6 Insights Into Customer Experience (CX) from a Conversational AI Expert
While there are many different facets to conversational AI, virtual agents, and the technology as a whole, one aspect to recognize when considering and implementing a solution is customer experience. Customer experience (CX) is the impression a customer has of your brand or company. It shapes how a customer sees your brand from the beginning of their journey right down to the end. All stages of the buyer cycle — awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, repurchase and renewal — can make or break a customer’s perception. Ensuring a seamless and frictionless process throughout is imperative to gain and maintain brand loyalty.
When it comes to intelligent virtual agents (IVA), this ideology is ever-present. Here at SmartAction, we believe in customer experience being the indispensable aspect of customer self-service. We live and breathe CX for our customers. We have a dedicated team of experts that curate the complete journey with obsessive hands and minds. Our solutions expert, Phill Fisher, is one jigsaw piece of the CX team, but the puzzle would be incomplete without him.
We’ve asked him for more insight into CX to shed light on what you should understand about conversational AI, what challenges you might face, and how SmartAction delivers the customer experience on your behalf through our intelligent virtual agents.
What’s the difference between customer service and customer experience?
One gets things done, and the other gets things done well and leaves a positive feeling with the customer about that brand, organization, and experience.
What’s something interested customers should come in understanding about conversational AI?
It’s a journey, not a quick fix. Our AI solutions are constantly evolving. The first day we go live with a new client is a huge milestone, but we don’t simply hand you the keys to the Ferrari and wish you luck. We have dedicated teams that immediately begin analyzing data, listening to calls, and learning how customers interact with the new virtual agent. As our relationship with each client evolves, so does our intelligent virtual agent (IVA). The speed and ease that we can accomplish this is essential to continually improve the customer’s experience and the value that conversational AI brings to a client.
How does what you do fit into the customer experience journey SmartAction provides to a customer?
When we begin onboarding a new client, it’s important that throughout the lifetime of the partnership, we align with business goals and maintain a great customer experience. To do this, we must be communicating collaboratively, and that’s where our Customer Success team takes control. We manage this partnership, ensure the client has an internal voice at SmartAction and that every step is being taken to continually evolve, improve and grow the value conversational AI provides within the organization.
What are some common challenges when delivering solutions to customers, and how do you address them?
Reliable customer data. If IVA can’t access accurate data from our client’s CRM or other databases, it limits the ability to help the customer. The capabilities are vast through intelligent voice automation, but if we can’t validate, search, or confirm information gathered, then containing a customer’s call within the AI-powered virtual agent becomes very difficult. This doesn’t mean that your data must be immaculate. We have assisted several clients with the ‘cleaning’ of data through our solutions. That was a longer journey, but essentially by committing to the partnership with SmartAction, the process was more reliable and definitely cheaper.
How do you ensure a customer’s voice is heard through a solution?
Collaborative partnership. We know AI very well, we know vertical-specific trends and use cases well, but we will not know a client’s specific customer as well as the client themselves. It is essential that we work in unison to become the experts on a client’s customer base through discovery and design of our solutions to enable a customer’s voice to be heard. Once live, our solution can then help guide a client better understand their customers based on the data collected in millions of minutes of conversation. The value of an accurate and consistent voice is the ability to provide insight into customer behaviors, trends, and frustrations that are all based on the exact same experience. IVA provides an identical experience all day, every day, no matter the time, no matter how many cups of coffee, it’s stable, consistent, and always exactly as designed.
Where do you see the future of customer self-service automation going?
As customers trust the abilities of conversational AI, we see continued growth within omnichannel solutions. We are confident that voice will remain a first choice (we humans just love to talk), but more customers want to use their preferred channel, whether that be voice, SMS, webchat, or through social media.
