How Can the Bar be Raised to Surpass Customer Expectations?
In a world of high demands and countless inquiries, meeting consumer expectations isn’t just a goal; it’s a commitment.
A dedication to understanding your customers ensures that every interaction is personalized and purposeful, alleviating the pain of lengthy wait times and ensuring each conversation is met with effective, personalized assistance.
Failing to invest in customer care risks customers seeking it elsewhere.
Therefore, when choosing an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), it is important to not simply implement technology just for the sake of it, but to make sure that it is enhancing the overall customer experience. New technology should support customer preferences and create or maintain a consistent experience across all touchpoints with the brand.
What’s an IVA?
Conversational AI is the set of technologies behind automated messaging and speech-enabled applications, known as an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), that offer human-like communications by recognizing speech and text, understanding intent, deciphering different languages, and responding in a way that mimics human conversation.
Changing the Way Customers Interact with Technology
Traditionally with automated solutions, humans have been forced to adapt their thinking and speech to be able to achieve what they need. Think about the “robot speak” you’re forced to use when speaking to an automated phone system to allow the technology to understand what you’re saying. This didn’t make for a good customer experience 20 years ago, and it certainly doesn’t now.
Now, with IVAs and Conversational AI, these interactions feel very different. Communication is adapted to the customer, not the other way around, creating more positive experiences and exceeding customer expectations.
Customers no longer dread contacting customer service – every interaction is personal, efficient, and effective.
Mastering Customer Satisfaction: The Essential 3-Step Process
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before even looking at what features are offered, it’s important to clearly define specific customer experience goals for your company. Keep these goals central when choosing an IVA, as it’s easy to get distracted by features that may actually bring no real benefit to your customers at the cost of features that do.
To provide an ideal customer experience that is cohesive, convenient, and productive, consider these three things:
Metrics That Matter
A sophisticated IVA can enhance a number of key metrics that you track within the call center. But, the metrics that matter most are unique to your business. It’s vital that you identify your most important KPIs, whether it’s lowering operating costs, increasing customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) or reducing agent minutes, and ensure the IVA will help you hit those when implemented.
Self-Service
Some IVRs and automated systems only assist customers by directing them to a live agent. While this can be helpful in streamlining queries, it doesn’t completely solve the problem of customers waiting on hold or wanting to get things done quickly. Building an application that incorporates self-service will allow for an exponentially greater customer experience.
Personalization
There are two sides to this one. The first is making sure that the technology can be personalized to your brand and business rules. This allows for a consistent brand experience. The second is the ability for a seamless back-end integration with your existing systems to provide personalization to customers. That way, when a customer calls, they will not have to repeat information that has already been shared.
“Study after study shows that consumers are increasingly requesting and using self-service options and prefer it over live assistance.” Frost & Sullivan
Step 2: Choose a Partner
Instead of a vendor that will simply sell you a technology, find a partner that will work with you and guide you to seamlessly integrate the technology into your brand and beyond.
When choosing a partner, consider these three characteristics:
Find a partner that will share in your success.
You want your partner to be as invested in the success of the technology as you are. One easy way to determine this is based on the pricing model that is offered. If the company is offering a one-time price, or charging you based on the total number of transactions, no matter whether they are successful or not, this is a red flag. A success-based pricing model is one that ensures that only successful transactions will cost, which is an incentive for your partner to work hard to constantly improve the application.
Find a partner that will grow with your business.
This comes down to finding a partner that is constantly improving their product and is at the forefront of innovation in the space. Understanding your partner’s path can help you determine if their technology is something they believe in at their core, or if it’s just a side business that may or may not be a priority in the future. Choose a company whose focus is Conversational AI and has a track record of continually innovating.
Find a partner who has done what you are looking for, and at scale.
Choosing a partner who has successfully completed Conversational AI deployments, especially at scale, matters. This ensures that the potential partner is experienced and flexible enough to support you and grow with you. This is essential to achieving measurable results and an overall successful solution.
Step 3: Choose Your Channels
There are two questions you should be asking: “How are my customers currently contacting me?” and, “How do my customers want to contact me?” These will help determine how to prioritize channel adoption and for which tasks. Ultimately, it is ideal to include every channel that your customers want to use, integrated with an omnichannel solution. Create an inclusive approach where your customers can interact with you on any channel, any time, for anything.
You must reach your customers where they are. It’s not just about having your application on every channel, it’s about the ability for those channels to seamlessly connect to create a cohesive customer experience and exceed expectations.
Conclusion
The future is crystal clear. In order to build brand loyalty, trust and exceed customer expectations, companies need to make themselves available to their customers at any time and on the channel of their choice. By implementing a customer service strategy that’s truly omnichannel and leverages key technologies, you can enable your customers to do more, faster—and keep them coming back for more.
