As Frontier Airlines embarks on its first full year of a digital-only strategy, James O’Hare, MD of LINK Mobility, looks at whether it’s right for every business. 

At the end of last year, Frontier Airlines announced it was moving to a digital-only customer service model. Changing a flight and getting help with a booking can now only be done through WhatsApp, live chat services, email, text and social media messaging. There will be no person to call for help. It was considered a bold progressive move, and no doubt the snowstorms over Christmas tested the strategy.

While many low-cost airlines have moved to more digital channel offering, a few minutes searching on most of their websites and you will find a phone number to call, eventually.

The transition for Frontier comes at a time when research shows that voice is still a much-preferred form of communication. Stats show around half of people say they have been ignored by brands when they have used messaging apps or social media channels over the last year. A quarter of people say that it has taken a day or more to get a response.

If you have an imminent flight and need a quick answer, then you’ll expect much better service. I can’t imagine Frontier hasn’t thought about that.

I suspect the move to digital isn’t just about service. It’s a sign of the choices brands all over the world are making in terms of reducing overheads and reviewing how much heavy-lifting digital channels can do.

Self-service is an extremely important part of delivering great customer service. Just as there are groups of people who want to talk to someone, there are cohorts of customers who want the option to do everything online. Why shouldn’t you be able to sort out a bill or organise a return using WhatsApp as easily as you can buy something online?

The numbers speak loudly

Gartner has said that chatbots will be the primary contact method for a quarter of firms by 2027. Juniper also earmarks chatbots for huge growth, expecting interactions to hit around 3.5 billion as we go into 2023, and 10 billion by 2027.

Just a few years ago these numbers would have been rubbished. The customer experience that chatbots delivered was deemed too poor for them to be so integral in delivering a good, let alone great, customer experience.

However, the technology has moved on as artificial intelligence and machine learning has matured. Now, chatbot messaging apps are of such a calibre that they won’t just serve customers, but they will also manage around half of all retail transactions by 2026. These sorts of figures can’t be ignored when cost-cutting and maximising spend without compromising experience is the priority in the boardroom.

Is an all-digital model right for every brand?

Though some customer service leaders might gasp at Frontier Airlines going ‘all-in’ with digital, it is what Amazon has done for years. The great learning is of course that Amazon hasn’t just implemented the tools that make managing a problem easy, it’s meticulously planned the processes that sit behind them. One would expect that this is what Frontier Airlines has also done.

But above all, companies that use digital channels to great effect have focused on creating trust. If people believe they will get a timely and helpful response from using a chatbot then they will be more inclined to a) use it and b) recommend it.

There are a variety of ways to ensure digital processes work and can be trusted. For most businesses, it will come down to ‘training’ the chatbots to ensure they are delivering the right answer first time. This requires detailed planning of the scenarios that a chatbot will be faced with, and how it should therefore handle the enquiries.

Take the common query related to deliveries. It’s now possible to integrate a chat bot into a delivery partner’s real time scheduling tool and find the answer – no need to interrupt anyone getting on with making goods or packing them. Plus, with AI and ML in use a bot can be trained to recognise that ‘where’s my parcel’ and ‘when will my package arrive’ are asking the same thing.

When bots are trained in this way it helps to establish the processes that can be fully automated, and at what point a chatbot should hand over to a person.

That’s important because in some cases, going all digital won’t be right, either for the business or the market. Take insurance claims as an example. A flood claim might be filed through an app in the first instance for speed and to access emergency help, but any complexity as the claim progresses won’t necessarily be easily managed through texts.

It needs an expert to interpret information and make decisions that manage the insurance aspects, but to also provide the empathetic care people going through a trauma need. The human aspect of delivering customer care is a critical factor in NPS.

Delivering empathetic care can’t be done by a bot

Empathy is perhaps one of the biggest challenges companies will face this year. As the cost of living crisis deepens, brands will be faced with more complicated service scenarios. Trained experts who can help people in a sympathetic way will be critical to help ensure the brand’s values are upheld.

It’s likely we’ll see companies introduce a blend of people and digital tools to assist with this challenge. First, all chatbots will be a boon for reducing the number of calls that make it through. Helping to deal with quick turnaround queries is an ideal way to implement chatbots. It improves customer service stats and saves money.

Taking the insurance scenario again to explain this further, chatbots can be run alongside SMS reminders to renew. For example, text messages can be sent proactively, helping to protect existing business. Recipients who click a link in the message can be taken to a landing page, that could be personalised, with a renewal calculator. A chatbot can be available on the page to help guide someone through the renewal process reducing calls and improving sales rates.

But most importantly, using chatbots in this way will create the bandwidth teams need to deal with more complex and time-consuming cases, where an individual is perhaps in distress about an emergency claim.

Understand what success looks like

To get this balance right, brands will need to do two things. Firstly, they must understand their customers’ preferences. How do people interact now? What are the common behavioural traits that indicate one channel will be more appropriate than another? Forcing people down a route that is unnatural, especially if it is without any support, won’t curry favour.

Secondly, it’s vital to build comprehensive decision trees. Knowing when a chatbot should and shouldn’t help will help to derive how skill is used and what process changes need to be made.

Above all, brands need to think about what success looks like. Is it that chatbots will lead to fewer returns because people ask questions about a product upfront? Is it a high propensity for people to recommend you to others because they love that they can get everything done when they want, how they want? Or is it that chatbots ensure that when someone does call, they feel under no pressure to get off the phone because the agent has been given permission to take their time?

It will look different for every company, no matter their sector or size. But one thing is for sure, it’s the brands that use digital wisely and are in tune with their customers that will win.

About the Author

James O’Hare is the managing director of LINK Mobility.

When it comes to customer experience transformation, the discussion tends to focus on faster and more efficient digital channels. But unless brands fully integrate voice into customer journeys, it’s hard to claim that they provide a fully joined-up customer experience.

Despite the rush to digital, voice remains the most-used service channel – particularly for complex issues. Advisors are seeing this first-hand, with 76% of demand into an average contact centre coming via the voice channel. This proved particularly the case during the early days of the pandemic when people clearly needed re-assurance. And with businesses and stores largely closed, the contact centre quickly became the new frontline for customer engagement.

When there’s uncertainty, a phone call is the preferred option
The voice channel clearly matters more to customers when there’s uncertainty. In this situation there is a real challenge for CX teams and advisors when to deliver great service without having immediate access to the full customer context.

Historically, organisations have been able to link their Salesforce or CRM system with telephony through a customer screen pop. However, this is a very basic way of passing customer information to an advisor. That’s a very simple form of integration which has been around for decades although still not widely deployed.

The good news is that with increased deployment of cloud-based digital telephony and continuous innovations within the channel, it’s now possible to track, measure and support all aspects of the voice call – from initial answer through to wrap-up and beyond. Newer capabilities such as those within Salesforce Service Cloud Voice provide the ability to create real-time transcriptions – so that not only is metadata being passed into the desktop but rather real-time insights on the conversation with automated knowledge and suggestions as well as the summarisation of notes, saving time during and at the end of an interaction. This emerging and evolving capability will help to truly digitise the voice channel.

And when we talk about voice becoming a stand-alone digital channel, there’s two aspects to that. Firstly, and even before the call is even answered, we’re able to greet the customer with a voicebot, thus immediately digitising the interaction by allowing them to access information or use the voice interface to solve an issue without the need to speak with a human.

The second aspect is, all of a sudden, all of that unstructured data in the voice conversation is being digitised and therefore allows us to do something more meaningful with it wherever we are able to surface our insights. This allows us to draw meaning from that data to help either the customer or an advisor solve a problem or answer a question quicker and easier.

So, if organisations are to deliver a high-quality customer experience at scale – and one that’s consistent across both digital and physical engagement channels – then they will need to be able to integrate enterprise voice telephony into their core CRM platform.

It’s time to place voice at the heart of the CRM Customer Engagement Centre

At Sabio, and via our recently acquired specialist CRM practice, ‘makepositive‘, we’re now working with Salesforce to help our clients to place voice at the heart of their CRM Customer Engagement Centre. With the introduction of solutions such as Service Cloud Voice, it’s now possible for Salesforce CRM users to take advantage of the power of telephony platforms such as Avaya, Genesys, Google and others across their end-to-end CRM experience.

By working with you to provide ‘Bring Your Own Telephony’ support for Service Cloud Voice, your voice platform is no longer a separate service channel. For example, Service Cloud Voice leverages the power of Salesforce Customer 360’s Service Console, Einstein Next Best Action and Analytics capabilities to give advisors the opportunity to deliver true omnichannel support and resolve calls faster.

Bringing the power of AI to phone calls not only helps to reduce average handling times, but also helps advisors to remove customer frustration by having the voice channel running seamlessly alongside web and social channels. And, because calls are transcribed in real-time, there’s no need for advisors to take notes. Automated call wrap-ups also give advisors the space they need to focus on the customer.

Integrating cloud telephony and CRM provides advisors with a toolset to enable them to do their best work. Sabio’s combination of deep contact centre expertise and Salesforce consulting skills means that we can take care of all the telephony integration and set-up, leaving your CX team free to focus on the advisor and customer experience.

For organisations determined to create a wholly digital customer experience, it’s probably fair to say that the telephony channel always used to be seen as somewhat of a legacy annoyance. Now with solutions such as Service Cloud Voice that’s no longer the case with voice becoming a digital channel.

Download Sabio’s Service Cloud Voice flyer to learn more about how you can extend the power of your CRM with native digital telephony.

About the Author

Stuart Dorman is Chief Innovation Officer at Sabio Group.

Sabio Group is a global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India.

The Group, which includes ‘makepositive’, delivers solutions and services that seamlessly combine digital and human interactions to support outstanding customer experiences.

Through its own technology, and that of world-class technology leaders such as Amazon Connect, Avaya, Genesys, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Twilio and Verint, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.

The Group works with major brands worldwide, including Aegon, AXA Assistance, BBVA, BGL, Caixabank, DHL, loveholidays, Marks & Spencer, Rentokil, Essent, GovTech, HomeServe, Saga, Sainsbury’s Argos, Telefónica and Transcom Worldwide.

Over the past two years, retailers have invested a significant amount of time and money to create exceptional digital experiences as consumers embraced a new way of interacting with their favorite brands.

While customers are returning to physical shopping in the post-Covid economy, digital engagement strategies are still vital to retain customers and keep them satisfied.

Verint conducted a survey of 6,648 respondents — the basis of our Verint Experience Index benchmark research of consumer satisfaction with leading retailers. Generational differences and channel preferences persist in this most recent report. And as a result, it’s important for retailers to recognize generational shopping preferences to drive customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, and to take a united view of both in-person and digital experiences to satisfy all consumers.

Generational Differences in Shopping Preferences

The role and relevance of physical brick and mortar locations has been debated ever since the advent of ecommerce. While physical retail will probably never go away entirely because for many shoppers it is highly experiential, we do see younger consumers demonstrating a preference for leveraging digital channels for a significant portion of the buyer journey.

Understanding these channel-shifting shopping habits of younger consumers is vital for retailers as they refactor their customer engagement strategies in the post-pandemic era. Digital experience is very important to this group and rates second only to price as the biggest driver of customer satisfaction. As a result, if retailers want to engage and connect on their needs, it is critical that they provide a wide range of support for rich and rewarding digital experiences. This includes seamless purchase processes.

For Gen Z, price and digital experience are the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction. For older generations, appeal, quality, and variety of merchandise are more important.

Key Drivers of Customer Satisfaction

With the world’s supply chains facing unprecedented strain, we see an almost universal shift in the biggest driver of customer satisfaction being “merchandise” – specifically, merchandise appeal, availability, quality, and variety. Merchandise ranked as the highest driver across the top 25 U.S. retailers that we evaluated. At a time when many items are more difficult to find, access to high quality and a large variety of items to buy clearly matters most to shoppers.

Digital experience – specifically responsiveness, ease of finding products, and the ability to provide needed information – was the second biggest driver of customer satisfaction.

Price – specifically, value, competitiveness, and clarity, was the third biggest driver of customer satisfaction – not unsurprising in an era of inflation.

Service representative – specifically their availability, responsiveness, and ability to answer questions –was the fourth biggest driver of customer satisfaction. This aligns with other research that we, at Verint, have done, that indicates that while many consumers value self-serve service channels, they also value human assistance, especially when they have an urgent question, problem, or complaint, or when the purchase has a high dollar value.

While there are myriad factors that make or break a retail experience, prioritizing and increasing customer satisfaction will positively impact desirable customer behavior. And understanding those factors that wield the greatest influence enables retailers to lean in and prioritize their focus.

Customer Journeys: More Complex Than Ever

Online retail has grown, with e-commerce spending in the U.S. predicted to jump by 13 percent to $1 trillion in 2022, but consumers have increasingly complex purchase journeys that often involve both in-store and digital steps.

Overall, 47 percent of consumers prefer to engage with a retailer by visiting a store, which is true across grocery, mass merchant, and specialty retailers. But there are clear differences across generations. Two-thirds of customers over 56 prefer to visit a store; for much of their lives, visiting a store was the only option for the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers and its familiarity is likely why it remains their preferred way to engage.

However, if we look at shoppers under 40, that number drops below 36 percent. Gen Z sees utility in the retail store as a convenient click-and-collect depot for merchandise. While 28 percent are making purchases via the retailer’s website or app, 51 percent either collect in-store or via curbside pick-up.

In addition, our research found that Gen Z and Millennials have more complex purchase journeys, with over 75 percent using at least one other digital resource – such as ratings websites, recommendations from influencers, and social media content – to help inform their purchasing decisions.

Respondents under 40 are also more concerned with retailers’ environmental practices than respondents in other age groups, rating the value of eco-friendly packaging at least 15 percentage points higher than Gen X and Boomer respondents.

What Does This Mean for Retailers?

Our research has found that digital interactions, whether on public social or private messaging channels, are the most effective way for retailers to turn customer communications into sales and do so in an agile manner. While marketing emails can easily get lost in an inbox, sending the right mobile message at the right time to the right customer can turn automated interactions into purchases.

Retailers can send timely reminders based on past activity or appointment requests which encourage customers to rebook or refill their regular purchases. They can also be useful in cart abandonment situations, where retailers can reach out to existing customers who haven’t completed a sale on their website or app with a reminder, or discount code, to encourage them to finish their purchase. Click-to-Messenger advertisements, or targeted advertising on Facebook or Instagram alongside purpose-built bot flow, can create a seamless browsing and payment sequence for a personalized shopping experience without leaving a private messaging conversation.

Gen Z and Millennials will continue to push the envelope on digital experiences, a shift that has been going on for years. To accommodate these groups, brands will need to establish continuous feedback loops, optimize digital communications to boost revenue, and ensure they are providing optimal customer experience to strike a balance between digital and traditional channels.

Leaning into digital solutions that help both online and in-store experiences as well as tailoring specific services to the correct demographics can help ensure consistent and enjoyable experiences across all kinds of journeys and channels.

The best strategy to improve customer experience is to ultimately connect every customer touchpoint and surface information from traditionally siloed departments. By collecting regular feedback around factors such as merchandise, pricing and loyalty programs, retailers can continually enhance and improve shopping experiences.

Click the link for more information and to download a copy of the report, Verint Experience Index Retail Report 2022.

 About the Author

Jenni Palocsik is vice president, marketing insights, experience and enablement at Verint.

Mark Wilding, Vice President of Global Customer Transformation at ServiceMax, steps into the future and predicts how advances in technology will enable a new era of service delivery.

A few years ago, I heard Kevin Ashton speak at a conference. In addition to being the ‘father of the Internet of Things’, he’s also a futurologist. Among other things, he predicted we will discover extra-terrestrial life in this century – not necessarily little green men, but perhaps bacteria. He also forecasts we will survive climate change and that most people will be vegetarian by the 22nd century. Not as far fetched as it would have been a decade ago.

Predicting the future is a unique skillset, but in some sectors it’s easier than others to see the direction technology is taking us and how it fits with the demands of business. One of the areas this is most visible is in the field service arena.

Technology is ripping up old ways of working and changing how machines are used and serviced. It is also enabling completely new service models and having a significant impact on the skills required and recruitment. This is not going to change. It is going to accelerate. So, where will be in 2030? More of the same or maybe something completely different will emerge? With ‘6G’ already slated for launch in 2030, service as we know it could change.

Here we have outlined our top five predictions for service in 2030.

The metaverse: virtualisation and service

What 6G will bring in 2030 is the sort of data speeds that can turn today’s science fiction into reality. As Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs has suggested, 6G will be a “sixth sense experience for humans and machines,” where applications can deliver on the metaverse and ‘Human 4.0’ vision. Imagine hologram video calls (a bit like in Star Wars but hopefully clearer) and a real-time digital simulation of real-world scenarios.

This is where service comes in. The metaverse can be a more powerful and real-time extension to the idea of digital twins. Field service teams can use the metaverse to train engineers but also trial new parts and experiment with repair techniques. Machines and their environments can be mirrored, monitored and enhanced, giving service teams a real-time simulation and vision. With predictive analytics built-in, it promises to enable more tailored, outcome-centric service models in a more cost-effective way.

Self-service and sustainability: the evolution of product design

Touchless services will be standard by 2030 enhanced by products that have been designed with service in mind. This means an enhancement of what we have already seen through the pandemic – self-service models and remote servicing by engineers. This will enable value-aligned asset lifecycle management, which means less waste, less cost and a more sustainable model.

Sustainability will be a key factor. There are already proposals in place to increase product circularity by using more sustainable materials and design that will enable easier maintenance. For example, the European Union recently revealed a number of measures designed to improve sustainable product design to help governments and businesses reach 2030 NetZero emissions targets.

IoT will be seamless and limitless

“Advances to the industrial internet will be accelerated through increased network agility, integrated AI and the capacity to deploy, automate, orchestrate and secure diverse use cases at hyperscale,” says an Ericsson report The Future of IoT.  “The potential is not just in enabling billions of devices simultaneously but leveraging the huge volumes of actionable data which can automate diverse business processes.”

The launch of 6G will enable IoT to deliver on this sort of promise. IoT connectivity will be the standard for industrial machines and devices, increasingly maintained by third party control centres to optimise skills and ensure uptime and scale. It will also accelerate smart urban projects as well as promises of personalised medicine and healthcare.

Automation will enable businesses to run multiple service models

As Gartner suggested in its Future of Field Service Management report, automation and network capacity will enable organisations to deliver multiple service models. Even simultaneously with multiple clients.

A combination of all technology advances will help organisations deliver and maintain tailored scenarios depending on the specific needs of customers. As Gartner says in the report, businesses can deliver services within four specific areas – outcome centric, equipment centric, appointment centric and knowledge centric.

This will require both digital transformation and business model change. Expect service leaders to address challenges such as technician bots, digitally augmented subcontractors and outcome-based contracts with greater velocity.

Field service engineers in short supply

Around half of all existing work activities could be automated in the next few decades, as next-level process automation and virtualisation become more commonplace. However, the role of the field service technician will be highly valued, more specialised and multi-faceted.

Each maintenance challenge will have its specific solution, with engineers working virtually to supplement self-service capabilities or on-site to physically change parts or upgrade machines and devices. Each job will be data-driven, pre-defined and pre-prepared with parts orders automated and delivered.

Given the expected increase in talent shortages – Korn Ferry claims that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them – organisations will have to fight even harder to attract and train talent. Work culture and reputation will be key, as will automation of processes and business alignment.

About the Author

Mark Wilding is Vice President Global Customer Transformation at ServiceMax.

Jen Snell, VP Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy, Conversational AI at Verint explains why its time to move from robotic chatbots to those capable of true contextual conversations.

Chatbots and Intelligent Virtual Assistants are on the customer engagement frontlines, interacting with consumers every day. Leveraging conversational AI to support rich two-way dialogues, they help facilitate seamless real-time communication and resolution, as well as help build a company’s brand credibility and boost engagement.

In 2020, the global pandemic led to an unprecedented surge in the usage of AI-powered customer service. The combination of a reduced labor force and high volume of support inquiries caused a 426 percent increase in chatbot usage as businesses began to rely on virtual assistants more than ever before. In fact, this trend is slated to continue with industry estimates for chatbot growth set to grow at a CAGR of 34.7 percent.

Despite the growing prevalence of chatbots in the customer service realm, chatbots are not without their own challenges as revealed in a recent survey we conducted of 1,000 U.S. consumers of 18 to 65 years of age.

Our survey results reveal that consumers just aren’t sold on chatbot efficacy, and many find chatbot experiences flat-out frustrating. They’re registering multiple complaints against chatbots as they continue to demand more from their digital-first experiences.

Nearly one-third – 32 percent – say they rarely or never feel understood by a chatbot. Only 28 percent say they always or often feel understood, and 30.5 percent say a chatbot rarely or never fully answers their questions.

Due to this failure to communicate, over 30.8 percent say they always or often abandon their efforts to resolve an issue when interacting with a chatbot. As a result of the inability to resolve issues or have their questions answered via chatbots, more than half of consumers turn to human agents for help – 54.5 percent say they always or often must request to speak to a human after speaking with a chatbot.

A common frustration noted by more than 60 percent of consumers was having to re-explain a situation to a customer service agent after starting the interaction with a chatbot.

Beyond problems with comprehension and issue resolution, consumers voiced frustrations with lackluster chatbots including:

• 7% say the options aren’t sufficient
• 7% say chatbots lack context for their unique situation
• 4% say chatbots don’t have all the information that they need
• 1% say the interactions feel impersonal
• 3% say the experience is too time consuming

Respondents said they are most comfortable using conversational AI for simple use cases such as retrieving account information, scheduling appointments or services, and travel bookings and do feel chatbots are increasingly effective for 24/7 assistance and quick responses in use cases such as healthcare – particularly in scenarios such as increasing patient adherence.

With businesses continuing to increasingly rely on chatbots as a key channel in the digital-first approaches, the next generation of chatbots must be more intelligent, personalized and effective. Negative experiences with outdated or poorly deployed chatbots will hurt overall adoption rates. Companies need to provide a high-quality experience with their conversational AI solutions, given higher customer demands and expectations.

Chatbots need to move beyond micro-smarts to become intelligent systems that deliver advanced understanding, assistance, and intelligence. ‘Beyond the bot’ conversational AI systems can carry on true contextual conversation, complete with clarifications or a subsequent choice by users.

These supercharged chatbots are supported by deep domain expertise, so their comprehension of user intent goes way beyond generic Natural Language Processing. They are also highly integrated with many systems of record to ensure effective issue resolution and the delivery of the right information. This also includes when the conversation is moved to a human agent and delivering all relevant context of the interaction, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves and agents can be successful by quickly resolving issues.

Conversational AI can be a key element of every organization’s digital engagement strategy, but only if those digital experiences keep customers coming back for more.

Click the link for more information and to download a copy of the report, Conversational AI Barometer: Chatbots and Next-Gen AI.

About the Author

Jen Snell is VP Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy, Conversational AI at Verint.

With the metaverse predicted to nearly double, potentially reaching $783.3 billion by 2024, it’s not a surprise that businesses across industries are looking to invest.

In fact, several new startups are opening virtual headquarters in anticipation of the Metaverse dominating the future of work. Gerald Martinetz, VP of Applied Intelligence at Mindbreeze explores further.

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the last decade has seen a digitization boom. But the rise of the Metaverse is expected to bring digitization to a new level, far beyond that of Zoom meetings and Slack chats. The Metaverse eliminates the need for a formal workplace, enabling digital working versions of ourselves to interact with one another in a virtual sphere.

Even if you are in the tech world and have excellent knowledge of what the Metaverse can be, one may still be a little unclear. Perhaps, a productive and accurate way to see the Metaverse is as a digital twin of our reality, enabling businesses to transact and interact virtually to optimize digital projects.

While this virtual world of work will allow ultimate flexibility, it will also exacerbate many challenges organizations face today with remote and hybrid work, such as collaboration across teams and time zones. To address these challenges and ensure the Metaverse is a valuable workspace for all, businesses should utilize tools that generate a holistic view of their corporation within the digital space. Seeing holistic views of what is going on inside your company can not only enhance your current business processes, but also prepare you for the leap into the Metaverse when the time comes.

Digital Twins and how the Metaverse Compares

Digital twins are virtual representations of physical objects and processes, serving as counterparts to real-life things. These twins provide little use without being exact, so they are continuously updated from real-time data and machine learning. In maintenance, a digital twin of a machine part is often created, enabling professionals tasked with fixing it to have insights into different components and functions of the piece – avoiding reworks and leading to more efficient labor.

While the Metaverse is still in creation and undergoing construction from the ground up, digital twins are designed from an existing entity. For companies and processes to go into the Metaverse, digital twins of what already exists will have to fill the space.

This is where access to data and information come into play. If the Metaverse truly becomes our new reality, companies need to have their data sorted on customers, company processes, employees, and more. It would be a shame to enter a new reality unprepared for a customer meeting.

Holistic views of customers give customer support and experience teams insights they never had before. Connecting data from internal and external sources ensure support teams are equipped with knowledge from every interaction or touchpoint a client had. Today, this is highly beneficial when a customer fills out a support ticket and the support desk is tasked with resolving an issue in a timely and efficient manner. All necessary knowledge on the problem and the customer history is in front of the support desk’s face in a matter of seconds, leading to expert solution finding and happy customers.

In the Metaverse, this could look slightly different. It’s important to note that nobody truly knows how the end product will look for business interactions. That said, if the avatar of a customer visits your virtual headquarters with a problem, your support team best be prepared.

In this scenario, augmented information will prove very useful in enriching content within the Metaverse. Augmented information adds modified existing data to a dataset, giving machines more to learn from. With an AI-powered solution, such as an insight engine, all digital entities in the “new” reality can be updated in real-time, enhancing the benefits of operating inside the Metaverse.

The Key Takeaway

Today, there are countless technologies on the market – many of which people had trouble conceptualizing until they saw it. If the world of business is heading towards the Metaverse, companies should begin conceptualizing what it will look and feel like as best as they can. Starting with digital twins to represent entities throughout your organization could be highly beneficial to serving your customers in the Metaverse.

About the Author

Gerald Martinetz is VP of Applied Intelligence at Mindbreeze.

In 2022, we are witnessing several changes around us. The aftermath of the pandemic that hit the world was so severe that its effects can still be seen. Jacob Davis explores five key trends that are emerging as a result.

From forcing changes in the way we work and how we work, the pandemic also affected how we shop, consult, interact, and live. And a majority of those changes are likely to continue into the future.

In this article we will look at some of the digital transformation likely to take place this year. Implementing such changes might offer a business greater chances of succeeding as you consolidate all your tools to tackle the obstacles.

The 2022 Digital Transformation Trends

1. 5G Everywhere

For the past few years, 5G has been a hot topic of discussion among techies and businesses. It is expected this year the upgrade from 4G will finally take place to accelerate changes and offer a whole new set of benefits to the users.

For telecom providers, this network is of great importance as it lets them offer fresh ideas, services, and experiences at unimaginable speed. It is receiving the same hype that 4G and 3G received. The only difference is that 5G has the potential of introducing notable transformations in business models and their functioning through fast speed, lower latency, and higher density.

This year, companies will need to invest in 5G network infrastructure. It includes investing in cloud services and increasing the use of IoT. Doing this will help you reap the benefits of 5G including, enhanced bandwidth, improved safety, and more reliability.

2. Digital Payments

There’s no doubt that our coming years will supposedly be entirely digital due to the rise in no-touch solutions. This transformation has nudged people to make contactless payments and businesses to develop contactless solutions to take and deliver orders, thus following the social distancing norms. McDonald’s has already adapted to this change by taking online orders and promoting in-seat ordering.

Online payment has allowed people to pay for their purchases while avoiding contact with the shopkeeper. Businesses all over the globe are adopting this transformation to access the virtual economy. It has become a crucial part of the banking industry.

3. Hybrid Environment

This year, the hybrid working environment will be the most ordinary transformation compared to the rest on our list. As the workspace setting has changed tremendously in the past two years, its future is only expected to evolve. Businesses will need to adapt and offer virtual intranet connectivity to the to attract and retain talent.

Because of the changes brought in by the Covid-19 pandemic, workplace norms have altered. Many companies today are shifting towards a hybrid working environment. It is because it allows the employees to have a work-life balance while staying safe from the virus. It has resulted in a spike in employee job satisfaction and thus their productivity.

4. Process Automation

Business process automation refers to the pace of virtual transformation within an organization by automating particular processes. It is an upcoming change, especially useful for small business owners who want to stay ahead in the race. It includes monotonous processes such as customer service, accounting, manufacturing, supply chain, research, and content marketing.

This year, people are hopeful it might be useful for all kinds and sizes of brands. Companies like Amazon have already switched to AI to boost predictive analysis, which will help with forecasting and business decisions.

5. Information Protection

Data protection has always been at the forefront of virtual transformation. All the significant changes taking place year after year are initiated keeping in mind the safety of user and company data. As the Covid-19 pandemic has enhanced the usage of electronic devices, increasing screen time, the risk of cyberattacks has also increased.

Every task today is carried out using a mobile phone, whether making payments, ordering food or grocery, working, playing, or watching a movie. We have lost touch with the real world which has compelled businesses to take advantage of the situation. Businesses are shifting towards a remote working setup and this has nudged them to give priority to cyber security.

In 2022, online safety might be the most visual aspect of technology to gain customer trust. Thus, people will witness high transparency and security this year.

6. Data and Analytics

We all understand that data is the livelihood of a business, which should be stored, processed, and analyzed thoroughly to reach great heights. An organization must make decisions keeping its data in mind to attain its full potential. Data analytics helps draw valuable details out of raw material to enhance decision-making and efficiency.

In 2022, data and analytics might play a vital role in introducing significant changes in its work. Companies may use various types of data analytics in each department and function to resolve complicated issues. This transformation may also assist in predicting consumer behavior, optimizing supply chain operations, optimizing sales, etc.

7. Cloud-based Services

Offering cloud-based solutions might fix various obstacles that have been a part of business operations. The popularity of such practices in the tech world is due to its perks, such as low cost, high scalability, and easy usage. Many brands today are shifting from traditional software solutions to cloud-based services.

Due to the enhanced use of online services, it has become vital to offer privacy to the users, thus providing safety from hackers. Cloud-based services help achieve all this by efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and security from hackers – all in one place!

To Sum Up

Due to a tremendous rise in digitizing business operations, the virtual transformation market is witnessing considerable growth. Brands are becoming flexible in changing their service quality according to consumer preferences and making considerable profits.

If you want to stay in the competition, it is vital to adopt this change. It has a lot of perks to offer. It includes strong network infrastructure, enhanced efficiency, higher ROI, reduced costs, data visualization opportunities, and modern business models and architecture.

About the Author

Jacob Davis is a data analyst and strategist working in the Israeli startup tech space for the last decade. Jacob specializes in turning unstructured alternative data into actionable decision-making. His passion is uncovering stories and trends in the digital space and turning data into stories.

It’s no secret that modern digital technologies have changed consumer behavior.

Today, digital technologies, such as mobile devices, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), etc., allow users to get quick information about almost everything. In short, consumers are dependent on digital technologies as they have become aware of what they can do with them.

Lately, most B2C and B2B business owners have realized the importance of digital transformation and enhancing the customer experience. They understand that leveraging modern technologies can help them drive new customers and keep them coming back. Most business owners believe that delivering a tremendous customer experience can have better ROI than advertising.

What Is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation refers to leveraging modern technologies to streamline business operations and deliver tremendous customer experience. Put simply; it’s about revamping business strategies to interact with customers and offer them a consistent experience whenever and wherever they need it.

According to InStride, more than 91% of businesses leverage digital technologies, and 87% of business leaders say digitalization is a priority. Some of the benefits of digital transformation are:

• Improved data collection
• Get better consumer insights
• Deliver a better customer experience
• Enhance team collaboration with modern tools
• Increase profits
• Improve employee productivity

But, how can businesses benefit from digital transformation? Companies that embrace modern technologies in their day-to-day business operations successfully engage with customers. Know that these customers are:

• Six times more likely to buy a product.
• Four times more likely to refer your brand to their friends and relatives.
• Two times more likely to purchase a product, even if your competitor is offering heavy discounts on products/services.

With that said, let’s discuss how to get started with digital transformation.

5 Tips To Get Started With Digital Transformation

1. Define Your Strategy

First of all, initiate your journey by defining a strategy. After all, without proper planning, your business can fall into chaos.

As big tech companies continually introduce new business ideas, new business owners must create a long-term strategy to survive in this competitive digital world.

When you plan your digital transformation strategy, you should ask yourself these questions:

• Where does your business stand today?
• Where do you want to reach?
• How do you plan to achieve your goals?

As a business owner, you need to plan which technologies you can use to enhance your business operations and deliver a better customer experience. For that reason, it is crucial to create a strategy that will reward you with long-lasting results.

2. Understand The Customer Journey

As customers expect businesses to offer them a better customer experience, you need to understand your customers of each segment and optimize individual experiences at every touchpoint.

You need to ensure that no customer ever bounces back at any point of the interaction process.

According to HBR, more than 40% of business owners say that customer experience is their top priority for digital transformation. Know that these digital technologies enhance the customer experience and allow you to create better relationships with customers.

3. Personalize The Customer Experience

Today, most online customers want to feel more valued by a brand. The following tips can improve the customer experience:

• Being recognized – Addressing your customers by their names play a pivotal role in enhancing their experience. In fact, they are more likely to purchase if a brand recognizes them by their names. You can do this by sending personalized emails and text messages to inform them about a new product/service or seasonal discounts.

• Being remembered – They are more likely to purchase if a brand knows their purchase history.

• Offering relevant recommendations – Customers appreciate it when a business shows recommendations based on their previous purchase.

Know that sending personalized messages and emails can do wonders for your organization.

4. Leverage The Power Of Automation

Most customers prefer to interact with computer automation to get quick information about a product/service.

For example, you can use chatbots on your website, which pops up every time a user visits your website. Know that chatbots are available 24/7 and respond quickly to customers’ queries.

Leveraging the power of automation in your digital transformation strategy can enhance the customers’ overall digital experience. However, if you haven’t incorporated automation in your strategy yet, it’s high time to get started.

5. Keep Your Customers Updated

Keeping the customers updated about new products and discounts is a great way to enhance the digital customer experience.

For example, big eCommerce giants like Amazon, Flipkart, and eBay keep their customers updated on what is going on with the product. They keep the customers updated about the payment made, order received, order packed, estimated delivery date, etc.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is set to rule the digital world in the coming years. Hence, it is an opportunity for business owners to leverage digital technologies to enhance customer experience and outrank their competitors.

Initially, the journey would be full of ups and downs. However, when you understand how to implement the right strategies, you can successfully deliver the best customer experience.

To sum it up, following the above-mentioned tips can help you establish better relationships with customers and survive in this competitive digital world.

About the Author

Jacob Davis is a data analyst and strategist working in the Israeli startup tech space for the last decade. Jacob specializes in turning unstructured alternative data into actionable decision-making. His passion is uncovering stories and trends in the digital space and turning data into stories.

Even the best, most highly regarded brands in the world experience service delays or snafus. 

When they do, they need to react promptly and appropriately to address the issue, assuage the unhappy customer and boost the odds that the customer will remain a client for the long term. Coupons are commonly used by all types of companies to appease customers when regular communications fail. But providing coupons can be fraught with many challenges. Chief among them is the ability to provide customer service reps a quick and seamless way to reach out to the customer with a satisfactory response.

When it Comes to Appeasement Immediacy Matters

The process for issuing a discount coupon to a customer when a problem occurs can be long and complex. Any delay in resolving the issue can cause the customer to further stew and fume over whatever the service problem may have been. During that time, a disgruntled customer can vent wildly over social media channels, sharing their dissatisfaction, however trivial or not, with potentially thousands of others who may likewise share the post and exponentially exacerbate the problem.

You don’t want that to happen. But there’s another important reason to offer appeasement as quickly as a New York minute. Research shows that the ability to provide immediate appeasement matters a lot. In fact, research has consistently shown that unhappy customers share their poor experiences to far more people than happy customers share opposite, positive experiences.

Fortunately, while the downside may be how quickly bad news can go viral, an upside is that technology can help to quickly expedite the customer appeasement process.

Digital Coupons Can Streamline the Appeasement Process

As an offensive strategy, the use of digital coupons to provide fast resolution and appeasement to unhappy customers can minimize the potential negative spread of reputational damage. Customer service reps are at the forefront of this battle and companies need to do all they can to give them the right tools to defuse a bad situation from becoming worse.

To that end, digital coupons can offer any number of smart customer service mitigations:

• Immediacy and instant gratification. Literally with the push of a button your service agents—or any authorized staff in your organization—can deliver a coupon to a dissatisfied customer.
• Flexibility in delivery format. Customers have different preferences when it comes to how they prefer to receive information. With couponing, these preferences can run the gamut from email, to chat, to text message and even social media.
• The easier it is for your service reps to request and process a coupon, the more likely they’ll do so and the more quickly customers will be satisfied with the response.
• Management control. Digital coupons make it easy to track distribution and generate reports indicating when, where and by whom coupon offers have been issued.
• Tracking Delivery and Redemptions. Tracking helps keep account of the cost of appeasement and reveal important insights into the actions disgruntled customers take. For instance, trending data on redemptions can help you monitor the effectiveness of your appeasement efforts and your ability to avoid losing customers.

While offering traditional gift cards or paper coupons to disgruntled customers can be a proven way to mollify customers and turn potential negative word-of-mouth into positive, there is the potential for some negative impacts on the bottom line if the process isn’t handled smartly and quickly.

Single-use Digital Coupons Protect the Bottom Line

A digital coupon that can be used multiple times obviously represents the potential for revenue risk. Companies want to ensure that any coupons they offer will be used only by the customer they were intended for and only once. That’s virtually impossible to do with traditional digital coupons.

With single-use digital coupons, though, coupons and gift cards are redeemable only once, either at the point of sale or online. Once redeemed, they’re immediately deactivated and cannot be used again. Similarly, customers aren’t able to redeem the coupon on more than one device.

Clearly, the ability to carefully control the distribution and appropriate redemption of digital coupons has a real bottom-line impact for organizations from two perspectives:

• Ensuring that appeasement efforts keep valued customers on-board
• Protecting revenue by carefully controlling coupon distribution and redemption

Customer service issues happen. When they do, it’s important for companies (and call centers) to feel confident and empowered in their ability to promptly respond, and to close upon customer satisfaction. Instantly issued single-use digital coupons and gift cards make conflict resolution a win-win. Not only are customers made happy, but it virtually guarantees they will return to do business with you. Better yet, it also boosts the odds that they will spread positive word-of-mouth about their experience to many others.

About the Author

Dan Slavin is CEO and co-founder of CodeBroker, a provider of mobile marketing solutions. He was CEO of Framework Technologies, VP of Open Market, and CEO of International Testing Services. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.

Jitender Mohan, Head of Customer Interaction Services at WNS explores how combining human workforces with artificial intelligence and digital tools can deliver a complete, omni-channel customer experience.

While COVID-19 may be the reason for slower-than-usual customer service currently, it cannot be a long-term excuse. Though everybody is wrestling with similar challenges, the patience of customers with brands and their challenges, especially with quality or timeliness of delivery, will reach its own limit.

Interestingly, despite the shift to more digital and online channels, many businesses have reported an unexpected spike in calls. In the US, telecom operators reported that both the number and duration of calls overall have increased, while in the UK there was a surge of up to 50 per cent in the number of mobile and landline phone calls. Many organisations are struggling to manage these huge volumes as their employees continue to work remotely.

While the pandemic has unleashed massive disruption, and is radically altering consumer behaviour, the cornerstones of quality customer experience – relevance, personalisation, and value – remain in place. How can brands, whether in retail, utilities, hospitality, financial services, or any other high-volume, consumer-facing sector re-define the experience they deliver to customers?

Optimising Limited Human Resources

Research has consistently shown that consumers prefer interacting with human agents, with one study suggesting that a lack of available human customer service representatives can actually harm a brand’s chances of securing business. One of the reasons there’s been such a spike in telephone calls is that people want to feel more connected. With so many messages flying around about what people can and can’t do, and different sectors under various stages of lockdown, sometimes the telephone offers the most direct route to answers, or at least more detail.

Yet, as previously noted, brands will be wrestling with human challenges – most noticeably, the increased restrictions of when and how people can work. There’s also the issue of juggling working from home with childcare arrangements for those with families, as well as the ongoing mental toll many are struggling with.

All of these issues can adversely affect a brand’s human resource – its most valuable customer experience tool.

Augmenting Value

Ironically, considering consumer preferences, the answer may lie in the implementation of technology. Not as a replacement for agents, but as a way of augmenting their capabilities; allowing them to focus on their strengths (such as empathy and creative problem-solving outside of pre-defined processes) by integrating digital tools to automate tasks that prevent them from spending all their time helping customers.

What sort of digital tools? Smart automation, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to take away the grunt work, such as administrative tasks or finding customer records, freeing up agents’ time to find solutions faster.

There is greater potential, however. Through cognitive chatbots, predictive and sentiment analytics, businesses can identify the causes of customer dissatisfaction and provide agents with real-time intelligence and potential solutions as they engage with the customer in question. This is where the empathetic abilities of the human agent come into play, along with the ability to identify potential solutions that fall outside of standard processes.

By resolving the issue quickly, the customer is left satisfied, and better placed to be up and cross-sold to at an appropriate point in time. This integrated customer experience model helps businesses understand audience behaviour and drive a more immersive experience, irrespective of the channel.

This model works across sectors, from mobile operators dealing with service issues to banks offering financial products, businesses can have proactive, contextual and intelligent conversations while significantly reducing cost-to-serve. It can even have a positive impact on talent retention and acquisition. With agents moving away from transactional tasks to become value-adding, knowledge consultants, opportunities for personal development increase manifold. At the same time, new employees, whether permanent or temporary, can be easily integrated as and when required to cover spikes in call volumes.

Delivering an Integrated Customer Experience

With limited resources, businesses need to think creatively in order to continue to deliver the experience their customers want. Empowering valuable human agents with smart automation, sentiment analytics and AI-powered chatbots means employees have access to all the information they need in real-time, freeing them to offer empathetic and creative solutions to customer issues. In doing so, they can take the big step forward in helping their employers rebuild trust, improve brand loyalty and unlock new opportunities.

About the Author

Jitender Mohan is Head of Customer Experience Service at WNS. He is responsible for the strategy, growth initiatives and financial performance of the CIS practice. He has decades of experience in the IT sector in various roles ranging from transformation, process re-engineering, operations, sales and training.