When did words such as ‘love’ and ‘care’ become so intrinsic to business discussions? Not too long ago. As customer behavior changes like quicksilver, ‘care’ is now innately connected to Customer Experience (CX). Delivering CX in today’s environment means proactively exceeding expectations by testing new ideas and quickly pivoting when required with the customer at the heart – the new paradigm of hyper-care.
This new model of intelligent, empathetic customer care simply puts people before profit. In my conversations with CX executives from various industries, I have observed that companies that have cracked the hyper-care code are clearly differentiated by a mindset. They inevitably build their CX design principles on dynamically collaborating, innovating and responding to customer needs – it’s not solely about the technology they use.
It’s true that there are a lot of conversations around deploying hyperautomation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). But remember, these technologies are basically just enablers. To deliver hyper-care, companies should apply best-in-class CX principles that positively impact modern customer metrics. The customer is the star of the hyper-care story enabled by intelligent platforms and collaboration. This story is delivered with intuitive design that respects the customer’s time, efforts and needs. Here are five hyper-care trends that I believe will drive the future of CX.
1. Leveraging Domain-led Conversational AI to Deliver Hyper-care
Scaling customer care capacity in proportion to the rise in volume of requests while providing exceptional quality with limited resources is all about using conversational AI. Conversational AI improves the ability to manage CX proactively, offer faster responses and ensure higher availability during market upheavals. Leading companies have taken it a step further by leveraging domain expertise to train and fine-tune the AI engines in order to solve complex customer problems and create solutions that are more intuitive, accurate and responsive.
Retailers are enabling hyper-care by gauging the mood of users even as they interact with the company and responding dynamically leveraging Internet of Things (IoT), psycholinguistics techniques and conversational AI. Responses based on different emotional states of the customers helps support more hyper-personalized conversations and solutions.
2. Creating Instant Emotional Connect and Trust through Super Agents
New AI-driven training models and technology interventions are leading the way for super agents who are far more productive and capable of instantly connecting with customers at an emotional level. A super agent with multiple skillsets, and deep domain knowledge, can resolve complex challenges quickly to deliver hyper-care. They also have the ability to proactively pre-empt challenges that customers may face to ensure customer delight. What’s more, they can dynamically adapt to technology and reflexively use new information resources instead of following a script. By combining domain and technology expertise, they bring better intuition and critical thinking to resolve complex problems swiftly. While super agents work remotely, it is equally important to ensure that they help sustain customer trust in the company. Organizations can enable the levels of data security required to ensure trust by establishing command centers and deploying remote monitoring software, biometrics, and voice and facial recognition technologies. For example, a leading retailer leveraged biometrics and facial recognition technology in its customer-facing processes to enhance data security and proactively ensure customer trust.
3. Aligning Cloud with Business Needs to Boost Differentiation
The future of contact centers is all about aligning cloud with specific business needs and delivering superior experience within an industry. This business needs and experience-aligned approach to cloud contact centers enriches CX delivery. A domain-led cloud contact center ensures adherence to different levels of compliance and regulations that are inherent to a specific industry.
For example, knowledge of Anti-money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) in banking or understanding of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in healthcare can enable the delivery of more focused CX. Similarly, a travel company can deliver focused care by leveraging a cloud solution to build a specialized travel BOT. A domain-led approach thus enables companies to deliver strategic CX that differentiates them from competitors who are using a one-size-fits-all approach across industries.
4. Driving Hyper-localization through Neural Networks
Distributed global operations and the need for multi-lingual accessibility is the key driving force for neural networks-led localization and hyper-care. Current market upheavals are increasing the focus on building and buying locally. This makes hyper-localization essential to make empathetic customer care a reality.
For example, consider a hospitality group that has offices in 45 countries, and has to serve customers in each of these countries with frequently updated travel information in local languages. The company can deploy neural network-driven language services that also leverage domain expertise to make the information relevant and accurate across their websites. Contact centers that use neural translation technology to provide interactions in local languages on channels such as chat and e-mail are another example of hyper-care.
Translations using neural networks can deliver high levels of accuracy, while human editing on the translated scripts can further improve the accuracy. Leveraging neural networks with human inputs helps deliver hyper-care while keeping costs low.
5. Orchestrating Customer Journeys with Deep Insights
Deep insights that detail the exact journey of a customer often evade companies due to rapidly changing behaviors, preferences, channel choices and the complexity created by the sheer variety of tracking tools. However, data science, advanced analytics and niche technologies leveraging AI and ML, can offer granular-level insights into a customer’s journey to drive hyper-care.
Journey discovery facilitates deep analysis of customer behavior across touchpoints. Journey mapping helps in understanding the emotions attached at each touchpoint. Leveraging these insights, organizations can orchestrate a customer’s journey by delivering hyper-personalized CX at every touchpoint. By adding the component of domain expertise to this, companies can further optimize customer journeys and enhance hyper-care. For example, utility companies are enhancing channel resolution scores and retailers are reducing cart abandonment rates by orchestrating their customer journeys.
Combined with advanced data science techniques and domain expertise, customer interaction analytics can reveal further underlying insights that companies may not easily have access to. Interaction analytics helps companies accurately decode specific customer journey challenges in the context of the new normal to align hyper-care efforts with current business objectives.
The reporting of metrics that business leaders need to optimize hyper-care is changing. Companies can optimize hyper-care by leveraging metrics from end-to-end reporting that combines technology, design, process and consumer psychology. For example, they can combine metrics such as website bounce rates and journey drop-outs across channels with call abandonment as well as waiting, transfer and resolution times during interactions with the contact center. This combination of upstream and downstream metrics helps them easily mine insights on the actual customer effort required to resolve challenges and enhance hyper-care.
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