The New Era of Customer Relationship Management
“It is a significant challenge to reorient a company toward the customer. […] You stop talking about yourselves and the things that you want to do and you start talking about customers and their experiences instead.” — Ron Ritter, McKinsey
Nowadays, clients are the main concern of companies’ strategy, they are the core of their daily work. Customers’ behaviors guide the companies’ actions and operations. Clients always demand ever-higher product quality and service performance. Consequently a great customer strategy is indispensable if a business wants to differentiate itself from the competition!
In order to upgrade customer experience, organizations redefine their functions around the end-users’ needs and customers’ interactions. Today, they use new tools to improve the relationship created with clients and satisfy them. In this article, we’ve decided to focus on a new tool: Chat bots.
A chat bot is a computer program that conducts a conversation with a customer. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), those intelligent systems are able to mimic human language and attend to customers’ requests. Companies implement this new kind of virtual assistants to transform a part of how they interact with their customers.
Most of the time, organizations implement chat bots to delegate a section of their customer service and reduce customer dissatisfaction. Indeed, they are able to answer simple customer questions and learn from their mistakes, so they are constantly improving.
Companies are increasingly seduced by those assistants that are available 24/7? They represent a new way to enhance customer service at lower costs because today, 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned— 40% of the time because shoppers were not given the opportunity to ask questions (source: IBM).
The first companies that implemented chat bots were in the banking sector. Those companies did not use those virtual systems for banking services but for customer services. The Royal Bank of Scotland decided to implement a chat bot to reduce congestion in call centers. Chat bots answer easy questions and redirect customers to a real human advisors for specific requests.
More recently, Twitter is going to let companies develop and automate their mail services on the network via chat bots. It would represent a new way for brands to communicate with their followers. The main idea is to reduce the waiting times and improve customer satisfaction.
But to achieve this goal, the chat bot must be properly configured, which involves:
- being where clients are — on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Twitter according to the brand’s target clients;
- being simple and efficient — if it is not, clients will leave;
- being beneficial to company’s banners and values — it represents the brand.
If that is not respected, customer dissatisfaction will increase!
A chat bot offers the opportunity for companies with a large number of consumers to use a new tool to improve their customer relationship. Gathering and analyzing information about the acceptance of a product, the improvements needed are much faster. Companies can adjust their offer more rapidly to the changing market and evolving customer needs.
Artificial intelligence tools are changing the field of customer service. Consulting companies are integrating those new intelligent systems in their offers. Prosodie, CapGemini Consulting subsidiary, offers an integrated solution for managing multichannel customer interactions (Voice, Chat, Email). Using voice authentification simplifies the clients’ journey when they contact the customer service. Prosodie can identify high risk calls with its emotion detection to ensure a quick response when appropriate and identify the customers’ preferences with speech analytics.
Large scale companies have the opportunity with current technologies to really focus on the end-user by offering a more simple and intuitive service. AI and machine learning are part of the future when it comes to focusing on user experience.
Haroun (@HarounBenA) & Victoire
