Future-proof your customer interactions with AI and the cloud

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AI and the cloud are some of the new technologies that are making it easier to achieve excellence in customer and employee experience – with a clear effect on the bottom line

By Jacques Schalkwyk, Senior Solutions Architect, Middle East and Africa, at NTT DATA

Hyperpersonalization has quickly become a customer experience (CX) buzzword as organizations across industries learn that a generic approach to customer service is ineffective, at best, and alienating to your customers, at worst.

However, this involves much more than preparing different versions of a contact-center script or simple variations on an email subject line. To match your customers’ intent to the right internal resources and processes for the best possible outcomes, you need a deep understanding of their unique qualities.

So, how do you continually analyze massive volumes of data quickly enough to make these decisions? It’s an impossible task without the assistance of AI-enabled technology and automation. But AI is already a huge and complex field, and finding the best use cases for it in your organization isn’t easy. Therefore, teaming up with an expert partner is just as important.

Great CX leads to great revenue

CX has always been pivotal in driving customer satisfaction. Tailored interactions that meet specific customer needs or address unique preferences create a more enjoyable experience. Everyone wants to be seen as an individual, and personalized customer journeys build loyalty and retention.

Senior executives are increasingly recognizing that improvements in their organizations’ CX directly affect their bottom-line performance – and they are rethinking their structures and operations accordingly. In fact, according to NTT DATA’s 2023 Global Customer Experience Report, 92% of CEOs agree that improvements in CX directly affect their net profit.

When your customers feel understood and are offered the right solutions quickly and with minimal effort, they are more likely to be happy – and to return. In this way, better customer engagement improves customer retention, which in turn bolsters sales and revenue. Over time, it also builds a high level of brand trust, which creates a competitive advantage.

On the flip side, generic and inefficient CX that involves numerous customer-driven interactions is frustrating and likely to drive customers away.

Pursuing excellence in CX with technology and EX

The peak–end rule is a psychological concept that states that people tend to remember the most intense part of an interaction as well as how it ended. Personalized and efficient customer service makes both the high points of an interaction and the outcomes more positive.

But without the right technology in place, you cannot respond rapidly and appropriately to the needs of your customers. Ninety-five percent of respondents in the CX report agree that demand for personalized CX is driving the rapid integration of touchpoints that blend real-time customer data with AI and analytics.

The reality is also that the cultivation of great CX extends beyond tools and platforms. Employee experience (EX) is just as important in improving the bottom line and enhancing the total experience (referring to a combined EX and CX approach).

Empowering employees to provide better service – for example, by recommending which actions they should take next or by highlighting relevant information at the right time – makes their customer interactions easier, more natural and more empathetic. This improves both CX and EX, as job satisfaction suffers when contact-center agents bear the brunt of disgruntled and frustrated customers. 

Cloud and AI are transforming CX

It can be hard to support hybrid and remote work while empowering your employees and improving CX delivery, which is why many organizations are turning to cloud-based CX.

In fact, cloud technology is identified in the CX report as the top solution for enabling CX capabilities, followed by AI and predictive analytics.

AI powered by real-time analytics can pick up on sentiment, provide effective prompts to steer conversations, and surface insights that can help retain customers or increase sales. It can even coach agents on aspects such as their talking speed, provide them with the right knowledge bases so they can deliver effective answers to customer queries, and enforce policies and procedures, using natural language processing, that simplify their jobs.

Design the right customer journeys and use the right tools

While AI can be a powerful tool, it must be deployed effectively and in the right areas, with the appropriate business use cases in mind, to deliver the best benefits.

You don’t want hyperpersonalization to go too far and cross the boundary between useful and invasive, so the customer journey and experience must be carefully designed.

To derive maximum value from your CX efforts, you also need to deal with legacy issues such as data silos, lack of ownership of CX and data-quality challenges. The right technology, delivered by the right partner, lies at the heart of resolving these challenges.

Cloud-based contact-center solutions like Amazon Connect offer all the computing power and technological capabilities needed for using AI and analytics to improve CX, EX and total experience in your organization.

They let you take advantage of next-generation technologies without massive capital expenditure, minimizing the risk of trying something new by enabling the ability to fail fast – and cheaply. You also benefit from the work done by hyperscalers to improve AI, GenAI and natural language processing.

Don’t go it alone

The power of AI is practically limitless, which is both its drawcard and its downfall. It is huge and complex, and organizations risk getting lost in this complexity – if they do not ask the right questions, the answers that AI provides will make no sense.

Partnering with a trusted managed service provider like NTT DATA can help you understand your business problems, frame the question “What do I want AI to do for my business?” correctly, and ensure that AI can help you create the best possible total experience.

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