By Sridhar Hari, Salesforce IndiaHave you recently been in a situation when you signed up for a new broadband connection or applied for a home loan? You probably began your search on the internet, looking for suitable products, comparing options, reading reviews, getting your friends and family to chime in with their own experiences.
After an extensive research phase, you finally get a "great deal" on the product you like, convincing you to go ahead and purchase.
Fast-forward a few days while you are still basking in all the praises you are getting for making such a great decision and out-of-the-blue, things don't look so good anymore.
Your loan application is stuck inexplicably. Mysteriously the broadband connection doesn't work anymore. You immediately get on the phone and go through IVR hell and the human that you finally get through to, asks questions you don’t understand and really has no clue how to address your issue. And that's just the beginning.
Differentiating your brand
Today's companies have great sales teams, refined sales processes and are getting closer to truly personalised marketing especially through digital channels and touchpoints, connecting those digital breadcrumbs that customers leave behind. But post-sale customer experiences leave a lot to be desired.
The crucial missing link here is true customer service. Many companies have a short-term view focussed on acquiring customers (at any cost) and not focussed on retaining them.
While there may be other reasons for service taking the back-seat, in today's super-competitive world, delivering memorable experiences and customer service is the ONLY real differentiator left. It’s no longer just about product or price.
Infusing Artificial Intelligence
Increasingly, customers are comfortable using digital self-service tools. However, a human-centric approach is required to design and develop these solutions.
On the other hand, a vast majority of customers have also shown a strong preference to talk to customer service agents to resolve issues. Consumers are seven times more likely to pick up the phone to talk to a real person than to deal with the problem online.
Herein lies the opportunity to infuse AI and elevate the level of customer service being offered. Thanks to the spectacular amount of data now available through mobile, social, IOT and other channels, the following areas have enormous potential with respect to customer service:
Faster issues resolution: AI-based case classification automatically defines cases based on user histories and trends.
For instance, if a product has a known defect, those cases can be automatically routed with the instructions to agents on how to address the issue. This can be a huge boost for agent productivity and efficiency.
Additionally, customers reward companies who provide them with a fast, efficient experience with high customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
Deliver the right answers, with confidence: Personalized responses uses case context and history to provide recommended answers, ensuring customers can quickly get the right answers to their questions.
Routine inquiries can be automated, freeing agents to focus on fewer, more involved cases that benefit from the personal touch. AI technology can also help route the right skilled worker to the right interaction at the right time, making certain that customers get the help they need on the first interaction.
Empower your team with insights about case resolution times: Predictive close time can help your support team route, escalate and prioritize work by predicting the time needed to resolve an issue.
Machine learning algorithms can get smarter over time, helping companies optimize their agent staffing, provide better customer service and drive up their customer service metric scores.
Enterprises need to look for solutions that take a platform-centric approach to solving these challenges. A platform that enables a deeper alignment between Sales, Service, and Marketing is a good place to start. AI is already transforming the way we engage customers but the benefit we’re seeing today pales in comparison to its projected impact.
IDC predicts that AI will deliver a $1.1 trillion boost to global business revenue and create 800 thousand new jobs in the next five years alone.
It is also critical that AI capabilities are not only available in a democratized manner but also in a manner that allows building custom applications leveraging the platform as well as an ecosystem of partners.
(Sridhar Hari is Director- Customer Success, Salesforce India. Views expressed above are his own)