Statistics don’t lie. 54% of customers have higher expectations of customer service today compared to a year ago and 96% of customers will simply leave a company if they experience bad customer service, according to a review by Forbes. More and more customer-facing operations have a seat at the board table, capturing more interest and investment than ever before. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed businesses across the globe permanently. The shift to more online transactions means customer experience is vital in retaining users and CX is where it all starts.
There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. The implications of this is the disparity between companies that can harness their data, and companies that cannot. But it is no longer enough to simply gather analytics on a single channel to measure or benchmark a customer's journeys.
Any business can use AI to find meaning from all the data they obtain to understand their customers at a completely new level. If you know more about the whole customer base, you can predict any difficulties and challenges in their customer experience. This is called predictive analytics. Companies can obtain this data from existing interactions where customers were confused and had questions to target any future problems.
With the rise of omnichannel engagement (i.e. different media platforms), an integrated approach should be taken. Additionally, establishing a customer data platform (CDP) as a unified source of information, is an effective way to gain valuable insights of customers' journeys across and between all channels, as well as their relationships with them. By using a CDP, businesses can analyse their data and find the most valuable areas to focus on.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the internet usage growth, forcing consumers online globally. Expectations of personalization for customers have not only grown in omnichannel engagement but also in catering to localization. Businesses will need to adapt to local culture and language for their diverse digital audience. Whilst cultural norms can be a grey area and hard to adapt to, implementing multilingual experience and service is a way of personalising engagement.
More than half of consumers are willing to pay more if you are willing to give them information in their own languages. - Harvard Business Review
With 56% of customers stating that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price, more and more businesses will be looking to employ multilingual support to satisfy their digital customers. Increasing the number of languages you market your content in will diversify your customer base and increase your audience.
Chat-bots have come a long way since its infamous Facebook messenger debut in 2016. With machine learning models, such as Google's BERT, chatbots are experiencing a revolution in design and capability. Chat-bots are increasingly being employed as a first contact to customer queries, reducing friction to support and improving support efficiency on the back end.
One of the biggest advantages of certain chat-bots is their multilinguality. They can easily and reliably communicate with customers in their native languages, resulting in a seamless experience, especially for non-English speakers. 74% of customers are more likely to do business with a brand that offers support in their preferred language, increasing potential revenue for the business and decreasing the hassle for the customers.
Customers are using several channels to interact with a company, ranging from social media messengers to email and websites. These multiple channels can help reach different demographics as different media platforms are more popular for differing ages. The diversity of channels on a macro-level is paired with the consumers increasing expectations of seamless integration between them.
‘50 percent of Millennials prefer customer service support over email, while 45 percent of Gen Z prefer social media, phone calls, or in-store’
Each channel comes with its own experience and content needs to be tailored for the corresponding age groups. Therefore an understanding of how to bridge customers' usage for each channel and their respective expectations is required to fully implement an effective omnichannel engagement strategy.