With automation proving so crucial to the profitability of today’s businesses and the success of today’s customers, why is it that so many brands still continue to build automations that fail?
Well, there’s a lot to that answer. But one of the main reasons boils down to this: Automation is too often built without a clear understanding of the real-life customers (and employees) it’s being built for.
Until this stops, it will continue to be as likely for a customer to be hindered by an automation tool as to be helped by it.
How do you better ensure that the investments of time and money put into your automation efforts will pay off? How do you de-risk your enterprise’s own journey toward automation…and technology change in general?
At Sutherland, we suggest you apply a human-centered behavioral lens to all your tech projects. That is, be sure to build your solutions in a way that accounts for how your users are most likely to actually use them to achieve their objective. This is especially important for those projects that automate customer experience.
You Can’t Be Human-Centered Without Being Data-Centered
Exceptional customer experience starts with unlocking your customer data. And that goes as much for automation customer experience (CX) as it does for any other type.
The future of customer care — whether automated, in-person or otherwise digital and/or self-serve — gains an edge with advanced CX that comes from AI-powered analytics applied on 360-degree customer interaction data.
This well-rounded view takes full advantage of the wealth of data now available to brands. It includes not just the voice/chat data from a contact center, but pulls in a compendium of data sources from across all a brand’s interactions with a customer — at every touch point.
There are three key accelerators for digital-first care built around the needs, behaviors and preferences of the customer or employee. Each accelerator of exceptional customer care also serves to de-risk your automation efforts because each helps ensure that the automation solutions you build are actually built around the needs, behaviors and preferences of the customers you serve.
- Accelerator #1: 360-Degree Interaction Data — Leading brands pioneer a better approach to CX — one that takes full advantage of the wealth of available data. Remember, 360-degree customer interaction data isn’t just the voice/chat data from the contact center, but a fuller data set from interactions across the enterprise. This includes stored data, data from feedback systems, survey data, social media interactions, focus group responses, sales transaction data and more.
- Accelerator #2: Predictive Intelligence — Organizations with an eye to the future are boosting their AI-powered data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to proactively anticipate client needs by generating next-best actions for service agents based on customer information. Ultimately, this transforms your customer care/service with outcome-based metrics like predictive CSAT, predictive CFR and predictive sales that differentiate your brand.
- Accelerator #3: Customer Journey Insights — Using customer experience data and mapping it back to specific touch points is how you start to understand the key moments that influence customer behavior. With a sophisticated customer journey insights platform, you can pinpoint issues in real time. You can test new approaches and see their influence on your customer experience and bottom line with insights that update as quickly as you need them.
Today, best estimates suggest that on average, only 3% of consumer interaction data is being analyzed to better improve CX. That’s because of a current overreliance on focus group research, survey-based feedback systems and manual quality audits. All together, these sources fall far short of meeting the real need for a full view of today’s customer.
So, your key to delivering a differentiated customer experience — which includes the experiences delivered by any customer-facing automation you build — is this:
Don’t throw away the data on 97% of your customer interactions.
Every interaction opens a window into customers’ thoughts, feelings and minds.
Take Risk Out of Automation With AI-Driven Data Insight
Advanced interaction analytics allows companies to better measure and manage their CX performance, as well as inform and improve strategic decisions like investments in intelligent automation solutions across an enterprise.
CX leaders can benefit most by partnering with experts who can provide solutions driven by predictive CSAT models, multi-model sentiment algorithms, advanced NLP/NLU algorithms and insight engines. These create an accurate and quantified view of the factors that propel customer experience and business performance. When applied, the result is a holistic, predictive and precise view of customer satisfaction, sentiments and the value potential of every customer.
AI-driven data insight solutions put automation planners/developers in a stronger position. They’re better able to understand their users’ true objectives (that is, what they’re actually trying to accomplish with the automation) and likely pattern of use.
Want to explore how you can better leverage human insight to build automation that matters?
Find out more about how we can help.
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