Using conversational AI and RPA to deliver superior customer experience

In this era of hyper-automation, customer experience is becoming the biggest differentiator for organizations. Product companies used to design products to deliver a better experience and more value for money as compared to their competitors. That used to be, and largely, still is – the differentiating factor. However, in the age of the internet and omnipresent connectivity, a large proportion of focus has shifted to how customer experiences the brand prior, during, and after the acquisition stage of the journey. 

In a market where product differentiation based merely on available features is becoming very narrow and pricing is becoming commoditized, brands both product and service-oriented have realized that ultimately, what experience they deliver to their customers and prospects may be the ultimate key to high sales and market share. The role of digitalized Omni-channel, with speed, efficiency, and accuracy becoming the core traits that must be offered to customers. Companies are seeking well-balanced offline to online strategies as the consumer journey shifts from offline to online. Companies that use these methods are winning the digitization race, gaining more customers, and increasing sales.

There is a wide range of conversational AI applications currently being experimented with or actually being deployed at scale across all industries. From customer service to marketing to security, these algorithm-powered intelligent programs are helping organizations connect with customers and employees in a wide variety of formats and ways. In fact, conversational AI has become a centerpiece for many organizations’ digital transformation in the wake of the global pandemic.

Conversational AI, as one of the most promising methods, is a technology that enables humans and computers to communicate clearly and effectively through speech or text. Conversational AI, while being complex in the background (evidenced by the time it has taken to reach this stage of maturity), works by recognizing a user’s speech or text patterns, predicting their intent, and responding with an adaptive, automated script. While, there are many platforms, the best conversational AI platforms today can create truly natural, human-like interactions. Conversational AI’s rise in popularity is based on its “friendliness” factor – being flexible to work with (and enhance) other technologies, and also by enabling a frictionless, human-like, end-user experience.  

Chatbots were brought into CX as part of this digital approach, and they are one of the most advanced and promising forms of human-machine connection. Conversational AI has been transformed by a combination of diverse AI types such as natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic understanding.

Unstructured data in the form of guided dialogues guide conversational AI, although it may also be passed off to a human worker if necessary. Conversational AI enables the delivery of a tailored customer dialogue at scale across many channels, resulting in a seamless customer journey.

Simultaneously, RPA appears to be emerging as a potential option that employs robots to automate repetitive operations and manual processes with the goal of speeding up CX processes while lowering operational costs. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Robots are guided by structured data inputs in a bottom-up, process-centric way. Even if customer contacts are routine, they are never the same in each transition. It also lacks the ability to respond swiftly to changes or handle exceptions.

Combining Conversional AI with RPA, which mimics user actions and conducts task-based activities, might be termed a self-serving engagement model. In such a case, RPA may effortlessly interact with chatbots and assist the chatbot in completing a CX task, accessing, or storing information. The requirement of prompting RPA “bots” to further commence and complete the process can be satisfied by the bidirectional data flow between chatbots and RPA.

As a result, RPA and conversational AI can be regarded ideal partners, as each picks up where the other leaves off in the process. When both are used together, CX can provide speedy, tailored encounters and customer assistance at scale. This integration's super-intelligent design will not only help consumers get their questions answered faster, but it will also provide the company an edge over its competitors by providing great digital branding.

While dealing with sophisticated requests and queries in real-time, an RPA-enabled chatbot can interface with not one, but numerous back-end enterprise systems. Chatbots combined with RPA and AI will provide your customer service a competitive edge by streamlining processes, increasing productivity, and lowering operational expenses.

The convergence of conversational AI and intelligent automation is part of an extended omnichannel experience meant to facilitate faster, more personalized, and responsive customer service

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New Normal - Borderless Workforce

The world has changed, and it has changed very rapidly indeed in the last 2 years. We all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak is a world-changing event that will have long-lasting implications for the global economy. It has been a once-in-a-generation global impact event. While there is no doubt that the pandemic is amplifying the adoption of new technologies, technological advancements were already changing the world over the past two decades, from living standards to the very nature of our work. It takes a world-changing event like the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate certain trends so dramatically and workforce-related changes have been, perhaps, the most profound.

“Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win” – Max McKeown

See, even before the pandemic struck, some features of the state of technological progress aka digital transformation were especially salient.

First, technology was already disrupting production processes, especially through the rapid scale-up of digital platforms.

Second, technology created seismic shifts in the mix of skills required to succeed in the labor market. these include cognitive skills such as critical thinking, as well as socio-behavioral skills such as managing and recognizing emotions that enhance teamwork or selling better. Earnings are higher for those who have a combination of these skills.

Third, digital technology changed the terms of work. Rather than “standard” long-term contracts, digital technologies have given rise to more short-term work, often via online work platforms. These “gigs” make certain kinds of work more accessible and flexible.

A hybrid virtual approach in which some workers work on-site while others work from home promises greater access to talent, enhanced productivity for individuals and small teams, cheaper costs, increased individual freedom, and better employee experiences. There are three major obstacles in implementing remote working:

1.            Securing the infrastructure for remote working

2.            Implementing new work policies in a structural way

3.            Balancing the work and private lives of Employees

With 40% of companies encouraging increased flexibility in terms of the country or office to work from over the next three years, and over 36% increasing the number of international remote workers not necessarily affiliated with a local office, the workforce of the future appears to be far more fluid and globalized.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence -it is to act with yesterday’s logic”- Peter Drucker

With such conditions, businesses' appetites will be piqued for one thing: A borderless Workforce.

Why?

1.            Is it More Effective? - Employees working remotely in various regions of the world save operating costs like salary, administrative expenditures, and business travel expenses. With a global workforce, you can provide round-the-clock support and significantly reduce your turnaround time. 

2.            Does it create new market opportunities? - Local skills may be unlocked and new possibilities can be created by a more globalized workforce. Striking for a borderless global workforce allows your organization to access high-quality personnel from all around the world, increasing your chances of being recognized in any market.

3.            Is it more sustainable? - Remote working decreases commute time and business travel, improving a company's environmental, social, and governance credentials. It aids in the prevention of brain drain from developing markets on a global level, and it aids in the creation of stronger social cohesion in smaller towns and rural regions on a local level.

As organizations start to reopen, they are finding that their workforce is not keen to give up remote work. Companies can no longer say that they cannot operate remotely (a common reason to avoid remote work pre-2020), but with an ongoing global pandemic, they also cannot ask employees to come back to the office full-time. The most popular solution is the thing that every organization seems to be grappling with now — the hybrid model.

People refer to the hybrid model a lot; it involves some combination of working remotely and from an office. So far, the hybrid model looks different for every organization, but there are a few clear themes. Whatever the specifics, however, companies that choose to incorporate a hybrid model will all face some challenges ranging from culture-specific to seamless collaboration to the kind of talent that is available. Borderless workforces break down geographical barriers and develop a culture of cooperation and complete adaptability, allowing businesses to grow at an unprecedented rate while leveraging global talent to solve business problems.

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How to Keep your Sales Funnel Growing and Healthy

The world has changed, and it has changed very rapidly indeed in the last 2 years. It takes a world-changing event like the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate certain trends so dramatically and B2B sales are no exception. Let us take a moment and remember what it used to be like when B2B buyers actually picked up the phone and called you. Now, let’s skip ahead to the real world of today where a vast majority of decision-makers skip the sales team altogether when making a purchase decision. By the time they are ready to make a decision to purchase and if you have not been engaging with them, you’ve lost the sale. That’s why B2B inbound marketing is so essential in lead generation. Inbound marketing strategies generate far more sales leads than other marketing efforts. Customer journeys and mapping them are an essential part of this effort.

A Customer Journey model for visualizing every stage of the journey a customer goes through while making any purchases. Optimizing Sales Funnel accurately is a critical task to achieve the goal of taking your target audience to the finish line in the way they need to be served. If you already have one, you need to understand the holes in your funnel that leak and never convert.

According to Envision Creative’s Founder and CEO, David Smith (https://www.envision-creative.com/blog/attract-engage-convert-retain-customers-economic-change/) – “In times of economic crisis, many brand’s first instinct is to pull back on marketing and advertising, which is a natural reaction. While everyone is doing their best to be cautious, it’s important to remember that maintaining a presence through thoughtful, (and sensitive) marketing communication is even more crucial during these times. While taking a broad approach to reduce or even eliminate your marketing initiatives might save funds in the short term, these actions may be at the cost of damaging your brand’s awareness with your ideal target audience during a time where top-of-mind awareness is critical. ”

Understanding a sales funnel before creating it is important to create one that best suits your business model and focuses on your target audience. With a clear business vision and marketing strategy, you can increase the awareness of your brand that attracts customers. At this point, onwards a business is required to have different stages in their funnel that engages and convert their prospects to sales. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel) – “The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service. In 1898, E. St. Elmo Lewis developed a model that mapped a theoretical customer journey from the moment a brand or product attracted consumer attention to the point of action or purchase. St. Elmo Lewis' idea is often referred to as the AIDA-model, an acronym that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action”. It has not changed too much in the last 120 years although the methods, which support the process, have largely been affected by the digitization of our culture.

The first common stage of any Sales funnel is creating awareness about your brand in the market that catches the attention of customers. At this stage, your prospective customers are arriving on your websites, social media pages, word of mouth, or any other traffic source with requirements in their mind that they expect to be solved. This is the widest stage of the funnel where customers observe what you are offering or just in simple terms “Just Looking”.  An ideal right place and right time scenario would be customers directly deciding to buy what you are offering, but practically it never happens!

Depending on your business model, there can be multiple stages post attracting your customers. However, all of them contribute towards engaging your prospective customers into your brand. If the customer has reached this stage of your funnel, it is a sign that they are interested in what you are offering and are probably evaluating and comparing it. At this stage, your product should be pushed to the customer to woo them. With established expertise, you can help your consumer to make an informed decision and proceed towards the final stage of your Sales Funnel.

At the final stage of your sales funnel where your prospects are about to get converted to actual sales, your customer is fully aware of your brand and the solutions you are offering for their requirements. While the customer is ready to select the best brand from their comparison, making the best attractive offers can be a good final step that will convert your prospects into your customers and become part of your business ecosystem.  However, there is more to this stage that you need to do! Since your customer has chosen your brand over a lot of other available options, it becomes critical and necessary to earn their trust and commitment towards your brand. A post-purchase survey or a follow-up email can help you understand the feedback of your customers that will help you to attract more customers in the first stage of your sales funnel.

Once your build your sales funnel, it’s also necessary to measure the success and effectiveness of your funnel. The key funnel metrics that can help you collect quantitative and qualitative data such as Cost per acquisition – cost on marketing to acquire new customers, Customer lifetime value, conversion rates, and conversion rate per channel can be utilized.

Creating and optimizing a sales funnel is hard time-consuming work but a necessary step to ensure your survival in a competitive marketplace. Building a Sales funnel is not a one-time activity. Sales funnel cultivates over time by adjusting every stage approach with the feedback you receive from your metrics. A satisfied customer will give your repeat business as well as refer you and there are high chances, they might get into the funnel again due to the competitive nature of the market. Thus, it becomes necessary to keep your funnel stages updated at regular intervals of time. A good flow of customers right from the top all the way to the action stage will ensure you have a healthy business.

How Social Media is driving customer-brand interaction

 In my previous blog, I briefly touched upon how the internet, since it going mainstream in mid-1990s became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

This week, we will explore where and how ORM helps in driving customer-brand interactions.

Building and maintaining brand loyalty are one of the central themes of research for marketers for a very long time. Marketers have utilized various means to maintain the brand loyalty of their customers. Brand loyalty is defined as the partiality of a consumer towards one business or product over another, and it can truly make or break a company. It drives in-store traffic, visits to your website, word-of-mouth recommendations, and the conversion of leads to customers. This means the difference between profits and losses. Whether you like it or not, your customers are talking about your brand on social media. Customers have always dictated brand perception through word-of-mouth. Companies can put out good products, market those products, and attempt to steer branding in a certain direction, but it’s always been up to the customers. Now, word-of-mouth has moved online and happens on a much larger scale. And through various social media platforms it’s available for all to see and more often than not, in today’s interconnected world, brand loyalty depends on your ability to leverage the power of social media to build connections with your prospects and customers.

Tapping into your social media market and communicating with followers is no longer an option – it is a requirement. Hence, in this digital age, reputation management has become a critical component of every business. It is all about reputation when it comes to how a brand identifies itself and how the public perceives it.

The primary goal of online reputation management is to market and protect your brand so that it can be found, followed, and promoted in a digital world. Online Reputation Management aka ORM works by responding to negative, unfavourable customer comments and articles published on the internet that reflect poorly on your company's brand image.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same goal, they approach it in quite different ways. ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially damaging information from other individuals or businesses. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

If you want customers to keep coming back to your brand, you have to connect with them in meaningful ways. Social media is the perfect place to build these relationships. First and foremost, doing a thorough online reputation audit could be considered the most basic of ORM activity. An online reputation management audit involves establishing how people view you online and the hurdles you face in challenging that perception, which can be done through brand monitoring. Simple questions like what kinds of websites do I see for my brand name. Do most people reach my business through search engines or external sites can be answered with this, and is the sentiment for my company's overall positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can outline your ORM goals, set limitations and constraints, and prioritise your duties to construct an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your firm.

Proactively monitoring online discussions gives you a real-time picture of your online presence and helps you to reply swiftly. People expect responses to social media remarks within a day or less. Prompt responses keep disgruntled consumers from providing negative comments and show that you value their assistance. The goal is to reply immediately and compassionately. A private message could become a public comment if you do not respond to customer inquiries swiftly.

To summarize, any company that wants to build client loyalty must remain on top of online reviews and develop an online reputation management strategy that shows its strengths and positions it well on the first page of search engines. Actively managing reputations can certainly benefit organization with bigger trust, better talent, less risks, and higher profit.

What is Online Reputation Management and Why Do You Need It?

As the internet became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

Why ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT is important for your business

·       Every organization tries to build a positive image about itself; in fact, the core of the business is all about building an image and improving it every day. In today’s immensely crowded, geography agnostic flat world, It is important to make sure your brand is interesting and fascinating to attract new customers.

·       The way customers interact with the business has undergone a tremendous change. These days, before buying anything online, they look for reviews online and on social media to know the product, brand, and its general views from others. More often than not, the preference of your customers largely depends on the search results.

·       Internet and social media have truly given voice to everyone and now anyone can give reviews online, even your competitors can write negative reviews to spoil your reputation online.

·       With the help of ORM tools, strategies, and practices, one can eliminate the negative content that is untrue; this helps in painting the right picture in front of the customer.

·       Online reputation management helps you improve the reviews and feedback about your brand and create a positive brand image. Customers usually pay more attention to a brand that has positive feedback and reviews online. This helps to generate sales as well.

·       Online reputation management boosts the search engine optimization of your company.

Online reputation management helps you to overcome all this. A survey indicates that a vast majority of customers read online reviews before purchasing anything, therefore ORM becomes paramount today

Hence, reputation management has become a critical part of every organization in the digital age. The way a brand defines itself and how the public sees it is all about reputation. Online Reputation Management is primarily concerned with marketing and defending your brand so that it may be discovered, followed, promoted in a digital marketplace. ORM works by responding to negative thus unfavorable customer comments and articles that are posted online media that cast a poor light on your organization's brand image.

Your consumer base might be jeopardized if you do not manage your online reputation properly. Because according to one survey more than 80% of customers conduct some internet research prior to making a purchase, how you seem online is a make-or-break aspect in their final choice. In addition, with the majority of consumers reading reviews to decide if your organization is trustworthy, your online reputation is a business quality check. Treating online reviews as personal recommendations becomes critical in such situations. Because the Internet keeps practically everything, anything people say about your business online is likely to stay online.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same aim, there is a significant variation in how they do it. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

Monitoring is an important component of maintaining your online reputation since it may provide you with valuable information about consumer satisfaction and feedback on your products or services. Customers who made a complaint and received a satisfactory answer from the company will return to do business with them. You can reduce negative customer comments and maintain a positive online presence by actively managing your reputation.

First and foremost, completing an extensive online reputation Audit may be regarded as an ORM activity. An online reputation management audit entails determining how people perceive you online and the challenges you have in contesting that perception, which may be accomplished through brand monitoring. This can assist with simple queries like What kind of websites do I see for my brand name?, Do most people find my business from search engines or external sites?, and Is the overall attitude for my business positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can create an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your company by outlining your ORM goals, establishing limits and constraints, and prioritizing your tasks.

Monitoring online chats, social media posts, discussion forums, reviews, etc in a proactive manner offers you a real-time snapshot of your online presence and allows you to respond quickly. People expect social media comments to be responded to within a day or less. Prompt answers prevent dissatisfied customers from leaving bad feedback and demonstrate that you appreciate their assistance. The goal here is to respond quickly and with empathy. If you don't reply to consumer inquiries promptly, a private communication might suddenly become a public comment.

To summarize, online reputation management is not a one-day or one-time activity rather it requires regular monitoring; online reputation management will help your business in the long term if you keep an eye on your activities and the activities done by your competitors.

How to succeed With a Customer-centric Marketing Strategy

Advances in technology and communication, combined with explosive growth in data and information, have given rise to a more empowered global consumer. During the past decade, consumer needs have changed significantly, with technology growing at an exponential rate, influencing consumer behavior and marketing strategies. Nearly three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025. By 2025, 85% of the global population will have access to mobile telephony and more than 75% of the customers will have low-cost tablets or smartphones. It is anticipated that almost 75 Billion devices would be connected globally with mobile-based internet being the primary method of connectivity. Social media and unprecedented access to information such as peer-to-peer product and service reviews are giving greater power to consumers, creating more demanding and informed consumers. These experiences are shaping consumer expectations across all sectors. Amongst all of this, personal interaction is still highly considered and will remain an important component of the overall strategy.

Every day, hundreds of marketing strategies are published, each with its own set of thoughts and studies, but nothing else counts if your customers do not connect with your brand. Any strategy is good if it keeps the customer’s interest. To build value and increase sales over time, understanding your customers is crucial for a predictable result from marketing activities.

Customer centricity is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers and places them at the center of operations in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. Understanding how to create leads based on your ideal customer and developing an overall marketing strategy that focuses on the greatest results for your customers are both parts of customer-centric marketing planning.

When a customer becomes engaged with a brand, they are 70 percent more inclined to spend than a first-time customer is. All of this is the outcome of long-term customer trust in the brand. A loyal customer base cuts down on the time, money, and effort it takes to generate additional revenue.

The most common way of creating an effective strategy, especially for marketing is to start by conducting a customer behavior study, which may assist split customers into distinct categories and personas’ as well as covering the most basic phase of constructing a customer profile, is a good place to start when developing a plan. This aids businesses in defining and focusing on their target market.

One can create original content that is relevant to one’s audience by focusing on a specific market, as a vast majority of consumers prefer relevant and personalized content. It is critical to align content not only to different stages of the buying process but also to specific buyer personas, as the type of content that will engage and incentivize them will differ depending on their characteristics and preferences.

With the proper content in hand, one can begin implementing it using an Omnichannel strategy, with special emphasis on social media. Social media and internet-based customer conversations – both good and bad – are federated, dynamic, contagious, and opinion making about products and services. As social media is about real-time and people-centric interactions, external social initiatives will have limited success if not backed by a similar focus on agent engagement. The way forward is to build internal collaboration capabilities that help deliver a superior external customer experience. The key here is to concentrate one’s efforts in the areas where one’s target audience exists, engages, learns and spends time. Share the content in these places and collaborate with the audience to create memorable experiences. This will help in increasing the likelihood of customer advocacy, which can foster a sense of community within loyalty the loyal customer base.

Along with content, other factors that can contribute to customer-centric strategies include training the talent that is aligned with customer-centric thinking and understands the value of customer experience delivered by the organization. Here the role of Contact center representatives who are the first and most front-facing workforce is extremely important. They will shape many of the first customer interactions. This must be coupled with relevant and timely information. Successful organizations break down silos of information and use an enterprise-wide approach to customer information and insight. A single, accurate, accessible enterprise customer view is essential to the success of any organization that wants to differentiate on customer-centricity.

Measuring the performance of one’s strategies is equally important, so having customer success metrics to measure customer-centricity becomes critical. Calculating churn rates can assist you in keeping track of customer satisfaction. Similarly, Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value are two metrics that can assist you in determining the success of your customer-centric marketing strategy.

95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is customer experience. The irony is that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience. But only 8% of their customers agree!

A customer-centric marketing approach is the most effective way to stay competitive, onboard ideal consumers, and increase the lifetime value of your customers. The modern consumer is acutely aware of their requirements and the myriad options and choices available to them. The transition to becoming a truly customer-centric organization is difficult and time-consuming, but even minor policy and procedure improvements can have a big impact on both employees and customers. Every part of your business should be focused on providing the best possible customer experience, resulting in your customers becoming your reason for success.

The scenario is similar in almost most of the B2C organizations like Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Telcos, BFSI, etc. However, the investments in marketing technology or process and people development areas to service their customers do not commensurate to this ratio currently. Moreover, organizations are driving efficiency and extending the cost play within the ecosystem and are not as much focussed on effectiveness.

To summarize, for the modern marketing strategy to succeed, it is imperative that the experiences during the acquisition and post-acquisition phases be engineered and managed properly. A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer is a complex function of the brand promise, which has set the expectations to the customer and the sum total of the life cycle of an engagement or interaction experiences – product performance, service delivery, people interaction, and process experience. It is perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact 

Customer Journey Mapping: The secret to Superior CX

Customers' behavior is surmised to be rather unpredictable, thus businesses strive to make lasting first impressions and provide unique purchase experiences. Those who wish to learn how your clients purchase in today's digital environment should focus on the most impactful channels and touchpoints in their buying journeys.

 Customer Experience Mapping is a method that helps you identify your consumers' motivating elements during the purchase process. It may be defined as a customer's journey through the phases of their relationship with a company, which includes all interactions between the consumer and the firm across several channels. It's basically a flowchart that displays the steps of a client's interaction with a firm, from purchasing things online to contacting customer support.

 Although most firms are rather effective at acquiring data on their customers, data alone does not adequately express the customer's problems and experiences. At such instances, a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of a customer's interaction with a firm through time, may give insight into the customer's overall experience. It assists your team in better understanding and addressing the wants and pain points of your customers when they interact with your product or service. Thus, a customer journey map allows your company to observe how your brand contacts a potential client and then travels through the many touchpoints of the sales process.

Depending on the sort of business and the types of consumers served, each customer journey map will be unique. However, there are a few key elements that will be consistent throughout every map you build. Some of them are:

 

1.      Personas: Personas, which are composite representations of a market segment of consumers with similar requirements, objectives, and motivations, are the greatest way to understand customers' behaviors and sentiments. It may provide you a comprehensive picture of who your consumers are, what they want, and how they engage with your company across all channels.

 

2.       Identifying the stages of the customer journey that your customer is attempting to complete. Rather than focusing on internal process processes, one should focus on creating a customer journey map with phases that depict your client's goal-oriented trip.

 

3.      Customer touchpoints: One of the most significant parts of the customer journey map is the touchpoints between the customer and the business. Each touchpoint specifies a specific action the consumer did with the business. Identifying your touchpoints is a crucial step in establishing a customer journey map and ensuring that your consumers are happy at every stage.

 

4.      Emotion: It's crucial to think about how your consumers could react to each engagement. Identifying the places of friction in the customer experience may help companies see their client personas in a new light.

 After you've established all of the components, it's a wonderful exercise to bring them all together from the customer's perspective. Companies frequently need to construct many customer journey maps based on a jumbled picture of how consumers interact with them.

Customer journeys aren't always going to be straightforward. Customers may hop ahead and back multiple times within the same segment throughout the course of their lifetime. As a result, taking exceptions into account while mapping the Customer Journey may be a smart idea. Another smart approach is to involve other departments since each department has a stake in defining the customer's experience and may give a distinct perspective. Customer Journey Mapping will, in the end, never be a static entity; like everything else in the digital age, it will be forced to be Agile.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a customer experience, so your company will have to figure out what works best for you. However, the Trip Mapping frameworks you develop should help you gain a better knowledge of the journey your consumers take as they interact with your organization, brand, goods, partners, and employees. Knowing where your consumer is on their journey might help you anticipate what they could encounter next.

Happy New Year - 2022

Wave goodbye to the old and embrace the new with hope, dreams, and ambition. Bring in New Year off with more motivation, positivity, and some resolutions! 

Wishing you a Happy New Year full of happiness!

Where CX meets Technology - Intelligent Experiences

As the pandemic forced us to change our very way of living, consumer behavior also changed drastically. Overnight, many people who were “fence-sitters” when it came to transacting “online” were literally forced to online since in-person contact became the least preferred way of doing commerce. This online commerce forced organizations to really take a deep look at their customer journeys both online and offline. Digital Technologies, earlier often relegated to “coming in future” or “nice to have” became “essential” to survival. Retail was the hardest hit with this realization.

However, we find that now almost every area of the customer experience is being transformed by new technologies. Customers have evolved to anticipate new levels of perfection, performance, and just about everything in between as the possibilities of digital technology improve. Customers' expectations are continuously evolving; thus, the current customer experience must go above and beyond old customer care practices. Companies that give a meaningful but relevant experience that meets or exceeds their consumers' expectations will be successful.

To stay on top of these advancements and trends, we must grasp these new technologies and use them to communicate, interact, and promote in novel ways. Today's organizations need to discover the proper digital tools to provide a great customer experience, build brand loyalty, and drive sales growth. CX is taking advantage of today's technology and data to improve the entire customer experience. This involves sharing data amongst teams such as marketing and customer support, developing new roles to act on the data, and using new technologies such as AI, resulting in the implementation of a class of digital practices that leverage data to improve the whole digital trip for customers.

Leading firms in customer experience management are already utilizing these new technologies to achieve a competitive advantage. This ranking is topped by the utilization of artificial intelligence. According to one Research, by 2022, consumers would probably be handling 85 percent or more of their interactions with the organization without the need to be engaging with a human, at least for simple interactions. Many of the technological breakthroughs accessible to CX delivery teams are determined by how artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces, and robotic automation are implemented. There are two aspects to this. One is related to productivity and efficiency. By automating frequent and repetitive processes, these solutions save expenses and boost agent productivity. The other aspect, perhaps more important, is to do with delivering superior experiences through quick, efficient, and empathetic engagements during various segments of customer journeys. Conversational Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are another method for automating simple chores. Today's industry-standard chatbots offer an incredible step forward for organizations looking to automate and outsource easy, regular inquiries and interactions to an intelligent system, thanks to an algorithmic learning feature that allows it to learn from past discussions and adapt replies. Another widely used option, IoT, may boost a company's bottom line by cutting operational expenses, improving productivity, and assisting companies in expanding into new markets or developing new goods.

One technique, which seems to be gaining tremendous traction in understanding and delivering empathetic engagements, is speech analytics, which is being increasingly used to augment existing AI processes enabled processes by listening for heightened voice pitches and other emotional indications, analyzing the customer's sentiments, further contextualizing with backend order data and transferring them to an agent when appropriate. It also gives fresh sources of feedback by identifying emotional drivers and focusing on terms or themes that regularly provoke specific feelings.

Armed with this sentiment analysis technology and with comprehensive dashboards, agents can quickly acquire a full image of each client, their purchase history, and their expected goals for each engagement – and then take on a consultative role, alleviating emergent and even projected requirements as well instantly acquire a thorough understanding of each client. These new and continually growing technologies are assisting businesses not only to extend their client base but also to get a macro-level understanding of their customers. Adopting such technologies for one’s organization is providing a more competitive advantage over competitors that have yet to connect technology with customer experience.

For a few years, a huge focus of most of the organizations and service providers was to deflect a transaction or engagement towards a non-voice channel – with the hope that customers would find these easier and such channels also afford a lower cost to serve. However, as seen, most of the customers are not very comfortable using non-voice channels especially with an AI-powered bot behind the channel during a time of crisis or during a buying journey. In a country like India, literacy rates while climbing has also proved to be a challenge for a largely English-dominated non-voice channel scene. Hence, we see that voice is making a comeback, albeit in a different avatar for service providers! And Speech Analytics and related technologies are at the heart of this revolution.

This is not limited to service providers or call centers only! General use of such virtual assistants is happening on an increasingly wide scale. For example, Taxi and cab drivers in India are routinely seen using some form of voice-powered virtual assistant for doing routine things – hands-free! Mostly the interface is maps or google assistant. The next frontier in Speech-enabled virtual assistants would be real-time language translation capabilities, which would allow two humans to converse with each other even though they might speak different languages. 5G and increasingly powerful speech engines are the key. While we are far away from Star Trek’s Universal Translator, but such technologies, on a simpler scale can revolutionize the way we interact with each other and transact online.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for such technologies available through a variety of interface formats!

Virtual Assistants: Their Role in Superior CX & EX

The Digital era compels many companies to maintain continuous connections with their customers until the resolution of their queries or issues. As a result, with customer service as a top priority, the ideal customer experience allows consumers to communicate via the channel of their choosing while keeping the context of interactions intact. A limitless firm has a new operating system that incorporates a shift in thinking as well as the increased embrace of emerging technology. The conventional tethered and physical workflow is morphing into interactive customer communications through various digital channels.

The role of Virtual assistants is developing as businesses adapt to the Omni Channel experience which is increasingly being expected by their end customers. Though virtual assistants first appeared in the 1960s with ELIZA and IBM's Shoebox voice-activated calculators, this technology is now emerging as the go-to solution in the realm of customer experience.

A traditional virtual assistant may be conceived of as an application that responds to a user's voice or text command and does the work at hand. Emerging virtual assistants, on the other hand, are programs that integrate the use of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract information and complicated data from conversations in order to comprehend and process them.

Structured data with standardized rules can easily adapt to RPA solutions whereas unstructured data with less application of standardization utilized Cognitive automation, a virtual assistant is a next-level combo that can extract information and complicated data from a conversation using a voice and text-based interface.

Virtual Assistant algorithms develop the capacity to construct data models that detect and adapt behavior patterns by merging past data. With the inclusion of historical data, preferences, and other user information on a regular basis, a virtual assistant can answer difficult queries, offer suggestions and predictions, and even start a discussion.

Pre-programmed virtual assistants, which are more rule-based, with logic mapped out with a logical next step for various answers users might ask, are giving way to more complex and dynamic AI virtual assistants, which can be divided into two categories: NLP virtual assistants and machine learning virtual assistants. As a result, virtual assistants are becoming smarter by ditching automated chats and becoming more participatory, as seen by one of the most popular products on the market, Google Home, which knows each user's voice and issues a secure ID to each. The trend is also emerging to integrate different Virtual assistants, which can provide enhanced functionality to consumers and end-users.

However, there are certain privacy issues with AI-enabled virtual assistants that gather and retain user data indefinitely for better upgrades and user experience; this may be mitigated with strict data privacy rules from the corporations that provide this technology. After all, technology is a double-edged weapon that must be handled with caution.

Virtual Assistants have a chance to build a new digital workforce that will supplement human talents while also benefiting B2C and B2B end customers. Virtual assistant technology may be efficiently applied to external customer-facing use-cases using Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, assisting enterprises in meeting the demands of digital natives and growing omnichannel digital contact with Omnichannel digital virtual assistants. At the same time, with employee experience also becoming increasingly important in the delivery of holistic Total Stakeholder Experience, virtual assistants are playing an increasingly important role in enabling employees to perform their tasks with much more accuracy, speed, and efficiency. These assistants are used in a variety of formats including conversational text, guidance coaches, and even as “co-listeners” to a voice conversation and then providing guidance based on inferences derived from a vast database of previous interactions and persona-based profiling.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for virtual assistants available through a variety of interface formats!

Benchmarking Your CX Organization

 To develop your business, you must first improve the customer experience (CX)  that your business delivers to guarantee that your customers are well-served and have transformative interactions with your brand. For a fully connected, effortless CX that adds value to your consumers and business, you need a well-defined CX strategy and clear leadership.

It's good to see companies continuing to value customer experience as a key differentiator. Benchmarking assists businesses in understanding how these strategies and staff perform in comparison to rivals and what customers are truly saying.

Thus, for setting your organization up for long-term success, it's vital to take a critical step of Benchmarking.

The first step would be setting up KPIs such as Net promoter score, customer satisfaction scores, Customer acquisition and retention, Customer effort score, Average ratings across listing platforms, Volume and sentiment of online reviews, and Consumer engagement for Benchmarking Customer Experience that is important to compare to previous results both internally and outside.

Customer and Employees feedback - By interacting directly with your customers, blind spots in the organization can be identified and understood what’s not working.

Using reputation management software that uses natural language processing (NLP) can help you to evaluate client comments as one approach to gauge consumer sentiment. It might provide insight into the precise issues that need to be addressed in order to improve your client experience.

Another method is to use Voice of the Customer initiatives, which are aimed at gathering and evaluating customer feedback in order to find chances for operational or product changes, which helps to achieve the ultimate objective of increasing customer acquisition and retention.

Comparing the most recent available scores to these earlier scores can assist you to determine what is and isn't working with your client experience when you begin your benchmarking CX.

Competitive Advantage via Benchmarking – we must focus on our customer experience via Client satisfaction to create a loyal customer base and keep business away from our rivals. When we're evaluating our company's performance, look at how our rivals are doing via internet reviews and social media mentions to get a sense of how they're doing and what areas they're having trouble with. With this kind of study, we should be able to pinpoint areas where we can enhance our client experience and address some of their concerns, perhaps luring them to our company.

With at least one-to-one comparisons, the aim should be to figure out where your competitors are outperforming us, where we can improve, and how our customer experience stacks up against the competition.

Benchmark revenue measurements can reveal where our team spends more, less, or the same as comparable organizations of our size, and these insights can help us better allocate our company's resources.

Benchmarking in fact forces us to evaluate ourselves in comparison to other organizations in our industry, rather than our own prior success, and holding our firm to industry standards maintains the focus on becoming the best among competitors.

Identifying the relevant KPIs, gathering consumer insights, and evaluating our achievements against the industry are only the beginnings of a customer-centric organizational transformation.

Benchmarking and improving customer experience is a long-term marketing strategy which is a long-term investment after adoption

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

With an ever-expanding spectrum of digital technologies and tools at our disposal, the distinction between digital and physical customer experience is becoming increasingly hazy. For competitive marketers, digital channels are becoming increasingly vital in supporting their whole customer experience strategy.

In my opinion, companies will, increasingly, compete on customer experience as a focused area alongside their product or service, thus they will be prepared to pay more for a great customer experience.

A successful digital experience plan needs organizations to consider how digital interfaces fit into their customer engagement strategy, which utilizes customer data and provides businesses with customer insights to improve digital interaction across interfaces and boost customer retention.

In order to promote genuine gains, digital customer experience management must become an executive priority and fit with the overall business strategy. Delivering a seamless experience across individual customer contact points by leveraging unified communications as a service is a fantastic example of channel flexibility when consumers want to remain engaged with the same agent across digital channels.

This may be accomplished by deploying cloud management solutions that allow customers to switch between your brand's multiple channels, therefore addressing the growing need for response time, which customers rank as critical when they have a customer service query.

Companies must make the effort to completely map and understand their customer journey in order to increase customer engagement scores, where consumers are willing to share data with you in exchange for personalized experiences that make their journey easier, easy, and convenient.

When the objective is to decrease consumer friction and effort, it's critical to build complicated systems that simplify client interactions as every move in the firm has an influence on the consumers in some manner, hence companies must be aligned towards customer-centricity.

This is possible with the help of a specialized digital team that specifies alignment and synergies with other relevant business divisions. This team must define KPIs to push the organization's and culture's thinking toward digital transformation and customer experience, as well as simplify processes to generate efficiency and reduce redundancies.

When you simplify your digital journey and offer tailored digital experiences for your consumers, you achieve customer satisfaction with less effort, which leads to an increase in your customer lifetime value.

Brands that have a strong CX strategy make a concerted effort to connect company goals with these consumer expectations.

Customer Experience – What to measure to get it right

 Customer Experience – What to measure to get it right

Link between customer experience and business performance is directly dependent on breaking down overall experience into smaller insights based on your company's specific goals and different stages of the customer journey. Customers are willing to spend more money to buy from a firm that provides good customer service. Thus, to attract, engage, and keep consumers, organizations are increasingly investing in a customer experience platform.

Companies need a mechanism to quantify the success of their efforts when they devote substantial portions of their money to improving customer experience projects. Thus, you may devise a goal-oriented strategy to decide which KPIs are most suited to measuring your success.

Customer acquisition, engagement, and retention may be identified as three strategic facets of the customer experience.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is frequently used to appraise a brand, service, or product in general and is critical for determining your standing with your consumers. With a lower NPS, you'll need to work more to change your consumers' minds about your firm. A rise or reduction in NPS assists you in forecasting future revenue gains or losses as It is widely accepted, and benchmarks are available.

To calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. While NPS tells you where you stand, it doesn’t tell you why you got that score. To get better information, we usually increase the number of questions that explore the customer’s thoughts.

2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is highly interactive and an easy-to-use customer satisfaction metric. It’s an excellent technique to find out what your consumers are thinking about you at the moment. Customer retention is boosted in organizations with high customer satisfaction. This metric helps gather up-to-date feedback since it can be calculated fast, usually within hours or less following a customer’s use of a product or service. This allows us to quickly reduce any friction that might be affecting their business across all channels, ensuring optimal customer experience

3. Customer churn rate

The customer churn rate indicates how many of your customers have abandoned your products or services. It can also be considered as lost business value over a period. Low Churn rate indicates that your customers are happy with the level of service you provide. Thus lowering Churn rate is critical step towards Customer retention as retaining existing consumers is substantially less expensive than acquiring new customers. More importantly, when we combine the churn rate metrics with other operational data, we can identify churn patterns, which can help us identify where your CX issues really are and get insights on how to address them.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Experience Score (CES) is a transactional indicator that evaluates how simple a single solution is to use and it entails client participation. It is critical to provide an easy-to-use experience in order to increase client satisfaction leading to retention. Thus using this statistic for identifying the sources of distraction, it is possible to reduce churn in a cost-effective manner. This metric helps improve the customer experience by showing places where improvements can be made to make things easier for customers.

5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a forecast of the net profit earned over the course of a customer's whole future relationship. It may be assessed as a business value that a customer contributes to a firm throughout the course of their relationship

6. Average Resolution Time

The average resolution time is a customer service KPI that measures how long it takes an organization to handle a client issue. This customer service statistic is closely related to client satisfaction and represents the effectiveness of the team. Fast resolutions are the most important aspect of a positive customer service experience.

One can better determine which levers to pull in order to influence client's experience when one can relate to the customer experience measure results to what transpired in the transaction. It's critical to comprehend how the customer experience influences consumer behavior which in turn affects your business.

However, it is not required to monitor all metrics unless you know what you want to do with them. The trick is to measure the one that is important to your business. Most businesses track 2-5 key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to customer experience and most of them benefit from focusing on just one customer experience indicator and one associated behavioral parameter. It is not required to measure all of them. One must choose the metric which is most important to one’s business.

First powered flight on another planet !

Even as this pandemic ravages this planet, humans continue to make progress. On Monday the 19^th of April, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieved the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is a small, lightweight, drone-like helicopter that was carried on the Perseverance rover. They launched from Earth together in July 2020 and landed on Mars on Feb. 19, 2021. To me, this is one of those historic moments, when the entire civilization can be proud that humanity’s quest for searching life beyond our own shores is slowly bearing fruits. Even as a vast majority of us are fighting one of the worst pandemics in recent memory, our thirst for science and the discoveries it affords us has not been extinguished. And just like that, humans can now fly on other planets!

Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL. It had to be this way, because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundreds of millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, and hence Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was not observable from Earth in real-time. While this may sound very disappointing to sci-fi fans, this technological demonstration will help humans create new missions to Mars and other places in the solar system using not just rovers, but helicopters as well. We are informed that humans are already planning similar flying crafts to be deployed on one of the largest satellites of Saturn which is popularly called Titan. Achieving flight on another planet means that our approach to planetary exploration will change.

According to NASA Associate Administrator for Science (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-succeeds-in-historic-first-flight) “Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Zurbuchen said. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked. As an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration.”

Ingenuity’s sole mission is to demonstrate that flight on another planet is feasible. This first flight was full of unknowns. The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight. In the early morning of April 19, Ingenuity spun up its rotors, climbed to a height of three meters where it hovered for about 30 seconds, performing a rotation while doing so, and then safely landed back on the surface of Mars. The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf commercial parts that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission.

It’s incredible to see how much technology has changed in just over a century and a half. From coal-burning steam-powered engines and using whale oil to landing on other planets and flying through their thin atmosphere. What will the next century look like? Will we finally break the light speed barrier and visit nearby stars and hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

 

As we run around our humdrum lives, largely oblivious to the nature of reality around us, only observing a a minuscule portion of this version of reality called our universe, there are forces shaping all that we can see, touch, experience, and then everything else that we cannot.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) – “In physics, there are four observed fundamental interactions (also known as fundamental forces) that form the basis of all known interactions in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces.” So, all of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, and now some physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

The search for a fifth force has increased in recent decades due to two discoveries in cosmology that are not explained by current theories. It has been discovered that most of the mass of the universe is accounted for by an unknown form of matter called dark matter. Most physicists believe that dark matter consists of new, undiscovered subatomic particles, but some believe that it could be related to an unknown fundamental force. Second, it has also recently been discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which has been attributed to a form of energy called dark energy. Some physicists speculate that a form of dark energy called quintessence could be a fifth force.

The findings come from physicists at Fermilab, the US Department of Energy Office’s national laboratory.

According to Silicon Repulic – (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/force-of-nature-physics) – “In the Muon g-2 experiment, the scientists exposed muons to an intense magnetic field by sending them around a 50-foot-diameter magnetised ring at Fermilab. When doing this, the team found the muons wobbled in unpredictable ways, defying the fundamental theory of how particles interact.”

“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment.

We’re quite familiar with the first two forces. Gravity pins us to Earth and pulls us around the sun, while electromagnetism keeps the lights on. The other two forces are less obvious to us because they govern interactions at the tiniest scales. The strong force binds matter together, while the weak nuclear force describes the radioactive decay of atoms

The Fermilab experiment builds on a previous experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory around 20 years ago. Elsewhere, there have been other experiments hinting at a new kind of physics. Last month, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva found unstable particles that fail to decay as the standard model suggests.

However, we might find it difficult to measure this new force. Gravity, for example, is such a weak force that the gravitational interaction between two objects is only significant when one of them has a great mass. Therefore, it takes very sensitive equipment to measure gravitational interactions between objects that are small compared to a planet.

The existence of fifth and more forces, fundamental to nature, have been speculated for decades. The study of physics and the search a new force of nature, in many ways, is a search for who we are, why are we here and what is this reality all about, or even whether are other realities or planes of existence which we have been, hitherto, unaware of. Imagine, with our current standard model of cosmology, our understanding of the universe falls astonishingly short – we still don’t know all the laws of nature and furthermore, we still don’t know what constitutes almost 95% of our universe or stranger still – why is there such a massive imbalance between matter/ anti-matter. There have been false alarms of course. So we may have to wait a while before we know whether a new particle and its potential fifth force will revolutionize physics or take its place atop the dustbin of debunked and discarded discoveries such as the now-infamous cold fusion! 

May the festival of colors brighten your life with happiness, health, and success. Wishing you and your family. Happy colorful and safe Holi !

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