As the world emerges from the global pandemic, businesses have to work harder than ever to stay top of mind. More and more brand interactions have moved from the brick-and-mortar world into the digital realm, making customer experience critical to building brand loyalty. Personalization forms the foundation for strong customer relationships, and hyper-personalization is the new norm—but even that isn’t enough to make your brand stand out from the crowd.
To create the kind of meaningful connections people are craving in the post-COVID world, you need to infuse every conversation with empathy and emotion. And you need to do it at scale. Let’s break down what it takes.
In recent years, advances in technology and data analytics have enabled brands to personalize CX interactions to an increasingly higher degree. Far beyond simply recognizing a customer and greeting them by name, today’s CX leaders use hyper personalization to take it to the next level. That means identifying them instantly, having immediate access to every interaction, on any channel, and using that data to anticipate what they need—and offer an immediate, relevant, and highly-personalized solution.
It’s the difference between saying, “Hello, Jane! What can I help you with today?” and, “Welcome back, Jane! There’s currently a sale on your favorite dog food brand. Would you like to check it out?”.
Everyone wants to feel seen, cared about, and that their worries matter. And that’s never been truer than today. For customers, this means showing them that you understand their needs right now and that you’re here to help. A great example of this is the recent trend towards letting customers opt-out of emails that might be sensitive, such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day messages.
Designing your brand interactions around what your customers are going through in the moment will help you shift the focus from what you want them to do to what you can do for them. The key to showing empathy is to use all the data that’s available to you to personalize digital conversations in a way that’s actually meaningful. And that requires an intelligent AI solution that makes it easy to show individual empathy on a grand scale. The goal is to make it all about the customer—not the company.
To build long-term loyalty and retention, you need to understand your customers’ needs on an ongoing basis. It’s not enough to get it right once. You should be personalizing conversations and predicting intent across channels and time. And you must put your customers at the center of every interaction. To create lasting emotional connections, you need a powerful AI platform that can keep up with the changing customer experience—digitally, continuously, and at scale.
Now is the time to make the changes you need, in both technology and strategy, to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations. Don’t just show them your products—show them that you care. Use the languages that they prefer and communicate with them through the channels of your choice.
Conversational AI can also help your agents build empathy with the customers, and delight them customers during the bot-agent handoff process. Once a customer is ready to speak with a live agent, the bot will provide the agent with the chat transcript as well as an AI-powered summary to quickly get them up to speed. This helps agents enter the conversation with a full understanding of the customer’s needs, and saves the customer the frustration of having to repeat themself.
At the end of the day, your customer relationships are built on the same promise as any relationship: trust and understanding. Show up for your customers, and they’ll keep showing up for you.
Data management is one of the biggest hurdles to infusing empathy into CX. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management, or both. Part of the problem is lack of cohesion due to siloed channels and solutions. If you’ve been patching together applications as your CX strategy grows, delivering the kind of hyper-personalization today’s consumers expect might be beyond your current reach.
To create unity and enable instant access to omnichannel customer data, look for an AI solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack. This will allow you to tap into all that rich customer data to better understand individual behavior and needs—and respond in the moment.
For fast-growing brands, being able to personalize conversations at scale is also a real challenge. Conversational AI combines advanced natural language processing with powerful machine learning to make automated conversations feel human—and personal. At the same time, it allows you to deliver those conversations at scale without scaling up costs. And an accessible solution allows you to easily design and update conversations that ooze empathy, brand personality, and in-the-moment insight.
It’s important to note that while unification is vital for your business, it won’t happen overnight, and you’ll need buy-in from several stakeholders across marketing, sales, support, and product. It’s also important that you set up an infrastructure that can support this cross-department functionality.
Dive into some of the challenges businesses face while creating personalized, anticipatory experiences, and how a robust conversational AI can solve them.
We sat down with Forrester to help you build a scalable and proactive CX strategy - here are 5 key takeaways from that conversation.
