Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of Women in CX, says, “Building a great customer experience doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by design.”
Most consumers would agree, with 80% indicating that customer experience is as essential as a company’s product or service.
But if the metrics aren’t tracking and the surveys aren’t garnering responses, how do teams know what strong CX actually means for their customers? How can companies design an ideal customer experience?
Humans use spoken conversations, texts and recorded voices to communicate every day. These unstructured and unsolicited data sources provide valuable and highly contextual insights that survey programs don’t reveal.
Historically, these conversations have sat dormant in the business. Today, artificial intelligence can analyse this unstructured data on a large scale to understand the topics and subjects customers care about.
This understanding contributes to making more efficient and effective CX design decisions, and improving business and customer outcomes.
As organisations prepare to meet (and hopefully exceed) customer expectations in 2024 and beyond, here are some things to remember.
Re-prioritise
To remain relevant, CX teams must prioritise how they keep their finger on the pulse of customer needs and use those insights to adjust strategies accordingly.
To remain relevant, CX teams must prioritise how they keep their finger on the pulse of customer needs.
Let’s take Net Promoter Scores (NPS), for example. Customers don’t care about NPS scores, and NPS scores frustrate business leaders, too. Yet, companies continue making significant investments in NPS measurement.
The CX industry has attempted to address these frustrations by evolving and adjusting how we conduct surveys.
For example, we’ve seen a shift from mail surveys to telephone, web, SMS, online ratings and reviews – and everything in between. And yet, these innovations in customer listening haven’t fixed the heart of the problem.
The reality is that customers interact with companies during times of need and moments of struggle.
When we prioritise the understanding and analysis of this data source, we have the greatest opportunity to drive the innovation needed to design a truly differentiated experience.
Advancements in AI and natural language understanding (NLU) empower CX leaders to recognise the importance and value of unsolicited feedback – that is, authentic customer voices.
As we see more organisations relying on unsolicited feedback, expect to see new metrics, like a measurement of friction (whatever makes experiences more cumbersome), begin to emerge.
Keep pace
AI enables leaders to keep pace with change and drive sound decision-making. Tools like ChatGPT and Gen AI contribute to speed, volume and accuracy in processing unstructured data sources.
Organisations investing in these resources will be rewarded with a competitive advantage because they’ll be equipped to respond quickly to meet customer needs.
The ability to quickly process a high volume of conversational data – representing the authentic voice of the customer – gives teams a clear line of sight into the changing customer landscape.
This approach also gives business leaders the confidence to strategically pivot to meet customer and business expectations.
Improve performance
AI is having a significant positive impact on customer experience. Conversational intelligence uses AI, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to leverage unstructured and unsolicited data sources from chatbots, calls, emails, texts and more to uncover nuanced insights and listen at scale.
Organisations utilising this technique to understand their customers cite a 25% increase in first-call resolution rates and a 10% decrease in customer churn.
Conversational intelligence use leads to a 25% increase in first-call resolution rates and a 10% decrease in customer churn.
Emerging AI technology will continue leading the way to help organisations find and decode signals driving the right actions and changes to achieve customer-centricity through the power of conversations.
Empower teams
Communication skills and customer service training are critical for contact center agents on the front line. According to the 2023 Customer Voices in Healthcare report, about 35% of Eddy Effect disruptions stem from people-related issues.
These disruptions waste company resources on problems that should never have occurred, creating frustration for those stuck trying to navigate issues independently. AI eliminates these frustrating conversations by helping to identify, determine and fix the underlying cause of customer issues.
Investing in conversational AI doesn’t just support operations and customers – companies can use it as a motivating tool for employee development and training, too.
Listening at scale captures data and information organisations can use in training to recreate and role-play complex scenarios – or update scripts to address common issues and guide conversational points more effectively.
AI gives employees more purpose in their work, creating efficiencies that, in turn, reveal opportunities for more intentional support for customers and teammates.
Frontline teams could receive self-service performance feedback captured automatically during each interaction. This ongoing innovation of automated and on-demand coaching gives employees timely feedback to help them continuously improve.
Data-backed storytelling
Increased digitisation has enabled organisations to collect vast amounts of data. Yet, many organisations struggle to drive action from that data. The current perception of storytelling – viewed as public speaking or data visualisations – is evolving.
We will see a data-backed storytelling role emerge to yield enterprise-wide, customer-focused action. As we move into next year, more leaders will seek data-backed storytellers with the:
● Research and knowledge to find customer stories.
● Creativity to craft those stories into powerful narratives.
● Presence to deliver stories that incite action and outcomes.
In the very near future, data-backed storytelling will emerge as an essential strategy for communicating the meaning of collected data trends, expanding the context surrounding data points and providing leaders with guidance on clear next steps.
Every touchpoint contributes to delivering an exceptional CX. Forward-thinking companies are approaching AI adoption with a strong sense of responsibility and purpose.
They recognise the technology’s value lies beyond its ability to automate tasks and ease human efforts – it shines because it can harness listening at scale and glean insights from unstructured data.
It’s time to reframe how we view listening, which has the power to solve a wide range of CX problems.
2024 is a wake-up call for CX leaders to embrace conversational intelligence via AI-powered technology to help listen more intentionally, identify stories and take action to deliver better CX.
