A customer expects a lot more than just services or products. According to Gartner's 2018 State of Personalization Report, 88% of surveyed customers reported not receiving 'tailored help.'

Rather than giving the same repetitive answers to your customers every time, are you listening to them? Are you communicating clearly throughout their buying journey? Try personalized communication instead!

Imagine you have availed subscription-based service for a particular product. Then you decide to close your subscription after some time. What will be your next step?

You will contact the customer support team and ask them to close your subscription, leading to returning the product and its final pickup. Sounds simple, right?

Not actually, when you face a hard time following up with support agents again and again on your subscription closure, raising a complaint ticket, status regarding the pickup, refund policies, and this goes on.

Where do most contact centers go wrong?

Most companies rely heavily on IVRs to reduce their operational cost instead of enhancing customer experience. It leads to the following common problems:

• One Size Fits All Approach

One of the common objectives of using IVRs is to handle the call volume. It never allows a customer to connect with support agents instantly and is asked to - "Press 1, 2, and 3", with no system in place to manage different calls dynamically, leaving customers frustrated and annoyed.

⦁Complex IVR Menu Structure

When a customer calls transferred to IVR, it looks nothing less than a maze. Since IVR has a standard menu structure as decided by the companies, it would not resonate well with the requirements of a customer. Resulting in high churn rates and unexplainable frustration.

⦁Lack of Integration with Other Channels

What if your customer prefers self-service digital channels over typical voice calls? The traditional IVR system fails to understand the different requirements of the CX journey.

Contact Centers having little or no integration with web or app-based services come with limited ability to provide superior customer support experience.

⦁Untimely Updates and Poor Communication

Suppose a customer buys a product from an e-commerce site, and recently their return policies underwent changes. The customer decides to place a return request.

A support agent or an IVR system not updated about the recent business changes as there is no coordination across various departments of the business. What will be the outcome? The brand is at risk of losing loyal customers and thousands of potential customers.

The COVID-19 is overwhelming contact center
s across the globe. People are relying on digital communication more than ever and expecting a faster response as compared to the pre-pandemic era.

The priority to adopt a customer-first approach and deliver the next-gen customer experience using Conversational AI, Call Automation, and Digital Deflection can help businesses to sail through smoothly during the turbulent time.

How to deliver the next-gen customer experience using Conversational AI, Call Automation, and Digital Deflection?

• Create an Omnichannel Experience

Most contact centers support different types of digital interactions like email, SMS, social channels, digital forms, virtual agents, and live human support. None of these channels is unknown to any modern enterprise. Then what's missing?

Possibly, tracking multiple digital touchpoints throughout a customer experience journey, identifying contextual intents, creating workflows, and providing a personal and customized experience to every customer based on their past interactions.

Irrespective of what channels you use, design customer journeys across all digital touchpoints in such a way that your virtual agents or live support agents can go through conversation history and deliver a better and consistent experience to customers.

• Provide Self-Service Options and Knowledge Base

Whether waiting in a queue for billing in departmental stores or waiting on a call for support agents to address customer grievances, the long wait time can be annoying and frustrating for anyone. So how about introducing self-service options for customers?

With voice and text-based virtual agents, you can automate most of your repetitive customer queries and escalate to agents via digital channels. Also, you can create a knowledge base that helps a customer to find the information they are looking for.

By leveraging Conversational AI, virtual agents can identify the right intent and return results from the right resources that meet the requirement of that specific interactions.

• Make it As Human As Possible

So your customer has already gone through all self-service options yet their problems are not solved. What’s next? Hand-off live agent. However, when they try to reach for agent assistance through calls or digital channels, they end up getting an automated response- “

Please wait while we transfer your call to our next available executive. We appreciate your patience.” Is this the kind of customer support you want to experience? No, right?

Then how about creating a seamless transition from any digital channels or app to direct live agent, pick up from present and past interactions in real-time, and route the customers accordingly to the right support agent.

• Proactive Communication As and When Needed

Your bill payment date is approaching soon. And you receive push notifications or email just at the right time. Looks so hassle-free, right? Most of us will agree that the power of proactive communication is immense if it is relevant to us and done at the right time.

Be it a payment reminder, service requests, or just an update, proactive messaging saves time and effort for contact centers and also allows customers to decide how they want to receive them.

These automatic updates are crucial for every stage of the customer journey to disseminate the right information. Besides, a customer also gets the option to request further assistance via call back or contact us options, as provided within the notification.

• Speak the Language of Your Customer

Beyond borders, geographies, culture, and diversity, if there is one thing that binds us all is the language. Let language not be a barrier for your customers.

The virtual agents built on Intelligent Virtual Assistant Platforms comes with multilingual support that helps virtual assistant to converse with customers in their native language.

To make every interaction more localized and human, virtual agents can be trained for welcome messages, small talks, and chit chats as required.

Getting started

For those contact centers who decide that personalized customer experience will be part of their ongoing strategy, setting up call automation and digital deflection is easy. It will help you to improve first call resolution, reduce long wait times, empower your support agents, and enhance the customer experience.

AI-powered virtual assistants manage different calls dynamically by deflecting them to smart virtual assistants and digital channels to provide live or asynchronous support. You can automate most routine customer queries using voice and text-based virtual agents.

When you are ready to take the customer experience to the next level, you can try virtual agents and digital forms to capture your customer request.