector services and more, have turned to technology to cut down reaction time, while sectors such as retail, banking, education, have had to find the right channels and put in place the necessary framework to allow them to meet their users online,” Dixit said.
Faced with challenges, he said that many organisations have had to speed up the process of putting in place robust technological infrastructures that can support the end-to-end digitalisation of processes, paving the way for automation.
Automation is the future of work
Dixit believes that automation is the future of work, and this belief is rooted in the present, which shows there is solid adoption across all markets and in workplaces and companies from all business sectors.
“Companies are stressed and automation, especially RPA, is one of the very few technologies where the return on investments is quite fast. Moreover, RPA implementations are quick to deploy and the gains can be quantified very easily,” he said.
Gartner has identified five technologies – customer engagement hubs, customer service analytics, the voice of the customer, chatbots and virtual customer assistants – that are generating significant interest among customer service and support leaders with ambitious customer experience goals.
The five technologies are:
- Customer engagement hubs: It is an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together to engage customers optimally. It enables proactive and reactive communication, as well as personalised, contextual customer engagement, using humans, artificial agents or sensors, across all interaction channels. For example, it can also reach and connect all departments to enable synchronisation of marketing, sales and customer service processes.
- Customer service analytics: It is the combination of interaction analytics (desktop, speech and text), customer journey analytics and next best action analytics that collectively surface real-time and historical insight into the customer service experience. The deployment of customer service analytics has the potential to uncover a diverse range of insights that can be used to improve the performance of the operation and its advisors. However, a challenge lies in building the business case, because often the insights (and, therefore, the RoI potential) won’t be revealed until the investment has been made.
- Voice of the customer (VoC) solutions: The solutions combine multiple, traditionally siloed technologies associated with the capture, storage and analysis of direct and indirect customer feedback. By integrating data from multiple VoC sources, organisations can uncover subtler insights, drive accuracy and ultimately instil more confidence in the actions taken at both the individual customer (such as an outbound call) and overarching strategic (such as a process change) levels. This holistic approach ensures that the right insight gets to the right employees at the right time. Overall these insights can be used to help manage brand perceptions, understand the customer experience and develop future customer engagement strategies.
- Chatbots: It is a conversational interface that uses an app, messaging platform, social network or chat solution for its conversations. They vary in sophistication, from simple, decision-tree-based marketing stunts to implementations built on feature-rich platforms. Chatbots are already in use in customer service and played a strategic role in some companies’ response to Covid-19. This might have an acceleration effect on technology.
- Virtual customer assistants (VCAs): It is an application that acts on behalf of an organization to engage, deliver information and/or act on behalf of a customer. The effective use of a VCA allows organisations to scale the numbers of engagements they can handle, especially in the contact centre. The use of a voice-enabled VCA in a kiosk or automated teller machine can alleviate the need for typed interventions, and it can help create an interesting interaction for non-traditional audiences.