Gone are the days when it was enough to respond to a comment. Many businesses are now evolving from customer service to customer-centric, which is crucial to thriving even in today’s competitive environment.
However, achieving this goal is not so easy.
Organizing massive client communication, gathering the most valuable data, and developing personalization strategies are just a few of the many steps to navigate.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful ally. By 2025, it estimates 95% power in all customer interactions. Technology is revolutionizing companies’ ability to communicate directly with their customers on a much wider scale — but in engagement.
How will AI change customer communication strategies in 2021 and beyond?
New value from interactions
To be customer-centric, you need to understand your customers. However, many companies still do not realize the importance of every customer touchpoint. A brief introduction will also uncover invaluable insights on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics.
It can scan, compare and generate with data volume, AI is well equipped to provide the required value. Above all, it has an arsenal of capabilities, including speech-to-text, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and predictive analytics. No matter the format — be it a phone call, live chat, email, or social media comment — AI can create models about your customers and processes.
So, there are often obstacles in your sales cycle or ways to improve training for customer service representatives, allowing you to get more value from AI client interactions.
Won the race of expectations
AI, empowered by data, allows you to enhance the customer experience. Combined with CRM systems, it can create a database for each customer and target them individually. With hyper-personalized follow-ups, offers, and offers closer to customer needs, or with automated birthday messages, engaging your customers will be easier than ever.
Ultimately, such a level of personalization also provides an end to the traditional marketing segmentation, which is the most complex process of placing customers in certain categories based on their similarity in terms of population or other factors.
At the same time, AI can help you keep up with the growing customer demand. Through automated responses, it is possible to outsource the most basic tasks while providing better and more consistent answers. Such self-service offers several benefits: IBM estimates that chatbots can reduce resolution time from 38 hours to 5.4 minutes for clear, Tier 1 questions.
If the problem is too complex for the virtual agent to solve, it can hand over the customer to the human agent. Here, the technology must be programmed to transfer the context smoothly to humans without the customer having to repeat any information. In the future, AI will also be able to engage in dialogue by assisting the human agent in research and guiding on the best possible answers.
Multichannel made it easy
McKinsey estimates that in the near future, 75% of customers will typically use multiple channels to contact companies under the Omchanel model. At the same time, they expect a consistent experience across all of these channels, with the potential to switch seamlessly between them. Reliance on AI is crucial to meet such demands, centralize all communications, store information, automate manual tasks, and engage quickly and accurately.
To strengthen your multichannel strategy, remember to keep an eye on the latest consumer trends. For example, during the epidemic, the popularity of phone calls increased significantly. In fact, US carriers increased by 35%. Based on AI-powered voice recognition technology, you can set up intelligent voice response receptionists to quickly let your clients know the purpose of their call and their expectations from the outset.
To be successful in 2021 and beyond, you need to focus on three different things: Include customer feedback, communicate as much as you can, and build a culture of customer success. Know that it is not enough to just sit back and embrace AI and enjoy its work: constant curiosity and work to improve algorithms ensures that your customers are getting closer to where you need them.
