The rise of artificial intelligence has led many people to believe that machines will take over many of the job functions in the marketing industry. However, when it comes to customer experience, the best results will occur when machines and humans work together, writes Dan Gingiss, VP of Marketing at Persado.
When people think of artificial intelligence (AI) and its technological cousin, machine learning, it often conjures up images of a robot taking over the job of a human. Indeed, “the robots are coming!” is a familiar refrain suggesting the human race will soon be invaded. If we can teach the machines to be as smart as humans, consume mountains of data in seconds, and continuously learn more at warp speed, isn’t the useful life of the human brain quickly coming to an end?
The answer: Absolutely not.
https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/customer-experience-2/beyond-chatbots-how-artificial-intelligence-can-humanize-the-customer-experience/
As 2018 fades to a close, Retail Customer Experience reached out to industry watchers, customer experience experts and those in the know—in the trenches of customer experience technology, advancements and innovation—and asked them to share what they expect to come into play in 2019.
Here's what they had to say:
https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/articles/experts-share-2019-retail-customer-experience-predictions/
Sales is no longer a door-to-door business; you don’t get to ring the doorbell and tell customers they need you anymore. Now, they’re coming to your door, and if they don’t like what they see, they move on. So, how do you ensure they see the value in what you offer?
You have to understand their expectations not just of your offerings, but of their entire experience with your brand — from discovery to customer care. That means that “sales” can no longer stand apart from “marketing” or “service.” These silos must converge and create a continuous, intelligent customer experience (CX). Read on for steps you can take toward meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
http://customerthink.com/4-ways-of-exceeding-customer-expectations-through-intelligent-cx/
Every consumer is unique, each with their own sets of needs and expectations. With every interaction with your brand, consumers will have many different options for how they can go about taking the next step in their customer journey. Not to mention, these options will also often depend on how well – or how poorly – their last brand interaction went.
For a Customer Experience professional, it can be very valuable to be able to pinpoint what types of experiences lead to specific paths along the customer journey, especially costly ones. These insights can guide them to make more customer-centric decisions when trying to design positive experiences that will better lead consumers down more desirable paths.
Collecting the “Next Steps” metric as part of a CX program can help you do this.
http://customerthink.com/cx-metrics-series-next-steps/
With a string of big names disappearing from the high street, requiring rescue or teetering on the brink, we need to ask, if retail’s battle cry is truly ‘adapt or die’, why have so many chosen the latter in 2018? And as the year draws to a close, which trends will drive the former in 2019?
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2018/12/06/retail-marketing-why-will-the-customer-cross-the-road-2019/
In today's business climate, companies need to ensure an excellent customer experience across all their channels to remain competitive, but how is this possible in a digital-first world?
Getting the customer relationship right is vital for every business – but it has its challenges.
Increasingly, customers engage with brands across a number of channels while competition from all quarters – including new “digital disruptors”– means their loyalty can no longer be guaranteed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/intelligent-business/customer-experience-digital-age/
Brands often talk about being customer-centric but in reality, most businesses are still not set up with customers at their core. Simply installing a chief customer officer and hoping the rest will fall into place will not cut it in 2019.
https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/12/12/marketing-trends-2019-customer-centric/
Get customer experience right and profit will follow. That’s the conclusion of a survey by Hotjar of 2,000 CX professionals published in November 2018. Only 12 percent of respondents regarded their companies as being mature when it came to customer experience.
“Customer experience leaders prioritize delivering an outstanding experience over everything else (yes, even over revenue),” the Hotjar survey states. The leaders focus on current customers, rather than obsessing about potential ones. They allocate a regular amount of time every week to make calls, meet for coffee or find out about the support issues of their customers. They follow the Golden Rule of customer experience: “Treat customers how you would like to be treated.”
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/customer-experience-trends-for-2019/
When it comes to the customer experience, consumer comfort levels with artificial intelligence can vary greatly depending on how the technology is applied. As we shared in a recent ebook, consumers often think AI is ‘creepy’ when it utilizes information they did not directly provide. In other circumstances, however, AI is seen as useful, particularly when it makes recommendations based on past interactions.
In a recent survey conducted by Interactions, we looked at how AI impacts the customer experience in order to better understand how companies can best apply this technology to their benefit. One takeaway from the research that was pretty clear: consumers prefer to interact with conversational AI. In fact, 79% of respondents said that one of the most useful capabilities of AI in providing a positive customer experience is the ability to use conversational words or phrases, as if they were talking to a human, rather than speaking “robot talk”. Additionally, 70% said they prefer interacting with a virtual assistant that has a human-like voice or personality as opposed to a computer-generated voice.
http://customerthink.com/3-revenue-driving-benefits-of-conversational-ai/
Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs enable business leaders to gather the critical customer feedback they need to address customer concerns and shape the future of their products.
Traditional VoC programs are one-on-one interview based and can generate volumes of unstructured customer interview data. Making that information actionable is where the rub is, according to Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, Principal Analyst of Customer Experience at Forrester.
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/how-ai-is-impacting-the-voice-of-the-customer-landscape/
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