Three ways migrating to the cloud will improve your customer experience
To better connect with customers, get your head in the cloud. Carla Bendeich explores three ways the cloud can distinguish your customer service above competitors.
Most businesses think they need to go to wild lengths to win over their competition — splashing out on creative and inventive marketing, reducing prices, or bringing to market a new product the likes of which the world has never seen.
All of that can still be valuable and true, but there’s another story to consider. What customers most want is to have their questions answered quickly and consistently, according to Inc. article “5 Ways to Exceed Customer Expectations,” and many customer service experts.
And, if you are looking to differentiate your business from your competitors, you may not be thinking about moving to the cloud as one of the ways to improve customer experience. But the cloud be an incredible accelerator of your customer service strategy.
Customers are looking for constant access to your products and services without interruption or any delay to 24/7 access. Customers expect to be engaged whenever they want, from wherever they want, from any device, on any subject. This makes delivering great customer service more of a challenge than any time in our history. According to a recent survey from Harris Interactive, “86% of U.S. adults expect brands to offer multiple options and flexible timing to interact with customer service” as published from Wired.com.
Today, let’s look at three ways how migrating your applications into the cloud can help meet high customer expectations and improve the overall customer experience:
1. Constant and consistent interaction
Cloud solutions can provide your business with ways to meet your customers’ requests and keep the costs to expanding services to a minimum. You are able to deploy a chatbot to answer questions and inquiries with consistency and immediacy. Chatbots can help a customer feel like they are interacting with your business without having to staff a team around the clock to answer calls or emails.
The customer experience is seamless and sometimes even better. Chatbots can provide answers from across the organization, your businesses website or app when previously a customer may have needed to be transferred to another department to get their answers.
According to Forbes article “What Customers Want and Expect,” they want zero repeats: When there is a problem, they only want to tell their story one time. They don’t want to repeat it to multiple customer service agents. According to the survey, 71% desire a consistent experience across any channel, but only 29% receive it. Chatbots such as Amazon Lex can offer a conversational experience to your customer through automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).
2. Hyper-personalized service
Personalized service can come from cloud services despite the misconception that only people can help to personalize. Amazon’s ability to leverage algorithms and machine learning is the key to their success. You don’t have to have the sophistication of Amazon to enable similar features to help personalize the customer’s experience. A Forbes article, “What is the Customer Experience Cloud,” declared that “successful companies have found that customer experience belongs to more than just the marketing department. If a company is so siloed that it distracts from the service customers are receiving, customers will take their business to a place where they feel valued and respected.”
Cloud solutions offer processing capacity to crunch big data sets that come from simple browsing and search history along with other available data to make informed suggestions of products and services a customer might want. These suggestions bring the opportunity to increase sales from informed AI applications.
3. Secure and safe
The last thing you want is to have your customers’ information hacked, especially if you have any financial data. Security breaches negatively put your business in the news quickly, take significant focus to correct, and cause you to lose trust with your customers.
Cloud security features allow for safeguarding your customers from cyber attacks or ransomware. A recent article from Business 2 Community recounted the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, “where hackers demanded ransom in exchange for the safety of targets’ sensitive files and data. Although this attack was terrifying for everyone involved, it did not target cloud users.” Cloud services provide valuable data security expertise to interfere long before any attack tries to get to your customer.
If you’re thinking about migrating to the cloud or further leveraging how you’re currently using the cloud to enhance your customers experience, leave a comment or reach out any time!
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
Carla Bendeich is an organizational effectiveness expert with Slalom. Her people-centric approach ensures that valuable technologies like RPA, AI, and the cloud make sense for both organizations and their employees.
