Unlocking strong CX with an effective customer engagement strategy
Customer engagement delivers multiple business benefits—it boosts the brand experience, increases customer loyalty and trust and provides valuable feedback and insight. All of these improvements help businesses stay competitive and grow the bottom line in a dynamic, rapidly changing marketplace.
Leveraging the digital era, India’s CX needs to move rapidly towards the introduction and management of new digital delivery models. With so many options for digitally engaging customers today, it can be challenging to figure out where to begin. Here are four key aspects of an effective customer engagement strategy, how they work and how they help you improve CX.
1.Omnichannel customer engagement
Customers have more options than ever for communicating with your organization, and they want to interact with you using the channel that's most convenient for them at any given moment. They also expect to have a consistent experience with your brand across all channels, including a seamless transition from one channel to the next while they're on the go.
An omnichannel customer engagement strategy manages all customer interactions from a single platform, regardless of the channel in which they originated or are currently taking place. With an omnichannel approach, your company can more easily manage all of its conversations and provide a smooth and unified customer experience.
A virtual contact center can deliver the omnichannel engagement capabilities you need. Streamlined routing capabilities allow you to automatically route incoming communications across channels and agents, increasing contact center agent productivity and reducing the time required for first-call resolution.
2.Personalized experiences
Customers expect personalized experiences that reflect their tastes and preferences. Crucially, it is no longer enough to deliver offers or product recommendations that are intended for people who are similar—now it’s important for these offers to be specifically relevant to each individualcustomer. Personalization based on your customers' unique purchase and browsing histories, for example, helps achieve this relevance.
As McKinsey notes, "successful personalization programs yield more engaged customers and drive up the top line." Accordingly, businesses that personalize their interactions with customers are far more likely to succeed with their customer engagement strategy.
By pairing personalization with an omnichannel customer engagement approach, you can have personal, one-on-one conversations with your customers. Real-time communication agents, for example, can enable your human customer service agents to engage customers over chat, voice and video conversations. Over time, this personalized customer engagement approach will allow you to cultivate meaningful relationships that lead to long-term loyalty.
3.AI-enhanced service with a human touch
Customers arelookingfor quick and accurate guidance from your customer service team. However, customer service agents often have to wade through different knowledge bases and data sources in order to find information—and this can drive up the time required to satisfy customer requests. Artificial intelligence (AI) can lend these human customer service professionals a helping hand, empowering them to more accurately answer questions in less time.
India in the past year has provided a push to AI enabled technology and recently announced the USIAI (US India Artificial Intelligence)initiative, to address challenges and opportunities at the intersection of science, technology, and society.There has also been a rise of private investment in AI despite the pandemic,as reflected in Stanford University’sAI Index report 2021 statingthat 2020 saw a 9.3 percent increase. Furthermore, developing countries like India have seen the highest growth in AI hiring.
AI-enhanced digital solutions can empower your team to engage customers at scale by first understanding the intent of customers' questions and then consulting multiple trusted sources to find the right information. An AI-driven knowledge base can be directly integrated into the agent desktop, for example, providing streamlined access to all of these resources. It can also automatically update data sources in real time, evolving to become steadily more accurate and relevant as new resources become available.
4.Automated self-service options
Many customers, particularly digital natives, expect self-service options when interacting with your company. Digital customer engagement tools that use AI can help your business satisfy this demand by augmenting your human customer service team with chatbots that are available 24/7 and can simultaneously support an unlimited number of customer interactions across phone, website, app or messaging platforms. Such an agent can address more queries within a short duration. In India, these chatbots are being developed to interact in regional languages, as envisioned by the National Language Translation Mission announced during the Union Budget 2021-22.
A virtual agent gleans information from knowledge bases, business systems and trusted external sources, tapping AI to provide the most useful responses. It's also smart enough to know which questions it can answer, and which requests would be best handled by a human agent, ensuring that your customers get exactly the level of care they need.Driven by these benefits, the chatbot market is expected to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 29.7 percent to hit $9.4 billion by 2024.
A winning and effective customer engagement strategy
A successful customer experience improvement strategy includes an effective engagement approach. By pursuing an omnichannel engagement approach that is personalized, you can meet your customers where they are and provide the relevant experience they've come to expect. AI-enhanced solutions can help your human customer service agents serve your customersmore efficiently at scale, while automated self-service options give your customers instant access to the information they need at any hour of the day or night. All of these strategies can better engage your customers and provide them with a stellar experience.
Leveraging the digital era, India’s CX needs to move rapidly towards the introduction and management of new digital delivery models. With so many options for digitally engaging customers today, it can be challenging to figure out where to begin. Here are four key aspects of an effective customer engagement strategy, how they work and how they help you improve CX.
1.Omnichannel customer engagement
Customers have more options than ever for communicating with your organization, and they want to interact with you using the channel that's most convenient for them at any given moment. They also expect to have a consistent experience with your brand across all channels, including a seamless transition from one channel to the next while they're on the go.
An omnichannel customer engagement strategy manages all customer interactions from a single platform, regardless of the channel in which they originated or are currently taking place. With an omnichannel approach, your company can more easily manage all of its conversations and provide a smooth and unified customer experience.
A virtual contact center can deliver the omnichannel engagement capabilities you need. Streamlined routing capabilities allow you to automatically route incoming communications across channels and agents, increasing contact center agent productivity and reducing the time required for first-call resolution.
2.Personalized experiences
Customers expect personalized experiences that reflect their tastes and preferences. Crucially, it is no longer enough to deliver offers or product recommendations that are intended for people who are similar—now it’s important for these offers to be specifically relevant to each individualcustomer. Personalization based on your customers' unique purchase and browsing histories, for example, helps achieve this relevance.
As McKinsey notes, "successful personalization programs yield more engaged customers and drive up the top line." Accordingly, businesses that personalize their interactions with customers are far more likely to succeed with their customer engagement strategy.
By pairing personalization with an omnichannel customer engagement approach, you can have personal, one-on-one conversations with your customers. Real-time communication agents, for example, can enable your human customer service agents to engage customers over chat, voice and video conversations. Over time, this personalized customer engagement approach will allow you to cultivate meaningful relationships that lead to long-term loyalty.
3.AI-enhanced service with a human touch
Customers arelookingfor quick and accurate guidance from your customer service team. However, customer service agents often have to wade through different knowledge bases and data sources in order to find information—and this can drive up the time required to satisfy customer requests. Artificial intelligence (AI) can lend these human customer service professionals a helping hand, empowering them to more accurately answer questions in less time.
India in the past year has provided a push to AI enabled technology and recently announced the USIAI (US India Artificial Intelligence)initiative, to address challenges and opportunities at the intersection of science, technology, and society.There has also been a rise of private investment in AI despite the pandemic,as reflected in Stanford University’sAI Index report 2021 statingthat 2020 saw a 9.3 percent increase. Furthermore, developing countries like India have seen the highest growth in AI hiring.
AI-enhanced digital solutions can empower your team to engage customers at scale by first understanding the intent of customers' questions and then consulting multiple trusted sources to find the right information. An AI-driven knowledge base can be directly integrated into the agent desktop, for example, providing streamlined access to all of these resources. It can also automatically update data sources in real time, evolving to become steadily more accurate and relevant as new resources become available.
4.Automated self-service options
Many customers, particularly digital natives, expect self-service options when interacting with your company. Digital customer engagement tools that use AI can help your business satisfy this demand by augmenting your human customer service team with chatbots that are available 24/7 and can simultaneously support an unlimited number of customer interactions across phone, website, app or messaging platforms. Such an agent can address more queries within a short duration. In India, these chatbots are being developed to interact in regional languages, as envisioned by the National Language Translation Mission announced during the Union Budget 2021-22.
A virtual agent gleans information from knowledge bases, business systems and trusted external sources, tapping AI to provide the most useful responses. It's also smart enough to know which questions it can answer, and which requests would be best handled by a human agent, ensuring that your customers get exactly the level of care they need.Driven by these benefits, the chatbot market is expected to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 29.7 percent to hit $9.4 billion by 2024.
A winning and effective customer engagement strategy
A successful customer experience improvement strategy includes an effective engagement approach. By pursuing an omnichannel engagement approach that is personalized, you can meet your customers where they are and provide the relevant experience they've come to expect. AI-enhanced solutions can help your human customer service agents serve your customersmore efficiently at scale, while automated self-service options give your customers instant access to the information they need at any hour of the day or night. All of these strategies can better engage your customers and provide them with a stellar experience.
