Customers increasingly expect brands to deliver support that helps them solve issues as quickly as possible and doesn’t require them to waste time on the phone with human call agents. To meet these rising expectations, many brands have undergone—or plan to undergo—a customer experience transformation, using lessons learned from evolving customer requirements to deploy tools that deliver on their demands.
However, embarking on a customer experience transformation isn’t just an exercise in refreshing your existing customer journey. It requires carefully reviewing your company’s culture, operations and people to discover opportunities to enhance user experience. Based on this customer experience research, you can then create a strategy for transforming your CX interface and your CX artificial intelligence (AI) engine—the body and the brains behind a positive customer experience.
The Essence of Positive Customer Experience
Delivering experiences that people love remains a significant challenge for many businesses. But before digging into the tactics and strategies, it’s first vital to understand what drives positive customer experience.
What Defines a Positive Customer Experience?
Customer experience is people’s impression of your company throughout every step of the customer journey. This includes everything from the look and feel of your website and how usable your website and apps are to how well you communicate with customers and your ability to offer them personalized offers.
But the key ingredients of a positive customer experience are your employees and your products. This is where you can differentiate between customer experience vs. user experience. User experience focuses solely on the performance of your company’s products, whereas CX broadens this to how people feel about your services.
Products’ role in CX
Products and services are the number one reason customers come to your brand, so delivering products that work well and meet their needs is critical to driving positive experiences. However, while products are crucial to shaping a positive customer experience, they don’t exist in a vacuum. Products can’t answer customer questions or troubleshoot on their own. That’s where people come in…
People’s role in CX
People arguably have the most significant impact on customer experience. Customer service agents are often the first point of contact that people have with your company, so the quality of support they provide and their ability to solve a problem quickly affects how happy customers are.
The Impact of Positive CX on Business
Delivering experiences that customers love can significantly impact your bottom line and revenue. In fact, research shows that happy customers will continue to buy more products and services and tell their friends and family about their good experiences.
The modern customer has more power than ever before, so delivering the experiences they expect is even more critical. Customers now have many options and brands at their fingertips, so a slight mistake or poor experience can encourage them to move to a competitor. In fact, as high as 60 percent of consumers would consider switching to a competitor after two or fewer bad experiences, according to a 2022 study by CCW Digital. That same study found the 17 percent considered leaving after a single bad interaction.
It’s therefore crucial to provide a great experience at every stage of the customer journey, from every sent email and every chatbot interaction to every time a call agent picks up the phone. Doing so will help you maintain high customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn, and encourage people to return for more and buy new products and services.
Identifying Unseen CX Challenges
Customer experience transformation isn’t without its challenges. Businesses that rely on traditional approaches often see them fall short of expectations. (After all, a customer experience transformation should be transformative. Using the same tools and tactics as before prevents organizations from realizing customer experience goals, like understanding customer intention and deploying emerging tools and technologies.) A few common customer experience challenges include:
Poor quality data: Businesses that work with inaccurate, incomplete or outdated customer data will struggle to understand customers’ needs and true sentiments. As a result, they may send emails customers don’t want, recommend products they’re not interested in, launch ineffective marketing campaigns and provide inefficient support. These factors will likely result in customers taking their business elsewhere.
Transformation resistance: Some companies may be resistant to change due to factors like new technologies being perceived as too costly or not fitting in with their existing stacks and workflows. This resistance can come from employees, senior leaders and even customers, but companies will inevitably fall behind more agile and innovative competitors.
Lack of technology: CX transformation relies on using emerging tools and technologies that enable companies to collect, analyze and act on customer data. However, many businesses lack the infrastructure and resources to implement these technologies, making it near-impossible for employees to deliver experiences that delight customers. For example, employees won’t be able to access customer relationship management tools, customer feedback management tools or customer analytics platforms.
Ineffective CX frameworks: Customer experience frameworks are essential to setting out the key elements of a customer journey, defining every touchpoint people have via every digital channel. So, failing to develop a compelling customer experience framework can result in incoherent and inconsistent interactions.
Ignoring corporate culture: Products and services are vital to enhancing customer experience. But culture is also a contributing factor that can make or break the success of customer experience transformation. Many successful companies start by establishing a winning culture; then profitable products follow down the line.
Revolutionizing CX Transformation with Multimodal AI
Multimodal AI systems can process and understand information from multiple communication modes and data sources, such as text, voice, video and more. Therefore, rather than simply interacting with a chatbot, you can offer customers visual or textual guidance for greater clarity and usability.
Uniphore’s X-Platform: Bridging CX Gaps
The Multimodal AI Platform (X) helps you take advantage of next-generation AI techniques by integrating state-of-the-art tools and technologies into your contact center and sales operations. The platform boosts employee experiences and optimizes customer conversations by combining proven workflow automation with emotion, generative and knowledge AI.
The Uniphore X-Platform helps you to bridge customer experience challenges by:
Maximizing every interaction: Call agents can struggle to capture every action point or opportunity discussed during a customer call. The Uniphore X-Platform addresses this by recognizing customer intent and emotional context throughout a conversation. This helps you understand what customers are looking for and connect with users more meaningfully.
The AI can identify the most critical moments in conversations by analyzing customer sentiment and tone analysis in real time. It can then help agents guide customers towards the most suitable products and services and provide them with relevant information and advice.
Simplifying knowledge discovery: Customers and agents alike are frustrated by putting callers on hold while the agent searches through disparate, outdated systems for their information. The Uniphore X-Platform unlocks knowledge AI, which provides a single source of truth to ensure information is quick and easy to discover. Knowledge AI uses conversational AI and cognitive search capabilities to help you maximize the value of data stored across your systems and databases. This transforms call agents and virtual assistants into subject matter experts, enabling real-time access to the information required to answer customer issues and make personalized recommendations.
Removing repetitive tasks: Simple, repeatable tasks prolong calls, frustrating call agents and customers alike. The Uniphore X-Platform uses conversational AI and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate these tasks, freeing agents to work on more challenging issues and spend more time interacting with customers.
Minimizing response times: The Uniphore X-Platform helps you deliver on customers’ expectations of personalized interactions, immediate responses, and first-time resolution. Conversational AI tools allow you to automate thousands of customer interactions across all digital channels in a fraction of the time it would take an employee to handle them manually.
How Multimodal AI Enhances Customer Engagement
Multimodal CX can transform your customer service approach, improving journey navigation, minimizing friction and meeting customer demands. The customer engagement benefits of multimodal AI include:
Interaction flexibility:
A multimodal approach enables you to close the gap between customer preference and usage. Customers can connect through one channel and continue the interaction through another, rather than being constrained to just email, chat or phone. This increased flexibility makes it easier for customers to interact with your company and boosts their overall satisfaction.
Customer retention:
Multimodal CX also saves you time and resources by streamlining backend operations. This helps to reduce the effort it takes for customers to solve their problems, driving customer loyalty and value.
Understanding channel preference:
Customers increasingly attempt to solve their challenges through self-service, so they’ll only be frustrated if they’re unable to resolve it themselves. However, a multimodal approach enables you to implement strategies that lead customers to experiences in line with their unique preferences.
5 Strategies for Positive CX Transformation
It’s essential to have a strategy to implement your customer experience framework and deliver support that users love. Strategies to help you provide positive CX transformation include:
Listen to the Unheard Voice of the Customer
CX transformation success relies on listening to the people who matter the most, since user interactions are the foundation of customer happiness. Conversational AI helps you to delight customers at every step and garner data on what they value and how and why they interact with the business.
However, many businesses focus too much on how customers feel about their products. Instead, you should focus on how products and services make customers feel about themselves, as this is a better gauge of loyalty and how likely they are to spend their money with you again. It’s therefore crucial to give agents the support they need to provide maximum value in every interaction.
Conversational AI offers insight into customer sentiment and intent during live calls, enabling you to respond to customer queries in real-time. It enhances the context of customer interactions and goes beyond speech to help people converse through chat, emails and text, simplifying the self-service process.
Unleash the Power of Chatbots
Chatbots can simulate human conversation using AI-powered text messaging and voice-based capabilities. By combining AI with natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU), chatbots understand the nuances of human language and automate relevant responses. These capabilities enable you to provide more advanced, two-way conversations between users and chatbots. As a result, you can help people solve their issues quicker than ever and relieve pressure from busy call agents.
Utilize Emerging Technologies
Technologies and techniques like AI, machine learning and RPA are critical to customer experience transformation. It’s increasingly vital to utilize automation capabilities to develop experiences that customers love, maximize engagement and enable seamless interactions and smooth transactions.
Enable Seamless Cross-Channel Experiences
Cross-channel capabilities provide a significant customer service boost. Connecting multiple channels gives your support teams a central repository of rich customer data. That means captured data is immediately available during future interactions, so agents no longer have to ask customers to repeat information or fill in multiple forms manually.
Promote the Power of Personalization
A key benefit of transforming customer experience is providing the unique, personalized interactions that customers expect. AI-powered agent assist software, such as Uniphore’s U-Assist, help call agents meet customer needs with empathy and understanding of their specific challenges. As a result, you can resolve issues faster and ensure more engaging interactions. Furthermore, intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) enable you to bring extreme convenience and personalization to every interaction, further enhancing customer loyalty.
Transform Your Customer Experience
Customer experience transformation can mean different things to different organizations. However, the end goal is ultimately the same: to deliver the services people expect and personalized and timely support on their preferred digital channel. Whether customers speak to a call agent or utilize self-service capabilities, new technologies can help you optimize conversation to enhance loyalty and value in every interaction. Unlocking the power of customer experience tools, like automation and conversational AI, can drive positive, empathetic experiences that keep customers returning for more and can differentiate your organization from the rest.