As a brand do you feel you are truly listening to your customers and their voice?
Are you able to reach your customers who are communicating across channels – contact centers, social media, web chat, online forums, review sites, messaging platforms, emails, online surveys in a personalized and timely fashion?
Today, the best companies in the world are obsessed with customer satisfaction and go to great lengths to listen. But for most brands it’s a challenge to even know where to listen, let alone respond in context and a timely fashion. And yet 67% of millennials have changed brand loyalties in past 12 months because of a bad experience. So how exactly are brands supposed to listen to the voice of the customer when there is so much of noise? The real question becomes how do you quickly respond and solve your customers problem with an understanding of the context, sentiment, behavior and real intent of the customer?
Voice has always been the dominant mode for customer interaction with brands, whether it was a face to face interaction at a branch or store, or a conversation with a contact center agent. Technology introduced new channels of communication – social media, email, web chat, smartphone apps, chat – and businesses started pushing customers to these channels to reduce cost to serve. With channel proliferation, companies lost that intimate connect with their customers.
With the advent of voice interfaces on smartphones, customers are comfortable reverting to the old way of doing business. Through voice. Voice is once again the preferred user interface. Customers want to communicate using their voices to have a much personal rapport with the brand. Brands need to provide this kind of a personalization to the customers. Today the power of voice is what customers expect and it will radically alter the customer experience.
Is your brand listening to the Voice of the Customer
Every conversation has at least two participants – a speaker and a listener. Customers dialling customer service for a conversation with an agent were left frustrated because their voice is not heard, and they have a poor experience. According to Forrester, 42% of customer service reps can’t efficiently resolve customer issues due to problems with disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, and multiple applications.
Every brand knows that customer service is paramount and that there is hidden knowledge in almost all customer interaction. Most customer focused companies record the calls that happen between their customers and agents. However, 1 or 2% of the calls are physically listened to. Imagine listening to 100% of the calls and analyzing these conversations to derive better business outcomes.
Customer service is the foundation and critical driver of customer experience. But it’s broken. To make things worse, customers are short of time and have brief attention spans. They switch brands at the drop of a hat. Customers today are truly empowered. When your customers take time from their busy schedule to engage with you, they are challenging you to deliver value for every second spent with you.
Customers are expecting a frictionless and memorable customer experience and this expectation has now reached a tipping point. Customers now demand simplicity, customization, and rapid resolution without effort. U.S. companies lose $75 billion a year due to poor customer experiences, a $13 billion increase from 2016. Most of these poor customer experiences can be easily resolved.
All this has triggered a growing trend of AI in the customer service industry. Within the contact center industry, the enterprises are experimenting with a combination of automation, chatbots, speech analytics, biometric security and so on. There is a major revolution underway in the customer service industry.
The future of customer service is Conversational Service Automation. Powered by AI, it helps organizations move away from a siloed experience and help service customers holistically, blending the capabilities of people, AI and automation to better understand conversations and the voice of the customers in real-time.
Conversational Service Automation is how enterprises deliver transformational customer service experiences. Uniphore’s Conversational Service Automation platform and innovative human-machine automation ensures every person, on every call, can finally be heard. Our platform includes Conversational Automation and Analytics, Conversational Assistant and Conversational Security that change the way enterprises engage consumers, build loyalty and realize efficiencies.