Today, we live in the cross roads of rapidly changing customer expectations. Every customer desires a consistent personalized experience when interacting with a Company’s products, services and brands.
Customers connect with the brands in multiple ways. The various communication channels that help to drive conversations include, walk-in facilities, 1800 – dial-ins to customer care centers, website, self-service web portals, texting, mobile apps & social media.
While these communication channels have helped in providing a seamless customer experience and increase in revenue, we still face continuous challenges related to growing customer segments, demographics and increasing customer expectations.
A recent research by NewVoiceMedia reveals that $62 Billion is lost by US business each year owing to bad customer experience. Another Forrester research report states 72% of business want to improve their customer experiences and 49% of CMOs indicate that technology management is too slow to meet the needs and the pressure is now on the CIOs to replace slow and complex technology with fast & simple solutions.
Customer engagement channels are managed by humans and thereby lack in providing consistent experiences or have a pre-requisite of getting familiar with IT systems such as web pages & mobile apps. Many companies still struggle to identify a plan of action to provide a consistent customer experience that helps in growing customers, sales and brand loyalty significantly.
Enabling customer experience is not about giving an IT toolbox with glossy visual design and usability or by continuous training of your customer support workforce. It’s about reimagining every step of the customer (& employee) journey, their unique touch points and providing a better, consistent, intuitive and personalized human – computer interaction.
Now let’s look at some of the consumer trends and where most of our customers are today:
- Messaging apps: have surpassed social networks. 20 billion messages are currently being exchanged through this channel. This is how we engage with our families, friends & colleagues. It’s more convenient than an email or a phone call. Messenger today is a perfect fit.
- Voice the Powerful Communication medium: With smart phone being ubiquitous, each of our customers has their own virtual voice assistant in terms of Ok Google or Siri or Cortana. Google states that 20% of their current web search happens through voice. We use it every day to turn on our lights or play our favourite music. Also we see home automation is on an up curve with Amazon Alexa and Google Home moving from our living room to every other room in our house. Voice is the most powerful, useful, and effective communication medium ever.
Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.
We live in the world where customers don’t care what channel the company provides to engage with, as quite honestly we as a customer would only want to engage in the channel of our own choice. And this choice varies by individual customer segments & age groups. Enterprises today need to provide a multi-channel engagement to improve their experience, while interacting with their products and services.
Hexaware through its Shrink IT and Grow Digital theme helps customers in disrupting their contact centers and processes by providing consistent multi-channel customer experience through Extreme Automation, Robotics & Virtual Agents (Chat & Voice Bots). All powered by Artificial Intelligence.
The solution acts as a bridge between system designed by IT and those designed for humans, thereby transitioning from ‘user adapting to learn technology’ to ‘technology adapting & learning from users’.
Hexaware multi-channel Virtual Agent encompasses enterprise grade bot implementation that includes social messengers & enterprise chats, home automation devices, personal voice assistants in smart phones, front office solutions & AI enabled telephony services.
Virtual Agents unlike human agents are cost effective, reliable, consistent, hyper personalized, intuitive, elastic to demand, always on, present across channels and always ready to assist customers.
We understand that no matter what digital channel you provide, if your underlying process orchestration does not have the same velocity and agility, your customer will not have the desired experience. Hexaware’s Shrink IT portfolio helps in deploying autonomous back office robotics and Virtual Agents that helps in delivering a consistent experience across channels.
For any queries, ideas and discussion, do connect me @ immanuelk@hexaware.com or tweet me @immu
Immanuel J Kingsley
Assistant Vice President & Head – Innovation Lab
Hexaware Technologies
