We were recently interviewed by Insider Magazine to talk about Customer Experience and AI. See what we had to say below. 1 How do you define customer experience?
Customer Experience is a customer’s perceptions and feelings toward a company. This is built through the sum of both one-off and cumulative interactions with employees, products, systems, or channels. It’s critical that companies pay attention to this and deliberately design CX to build trust and loyalty from customers who have an ever increasing choice of who to do business with. 2 What has changed in customer experience goals for business since 2020? Much of the movement within the CX space recently has been adjusting to a working from home model. Customers and Consumers are reporting that customer experiences have become worse over the last few years; for many companies they have needed to go back to the basics of providing better customer service. Many organisations were also led by cost cutting measures and implementing chat capabilities as a silver bullet to solve problems but many of these have been poorly implemented and have not considered the fact that real human interactions are still essential. With such a focus on cost saving, companies are now realising the long-term damage that a one faceted approach can have on customer sentiment and there has been a resurgence in trying to get the basics right and building CX maturity once again. 3 How is artificial intelligence changing customer experience now? With the advent of LLM’s (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT and Bard, companies are now focused on utilising this capability, with many implementing chatbots with LLM integrations, vastly improving the quality of these interactions beyond the old structured conversation approach we have seen previously. Additionally these capabilities are being used to cut down the effort in terms of sentiment research for Qualitative based surveys. 4 How might artificial intelligence change customer experience over the next five years? AI and more specifically LLM’s will continue to evolve and become smarter and more powerful. While many companies are already using such within their chatbot functionality, more forward-thinking organisations are looking at how AI can be used to support teams internally to improve productivity and efficiency; ultimately to improve customer experience by getting things done more quickly and to a higher level of quality. Some of the real value will be seen where AI can perform operational tasks such as a refund or cancelling a booking, for example. These next stage LLM’s natively and seamlessly interact with back-office systems. 5 What are the limits to artificial intelligence in improving customer experience? AI is not in a place where it can replace humans, today at least. AI can help in relation to many transactional style interactions but interactions that are necessary to build relationships, trust and advocacy require human to human interaction. AI’s can help to improve efficiency resulting in more time to spend on these value related experiences. 6 How else might businesses seek to improve customer experience? We believe in taking a structured approach which starts with a clear strategy and vision with the customer at the very centre. Then we advocate using the I-SEE model. Intelligence: including Voice of the Customer Programmes (VoC), to build an understanding of what customers need, their drivers, motivations and frustrations. Success: ensuring that we focus on what success looks like for customers and that products and services align to this. Effort: reducing the relative effort for customers to achieve their goals and finally but very importantly Emotion: ensuring that each and every interaction builds a sense of trust and advocacy showing that we genuinely care about customer. 7 How else might businesses seek to save costs in customer experience? There is a great deal of research showing the ROI of Customer Experience and the effect on the bottom line. Being customer-centric means having a continuous improvement mindset. This enables companies to improve effectiveness and efficiency. In other words, being focussed on customers and listening to their views allows companies to focus their efforts in areas that will both improve the customer experience and become more efficient. Customer-centricity requires three main elements, servant leadership (strategy and enablement), a customer obsessed approach and a defined focus on Employee Experience. Comments are closed.
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AuthorOur Blog editor Miles has over 20 years of experience in Customer Service and Customer Experience Categories
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November 2024
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