MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Meta’s AI Play, CMOs Don’t Trust Their Data, CS to ‘Older’ Americans

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone is ready for another productive week! I think today will be the last hot day of the year for us, temps are supposed to be in the high 80s. After today, temps will be in the low 80 or high 70s for the rest of the week and next. Fall is almost here! It’s honestly my favorite time of the year! I hope the weather and everyone else is wonderful where you are, here’s 3 stories that caught my eye:

 

So Meta is working on a new AI engine to try to catch OpenAI. According to this article, Meta’s first foray into AI, Llama2, was trained on 70 billion parameters. Sources in Meta say the new engine will be ‘several times’ larger, but that might not be enough, as the latest version of ChatGPT is said to be trained on well over a trillion parameters. Meta, Google and others will all be rushing to get new AI systems out over the next 6-18 months. As crazy as 2023 was for AI development, 2024 could be even moreso.

 

CMOs aren’t trusting the data they have to work with. In fact, a third of CMOs don’t trust their data OR their analysts, according to new research by AgilityPR. And I think this is a problem that will be made worse by AI, at least in the short term. After AI systems become more mature and robust in data management, they can become a much better asset to CMOs in this regard.

 

Ok I gotta be honest: The main reason why I included this next story was because it irked me that the article considers anyone over 45 to be an ‘older’ adult. Seriously???  Look we are getting old fast enough, I don’t need to hear that once you hit 45 it’s time to start sizing up rocking chairs for the front porch! Besides, have you tried to call into customer service lately? I don’t want to deal with the 45-60 minute or more wait times on a phone. I’d rather do the same thing in chat and wait for a ‘ding’ to tell me they are ready.  *shakes fist at clouds*

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of the Monday Marketing Minute! On Wednesday, look for the unveiling of the Power List for the RETAIL industry! Last week we debuted the Power List for the Technology industry, and have received a lot of nice feedback from those chosen, and I can see they are getting some nice exposure from being on the Power List, which is great to see. So see you Weds for that, and a new post up tomorrow! Have a great week!

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Guests are Hungry for Better Digital Customer Experiences in Restaurants

digital customer experiences

Modern diners expect restaurants to meet their needs seamlessly across both online and on-site touchpoints. However, effectively integrating emerging digital channels into customer service presents challenges for restaurant operators. Nevertheless, today’s diners expect superior digital customer experiences from all businesses, and restaurants are no different.

This article explores multiple proven strategies and best practices restaurant executives should adopt to deliver responsive, personalized customer service by unifying online and on-premise digital capabilities.

Conduct Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the process that a customer goes through in purchasing a product. This site gives a great example of what a typical customer journey could look like.

A key benefit of customer journey mapping is it helps identify pain points and bottlenecks for the customer in the purchase process. Here’s some areas to focus on:

  • Map key journeys like ordering, reservations, in-restaurant experiences and loyalty. Identify friction points from the customer perspective. This will help identify areas for improvement. Also, compare journey results across different locations of a franchise, to help identify how one location may be performing better or worse than another site.
  • Conduct shadowing research and interviews to uncover unmet needs and grievances across channels. Collecting feedback directly from customers helps you identify areas in the purchase process that should be addressed and corrected.
  • Audit service metrics across online and on-site channels – wait times, resolution speed/quality, CSAT, NPS, and sentiment. All of these stats will be signals to help reveal customer satisfaction as well as pain points. Both are vitally important in your continuing quest to deliver exceptional digital customer experiences.
  • Analyze contact topics and types to identify knowledge gaps to address through self-service content. Review common questions and complaints, and when possible, give customers the ability to self-diagnose common issues. FAQs and chatbots can help with this.

These insights should inform an integration optimization roadmap tailored to your guests’ needs.

Expand Digital Reservation and Ordering Options

A majority (56%) of diners now want to be able to place an order through your restaurant’s app.  Additionally, 64% of diners would prefer to place an order digitally on-site. Today’s diners want and even demand digital and online ordering options. Here’s how you can meet the demand for digital customer experiences:

  • Enable reservations, waitlisting and table management via website or app. This gives customers an added level of convenience and helps your restaurant set itself apart from competitors that don’t offer similar benefits.
  • Optimize online and mobile ordering for delivery, takeout and curbside pickup. During covid in 2020, all retail businesses were forced to invest in contactless and curbside pickup. Customers now expect the ability to order online of via your app, and pickup their order on site, without contact. This is another key service that customers expect, and not offering contactless and curbside pickup could easily cost you business.
  • Integrate loyalty features like saved payment methods and customized orders. This is another benefit that is expected at this point.
  • Offer status tracking and real-time support for issues through apps or text. Status tracking is very important, try to focus on showing customers every step of the preparation process for their order so they can see exactly where the order is in the process. This helps alleviate trust issues and improves satisfaction and customer loyalty.
  • Provide bots or chat support to aid reservations and orders. This is another expected feature, also give customers an option to speak with someone live if further assistance is needed.

Robust digital ordering and booking capabilities keep guests engaged and satisfied.

Implement Customer-Facing Tech In-Restaurant

Over 60% of diners now prefer to order digitally, on-site. Deploy on-site tech to match online convenience:

  • Provide kiosks for quick ordering and payments to skip lines. This also helps frequent customers who know exactly what they want and feel they can complete the transaction quicker themselves than dealing with restaurant employees.
  • Your restaurant’s app should provide guests with the ability to summon wait staff and pay for their meal.
  • Digital signage with dynamic wait times, promotions and feedback collection. Displaying wait times helps manage expectations as soon as the diner arrives at your restaurant.
  • Tabletop tablets for entertainment, ordering items, requesting service. Offering entertainment options can keep diners engaged while their meals are being prepared.

When utilized correctly, on-site digital tech can speed up the ordering and payment process, while providing an additional layer of support for the customer.

Implement Social Media Customer Service

Leverage your restaurant’s social media accounts as a way for diners to provide feedback and create word of mouth via shared content:

  • Promote Twitter/Facebook profiles for guests to directly make inquiries.
  • Make sure social media accounts are staffed with managers who have customer service training to handle complaints and suggestions.
  • When complaints are left via social channels, make sure to respond promptly. This guide can help you address all customer complaints via social media.
  • Share positive reviews on social to boost visibility. Also show positive reviews in your restaurant as a way to model the type of behavior you want guests to engage in.

Social channels provide convenient service in guests’ preferred channel.

Unify Brand Identity and Experience

Every customer has multiple touchpoints across multiple channels as they complete a purchase. It’s vital to ensure consistent digital customer experiences throughout the process. Here’s some tips to keep in mind:

  • Audit language, tone, terminology, and policies across digital and physical touchpoints. This is especially important when reconciling tone on social channels versus on-site support. Increasingly, support issues are beginning via social media channels, before being handed off to your main support team. A disconnect in tone can lead to a negative experience for the customer.
  • Create knowledge base resources, brand standards and training for both digital and human agents. Most importantly, all members of the support team, regardless of whether they work predominantly in online or offline, should be working from the same training and material. The overall level of customer support should be consistent across channels and online/offline.
  • Monitor across channels to rapidly identify and address gaps or misalignment. Consider earlier how we discussed the customer journey map for purchases. You can do the same thing for the customer support journey. Map out the entire process to help identify gaps, inconsistencies and pain points.

Consistent messaging and experiences build trust and increase customer loyalty.

Track Analytics to Optimize Digital Customer Experiences

It’s vital to aggressive track the analytics associated with your digital support:

  • Unified CSAT, NPS and sentiment scoring across digital and on-site interactions. These are key signals that help identify customer satisfaction as well as pain points.
  • Identify channel service speed and quality gaps. Look for disconnects and any stages where the process slows for the customer. Map to areas where complaints arise to get greater insights into needed corrections.
  • Monitor digital channel adoption and usage metrics. This helps illustrate what features and conveniences the customer is looking for.
  • Correlate integration initiatives to revenue, visit frequency and loyalty lift.

Data visibility helps maximize integration benefits and can bring into focus which areas of the purchase process need priority.

Continuously Optimize Cross-Channel Experiences

An iterative approach is key as consumer behaviors evolve:

  • Survey guests directly on friction points and integration desires. Proactively suggest improvements and collect feedback on desired implementation.
  • Pilot new initiatives and channel combinations, measuring business impact and satisfaction. When possible, pilot initiatives should run through your loyalty program where it will be viewed as a perk by program members.
  • Optimize underperforming aspects based on data insights. Map the customer journey and overlap feedback along with analytics to help identify pain points and bottlenecks in the process.
  • Keep pace with digital and hospitality innovations reshaping guest expectations. Proactively survey guests about desired changes, they will often suggest improvements that they have noted and enjoyed from competing restaurants.

Ongoing optimization ensures integrated digital customer experiences exceed growing expectations

With the strategies explored in this guide, restaurants can effectively unify online and on-premise customer service capabilities into seamless guest experiences that drive loyalty. What’s your biggest priority for integrating digital capabilities? Reservations/ordering? In-restaurant tech? Mobile staff enablement? With focus, the impact on guest satisfaction can be immense.

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The 6 Keys to Delivering Exceptional Mobile Customer Service Experiences in Tourism

mobile customer service

Today’s travelers increasingly expect on-demand, mobile-first service from tourism brands when planning or during trips.  In fact, 83% of travelers will do research on a mobile device before committing to a trip. The mobile experience and customer service you provide travelers and tourists is vital in securing their business.

However, offering seamless mobile customer support across multiple touchpoints presents challenges for destination marketers and travel providers. The difficulty in providing such a seamless customer service on mobile devices is matched only by the travelers’ expectation that your destination can do just that.

This article explores six proven strategies and best practices tourism executives should adopt to deliver responsive, personalized mobile customer service experiences that meet modern traveler expectations.  As you are reading this article, take notes and think about how your destination or attraction is utilizing each of these steps. If you aren’t utilizing any of these strategies yet, then you have a chance to make a very positive impact on your destination’s customer support, especially from a mobile perspective. If you are already utilizing some or many of these strategies, focus on the areas that aren’t being utilized, as they could be the missing piece that optimizes and improves your entire mobile customer service strategy.

Conduct Journey Mapping from a Mobile Lens

Journey mapping is the process of visualizing how a customer would perform a certain task. For instance, if a potential traveler in say Utah, wanted to book a tour of your attraction in Greenville, South Carolina, what would that process look like? What steps would the traveler have to take in order to book a tour? Now think about the process that this same traveler would have to go through in order to book a tour using only mobile devices:

  • Map key travel journeys from research to booking to the trip itself from a mobile perspective to uncover friction points. For an added perspective, first conduct the journey on a desktop or laptop, then follow the same steps on a mobile device. Note any differences in the experience, such as load times, display of information.
  • Conduct interviews and shadowing research focused on mobile usage and needs throughout the travel journey to gather insights directly from travelers. Have customers follow a set path on a desktop or laptop, then have then execute the same journey on a mobile device. As they complete the process, note any provided feedback on where the journey with the mobile device is better or worse versus the experience on the desktop or laptop.
  • Comprehensively audit mobile metrics – platform usage, traffic sources, booking conversion rates, transactions, service case resolution speed/quality and satisfaction scores. Compare and contrast all metrics to the experience on other channels to note potential bottlenecks and churn points.
  • Analyze mobile service case topics and types to identify knowledge gaps to address in self-help resources. Flag topics that are consistently mentioned by CS agents. These indicate potential problem areas that should be addressed to ensure a better mobile customer service experience for travelers and tourists.

Analyzing the customer journey from a mobile perspective can help you optimize the experience for travelers.

Expand Mobile App Capabilities

A branded mobile app is a wonderful way to deliver customized customer service experiences to travelers. Make sure your mobile app offers the following features:

  • Your mobile app should allow booking, chat support, and self-service options to handle needs during the shopping journey. Traveling can be a spontaneous adventure for many people, make sure your mobile app gives travelers the convenience to book a trip when they are ready, on their schedule.
  • Provides location services, travel guides, and destination recommendations accessible in-trip. Research will be a critical part of any successful trip. Make sure travelers have destination-specific information available at their fingertips at all times.
  • Share itinerary, loyalty program, and payment details for in-app access throughout travels. This provides an added benefit to the traveler by helping them keep organized and focused on trip details. By linking loyalty program information, it also helps the traveler stay up to date on possible rewards that could be claimed during the trip.
  • Send proactive notifications for flight/event updates, special offers etc. based on context. Allow travelers to store and synch flight and hotel information in app, and keep travelers abreast of any changes in itinerary.
  • Offer a mobile concierge or chatbot to handle common requests on-the-go. Leveraging AI, you can offer a chat assistant that can answer common questions about the travel process as well as answer questions related to the locations and destinations that the traveler will be visiting.  Remember, every time you can give a traveler the ability to answer their own support question, that potentially deflects a customer support event (saving you money) and it increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Apps that give travelers the information they need at all stages of their journey will lead to higher loyalty levels and greater retention.

Train On-Site Staff to Be Mobile-Ready

Your on-site staff should be trained with using mobile devices to bring added convenience and support to travelers:

  • Provide locations teams with tablets and smartphones to assist guests anywhere on-property with lookups, requests, or issue resolution. This allows your support staff to be more accessible on site, which gives an added level of convenience to travelers.
  • Let travelers summon or locate on-site staff via your mobile app. This gives travelers more control over getting support and assistance with issues and questions.
  • Equip roaming customer service agents to handle needs, answer questions, and queue services digitally. Monitor traffic patterns at your destination to understand where agents should be stationed to maximize effectiveness.
  • Set up self-service kiosks around sites for quick lookups or appointment scheduling without staff. Give travelers the ability to quickly print out their itinerary as well as brief travel guides and coupons from the kiosk. Also give travelers the ability to summon an agent if additional support is needed.

Mobile-empowered on-site staff enable personalized support, which leads to higher levels of satisfaction.

Adopt Emerging Mobile Technologies

Continually assess feedback from travelers to identify emerging tech that can enhance the mobile customer service experience for tourists:

  • Robots and drones can be utilized to deliver small packages to tourists poolside, or hikers on a trail. This can address customer support and possibly even safety issues.
  • Implement virtual/augmented reality to provide immersive property tours and destination previews. AR and VR can be provided both on-site, as well as demos given online or at your travel agency. Providing a more immersive experience for the traveler can increase satisfaction in the trip.
  • Leverage geofencing and GPS for hyper-localized, contextual push notifications. This technology can ensure that travelers have location-specific information that adds an additional layer of convenience.

Cutting-edge mobile tech can delight and satisfy guests and improve satisfaction.

Monitor Mobile Analytics Closely

One you have a robust mobile customer service experience in place, make sure you are tracking the correct analytics associated with your mobile experience:

  • Track satisfaction scores, NPS and sentiment specifically for mobile touchpoints. Compare and contrast scores for the same metrics among desktop users to help identify areas for improvement in both areas.
  • Monitor usage and adoption rates for mobile apps, messaging, and on-site technology. Note any areas that are seeing rapid adoption and growth, and try to identify why. If travelers aren’t using a particular mobile tech at certain parts of the customer journey, drill down and see if there are ways to increase adoption. If not, consider abandoning that touchpoint and investing in more promising areas.
  • Measure mobile booking and transaction conversion rates vs. desktop. This will help you identify customer behavior patterns, so you can further customize the overall support experience to deliver higher levels of support.
  • Analyze mobile traffic sources, on-site usage heatmaps and popular device types. Also focus on traffic patterns and tie that to mobile usage. Once hotspots are identified, make it easier for travelers to engage with your mobile tech at those locations.
  • Identify service gaps between mobile and traditional channels. Additionally, if travelers are positively responding to your mobile tech on-site, see if there are opportunities to provide a similar experience via traditional channels. Seek to understand why the mobile experience is resonating with travelers, and incorporate what’s working on-site into the traditional channels.

Traveler data can provide opportunities to enhance and optimize mobile offerings and experiences.

Continuously Optimize the Mobile Experience

The mobile environment evolves quickly. Continually improve by:

  • A/B testing new mobile app features and self-service functionality. Remember that travelers are increasingly expecting to be able to self-diagnose support issues. Give travelers the ability to solve their own problems, especially when they are on the go and on-site.
  • Study your competitors and other destinations to spot opportunities. See how other locations and destinations are leveraging emerging mobile technologies to enhance the customer support experience.
  • Seeking direct traveler feedback on mobile pain points and desired improvements. Compare and contrast this feedback with the same feedback from travelers who book and research trip on their laptop or desktop. Figure out what travelers prefer about the experience on their desktop, and see how you can incorporate a similar experience into mobile.
  • Journey mapping the mobile process for travelers to identify friction and pain points. Find the bottlenecks for travelers and address them.
  • Piloting enhancements, measuring impact on satisfaction and usage, and iterating. Utilize traveler feedback to incorporate improvements, test, then test some more. Rollout your winners and scrap the losers and try again.

Optimization never ends as mobile technology and traveler expectations continue to evolve.

Achieving Mobile Customer Service Excellence

Providing seamless mobile customer service is challenging yet critical in travel. The strategies explored in this guide equip tourism brands to effectively meet rising expectations.

Emerging mobile technologies can greatly enhance the support experience for travelers, but only if properly utilized. Adopting a proactive versus reactive mindset can set your destination up to be the case study that others in your industry learn from.

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Your Guide to Delivering Consistent Omnichannel Customer Service Experiences in Retail

retail omnichannel customer service

Today’s consumers expect seamless shopping and service engaging with retail brands across devices, channels, and touchpoints. Orchestrating unified omnichannel customer service presents immense challenges for retailers. However, the rewards can be sizeable when done correctly. Research has found that companies who have a strong omnichannel strategy realize a 89% customer retention rate, compared to a lowly 33% for companies with a weak omnichannel strategy.

This article will explore several proven strategies and best practices retail executives should leverage to optimize omnichannel customer service experiences across stores, ecommerce, mobile apps, and new emerging channels. If you have questions about optimizing or improving your retail omnichannel customer service strategy, feel free to leave a comment, or you can email Mack directly for private feedback.

Conduct In-Depth Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing the steps that a potential customer goes through in order to complete a purchase. Here’s some of the ways that customer journey mapping can be helpful:

  • Identifying friction points from the user perspective. By visualizing the purchase process, you can see the flow that the customer goes through on the way to a purchase.  And it SHOULD be a flow, if not, the customer could get ‘stuck’ in one stage, and that could easily lead to frustration and abandoning the purchase.
  • Conducting shadowing research and customer interviews to uncover unmet needs and grievances. This allows you to hear directly from the retail customer and learn how the purchase process worked for them.
  • Auditing support metrics across channels; such as wait times, resolution speed/quality, CSAT, NPS, and sentiment. This will further help identify areas for improvement in the process.
  • Analyzing contact topics and types to identify knowledge gaps to address. This helps suggests information that can be provided to the customer to help them self-diagnosis and possibly even resolve issues themselves.

These insights help inform an omnichannel optimization roadmap tailored to your customers’ needs.

Architect Seamless Cross-Channel Experiences

Today, customers expect unified service across in-store, web, mobile, kiosks, chat, social and more. A consistent experience across all touchpoints is expected. You can deliver this by:

  • Defining optimal channel roles based on their strengths to simplify choice. This helps direct the customer to the channels that are best suited to provide the experience the customer needs at that stage of their purchase journey.
  • Enabling tight integrations between channels, such as store finders, click and collect etc. Also pay attention to how customers will use channels differently. For instance, when on your app, customers are often away from home, and looking to complete or pick up a purchase. When at home, they are more likely to be on a laptop and doing research before deciding on a purchase. Factor customer intent into the integration of your retail omnichannel customer service experience.
  • Allowing pick-up purchases and returns across any channel. This should be a priority for mobile devices and apps in particular.
  • Transferring customer context and histories between channels/agents. There should always be a way to track the history of a support issue so that a handoff improves the experience, instead of resetting it.

Contextual, personalized omnichannel experiences satisfy customers and improve efficiency and increase customer loyalty among retail customers.

Equip Employees with Mobile Technology

Allowing retail employees to have mobile devices while interacting with customers allows them to give a higher level of service and support. Here’s some examples:

  • Retail employees can access customer purchase history and loyalty profiles anywhere to personalize interactions.  This allows employees to immediately get up to speed on the customer’s purchase and support history.
  • Assist customers with inventory lookups, pricing, recommendations on the salesfloor. This allows the employee to stay present and engaged with the customer, while also speeding up the support process.
  • Check in customers remotely via mobile POS to reduce lines.  This gives the customer more control over initiating the support process and it creates more speed and efficiency.
  • Resolve issues, answer questions, and schedule appointments on the go.  By letting employees have mobile access to customers, they can interact with customers in a way that’s convenient for both parties, which speeds up the overall process and increases satisfaction for the customer, and productivity for the retail employee.

Giving retail employees the right technology to deliver mobile support ensures a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Expand and Enhance Self-Service Options

Let’s be honest: Many customers would rather handle a support issue themselves, if they can. So it pays to give customers the resources to self-diagnose problems and potentially solve on their own. In addition, it take stress off your CS team, and also creates a cost-savings. Invest in channels like:

  • Intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants on website, apps and messaging. Chatbots in particular are having a revival of interest due to the rise of easy-to-use AI tools. Look for use to expand over the coming years.
  • Interactive kiosks in stores for product research. These should be placed as close to the actual product as possible. Give customers a way to do last-minute research as a way to make the final determination on which product to purchase.
  • Enhanced help centers with improved search, content, and community forums. These are more frequently used by customers who are still in the consideration phase of the customer journey, so feel free to give them access to more in depth product information.
  • Allow access to customer ratings and reviews. This ties in with the previous point, as customers are doing research, they are narrowing down the list of products they are interested in. Once they have narrowed their consideration pool down to an acceptable number of products, they will want to check customer reviews for each product. This will help them narrow their list down even further, or it could convince the customer which product they should purchase.

You can also drive utilization through promotions, associate referrals and in-journey prompts.

Continuously Improve Through Testing and Innovation

Omnichannel retail customer service must continually adapt and improve. Recommended approaches include:

  • A/B test new features and channel integrations to optimize performance. Test internally, and also offer testing to select customers. This can be offered as a perk to loyalty program or community forum members.
  • Monitor service innovations from leading competitors and brands. Always keep up to date on the latest news and case studies to identify opportunities to improve your own retail customer service.
  • Survey customers directly on desired improvements. Ask customers what is working for them, and where the problems are. Over time, you can identify trends and isolate areas for improvement.
  • Pilot enhancements, measure impact, and iterate. Leverage customer feedback to roll out new features, and make sure customers know they helped contribute to the improvement. This will encourage customers to become even more engaged in the feedback process.

There are always opportunities to optimize and evolve your omnichannel customer service experience.

Achieving Omnichannel Customer Service Excellence

Orchestrating seamless retail customer service across expanding digital and offline touchpoints is challenging yet invaluable. Brands that have achieved successful omnichannel customer engagement have realized a 9.5% growth in annual revenue.  Additionally, a solid retail omnichannel customer service experience can result in a 7.5% decrease in cost per contact.

With the right strategy and planning, the payoff of a focus on retail omnichannel customer service can be immense.

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Your Guide to Optimizing Online Customer Service in the Technology Industry

online customer serviceProviding exceptional online customer service is now essential for technology companies (really all companies in all industries) to satisfy and retain users in an increasingly digital world. However, delivering seamless support across websites, mobile apps, social media, webchat, help centers and emerging channels is complex. Yet at the same time, it is demanded by hyper-connected customers.

With customer expectations rising and new technologies advancing rapidly, support organizations are struggling to keep pace. Those that can, are reaping the rewards of higher levels of customer loyalty and profitability, while reducing customer service costs. While companies that aren’t reacting as quickly are being punished. As customers become more accustomed to using digital and online tools, they appreciate the speed and delivery of information and experiences. That expectation will extend to all elements of the online experience, including customer service and support.

This comprehensive guide explores proven strategies and best practices for technology companies to optimize online customer service delivery in today’s omnichannel environment.

Conduct In-Depth Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping involves mapping out the path that a customer takes from first becoming aware of your product, to purchasing it. This link gives you a good breakdown and definition of customer journey mapping. The advantage of mapping the customer journey from a support perspective is it helps you identify potential pain points in the purchase process for the customer. Once the potential problem areas are known, they can be addressed and responses can be proactively created. Considerations include:

  • Creating detailed journey maps for key processes including onboarding, adoption, training, troubleshooting and escalation. This helps you identify friction points at each step from the user perspective. Knowing those potential pain points makes it much easier to address them, leading to higher levels of customer loyalty.
  • Conducting extensive ethnographic research through surveys, interviews and observations to uncover unmet needs and grievances directly from customers. Customer feedback is vital to optimizing and improving support processes.
  • Completing comprehensive audits examining support metrics across platforms – response times, wait times, resolution quality, customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Tracking metrics throughout the customer journey allows your technology company to identify strengths and weaknesses throughout the process.  Once identified, weaknesses can be corrected and strengths magnified.
  • Analyzing support case topics and types to reveal knowledge gaps. Expand help content to address common questions. This is where tracking satisfaction with support as well as time spent with agents can reveal potential problem areas. Consistent problems could point to a need to invest in training and/or the hiring of SMEs.

If leveraged correctly, these insights will inform an omnichannel customer service optimization roadmap tailored to your customers’ needs.

Design Integrated Omnichannel Experiences

Today’s consumers expect unified support experiences across the web, mobile apps, social media, email, chat, and emerging channels. Eliminate friction through thoughtful omnichannel design:

  • Define optimal roles for each channel based on strengths. Chat for convenience, phone for urgent issues, forums for troubleshooting. This also helps you consider the needs of the customer, for instance forums should have access to SMEs who can answer questions that are often involving a more complex issue. One answer from a SME could potentially deflect multiple CS calls, which would be a cost savings that would continue to be realized as long as the answer appeared on the forum.
  • Craft tight channel integration, such as website support forms prefilled with user data for contextual experiences. Make sure to collect only the data that customers have consented for collction, and carefully explain to customers which data will be collected. This helps address privacy concerns and works to establish trust.
  • Enable smooth cross-channel transitions, such as handing off conversations between agents without repetitive explanations. Remember that the customer assumes the entire interaction with CS is being conducted by a team that’s on the same page, not disjointed employees.  The customer doesn’t expect to have to start over with a fresh explanation of the problem every time a new agent is involved.
  • Connect steps into one seamless, consistent and personalized cross-channel customer journey.

Contextual, continuous omnichannel experiences satisfy users and improve efficiency while increasing loyalty.

Evaluate and Adopt New Service Channels

The digital service landscape evolves quickly. Continuously evaluate and pilot new channels and innovations such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots equipped with natural language capabilities, sentiment analysis and escalation for automated conversations.  This post has a detailed breakdown of how technology companies can leverage AI in customer support. AI can be used to deliver customer support directly, and it can also be leveraged to analyze customer data to enhance the support experience.
  • Augmented reality that allows remote visual issue diagnosis through overlays and annotations. This is especially useful in the field service spac, where a remote worker can use AR to diagnose and fix a problem directly, or be connected to a SME (Subject Matter Expert) who can help the technician deliver support on site, saving time for both the customer and service vendor.
  • In-product communications via embedded commentary forms or help widgets. QR are a useful example of this, allowing both the customer and the service technician to get relevant product information at the site.
  • Proactive assistance powered by machine learning models that predict issues. This ties into the first point about AI, machine-learning can also be utilized to predict potential problems, turning costly repairs into preventative maintenance.

Assess new technologies based on your capabilities and customers’ evolving needs. Adopt channels that provide high value.

Incentivize Use of Self-Service Options

Deflecting common inquiries to self-help resources reduces human support costs. Boost adoption by:

  • Identifying key opportunities to augment or replace live service, such as leveraging virtual agents or community forums.  Pro-Tip: Publish some of the most engaging forum answers on your website’s homepage. This is a great way to promote the availability of the forum as a way for the user to self-troubleshoot problems. Remember that one answer from a SME on a forum could help countless users solve the same problem. Every time a user can solve their own problem via a forum, that deflects a call or chat with a CS agent. Which saves you money.
  • Designing stellar help centers, FAQs, chat bots, online communities, and in-product self-service. Make sure every level of service is provided for the user. If the user needs 101-level help, provide FAQs, if they need a bit more instruction, give them easy access to chat bots and forums.
  • Driving awareness through promotions, in-product prompts, and informational content. Users can’t access help if they don’t know it’s available. Providing exceptional online customer service is about giving customers the ability to choose the type of experience that’s most helpful and convenient for them.
  • Continuously optimizing self-service content and functionality based on analytics and user feedback. Constantly monitor for roadblocks and bottlenecks in the process. Survey users post-ticket to identify areas for improvement.

Giving customers self-service options that work leads to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction, as well as reduces costs for your technology company.

Experiment, Iterate and Innovate

Customer service cannot remain stagnant as user expectations rapidly evolve. Continually optimize by:

  • A/B testing new features and support processes to improve key metrics. Leverage community forums and give the most active participants the chance to test new features. You will often find that frequent contributors to forums will jump at such an opportunity.
  • Monitoring emerging innovations in service delivery from competitors. Be aware of what the competition is doing, and what is working for them. This can give you ideas for improvement in your own CS processes.
  • Interviewing users to identify desired improvements and pain points. Lean on feedback from users throughout the customer support process. You will often find that users will be happy to provide feedback and stay in contact with your CS team to help implement their suggestions.
  • Proactively journey mapping to uncover friction opportunities. Find and identify pain points for users along the CS journey, and eliminate them.
  • Piloting enhancements, measuring impact based on data, and iterating. Pro-tip: Rollout changes first to your forum members or loyalty program members. If you will be providing a new features in your customer support efforts, give limited advance access to certain user segments. This will be viewed as a perk by the group, and will result in better feedback and higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

The best brands continually and proactively adapt based on customer needs and feedback.

Achieving Excellent Online Customer Service

Providing superior omnichannel customer service is challenging yet invaluable. Applying the strategies outlined equips technology companies to meet, and even exceed, rising user expectations.

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AI-Powered Customer Support Solutions: Enhancing Customer Experience and Efficiency for Fortune 500 Companies

ai-powered customer support

As today’s business landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, providing exceptional customer support is vital for Fortune 500 companies. Customers want more personalized support, faster. To address the needs of customers, forward-thinking CMOs are turning to AI-powered customer support solutions. Leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), these innovative solutions revolutionize customer interactions, enabling personalized experiences, seamless self-service, and streamlined operations. Let’s explore some of the benefits of AI-powered customer support, and look at some real-world examples of how companies are utilizing these emerging technologies to drive real business growth.

The Benefits of AI-Powered Customer Support

In an increasingly digital world, AI-powered customer support solutions offer many compelling benefits for Fortune 500 companies. First, AI chatbots and virtual assistants enable immediate and round-the-clock support, addressing customer queries and concerns in real-time. This availability boosts customer satisfaction and improves response times. While there can be some concerns over the quality of the support delivered via AI, these concerns should further abate over time as the technology matures and improves.

Secondly, AI enhances personalization by leveraging customer data and historical interactions. AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of information to deliver tailored recommendations and customized support, creating a more personalized experience for customers. This is an area where AI provides a level of support that humans simply cannot replicate. And as noted earlier, AI’s ability to process vast amounts of customer data and extrapolate relevant outcomes should only improve as the technology continues to mature.

Additionally, AI-powered customer support solutions drive efficiency by automating routine tasks and inquiries. Chatbots can handle repetitive questions, provide self-service options, and escalate complex issues to human agents when necessary. This automation optimizes resource allocation, reduces costs, and allows human agents to focus on more complex and value-added tasks. Also, this allows a company’s SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to spend more time addressing support issues that require advanced expertise.

Examples of How Companies Are Currently Leveraging AI to Improve Customer Support

Let’s look at some quick examples of companies that are seeing real results from integrating AI into existing customer support processes:

  • Fintech startup Tomorrow reduced AHT (Average Handling Time) by 50%, dropping AHT from around 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.
  • According to Satu Karaksela, Service Manager (Digital Customer Service) at Finnair, the airliner realized a 30% improvement in response times for CS cases after adding AI to the mix.
  • Payment and transactions company Efecty realized a 48% reduction in calls to customer support in the first year it began utilizing a chatbot in its CS mix. You can take the internal cost your company assigns to each CS call and get a rough estimate of the potential savings that could be seen from a similar decrease at your own company.
  • Launched in 2018, Bank of America’s chatbot Erica has now helped over 32 million BoA customers with over one billion interactions.

The common theme here is utilizing AI to assist with the more basic customer support requests.  Think of AI as being able to handle the 101-level inquiries, and then handing off to a human agent if more detailed and specific assistance is needed. While this may reduce the need for less skilled customer support agents, it should increase the demand for more skilled SMEs.

 

Transforming Customer Experiences

AI-powered customer support solutions have the potential to transform customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies. This can be done by harnessing the power of AI, organizations can offer intuitive and seamless interactions across multiple channels, ensuring consistent support regardless of the customer touchpoint. As research shows, a consistent experience throughout the buying and/or support process is vital to achieving superior CX.

The use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms enables chatbots to understand and respond to customer inquiries in a human-like manner. These AI-powered systems continuously learn from interactions, improving their responses over time and providing a more conversational and engaging customer experience. It’s worth noting that as investment continues to flow into AI and related technologies, the automated experience that AI can provide will only improve. Keep this in mind when considering or analyzing the current landscape and offerings.

Furthermore, AI-driven personalization allows companies to anticipate customer needs and preferences. By analyzing past behaviors, purchase history, and demographic data, AI-powered solutions can deliver relevant product recommendations, promotions, and content tailored to individual customers, fostering a sense of connection and loyalty. Again, relevance will be key to driving customer satisfaction, and AI’s ability to give relevant interactions will only improve over time.

Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Efficiency

CMOs of Fortune 500 companies understand the importance of efficient operations and cost optimization. AI-powered customer support solutions offer significant opportunities in these areas. By automating processes and handling a high volume of inquiries, AI chatbots can significantly reduce response times, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance operational efficiency. The four case studies linked to earlier in the post were provided to illustrate this very point.

Moreover, AI-driven analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior, sentiment, and trends. CMOs can leverage this data to identify pain points, understand customer preferences, and make data-driven decisions to refine products, services, and marketing strategies. This data-driven approach enables organizations to stay agile and responsive in meeting customer demands.

Integration and Implementation Considerations

While the benefits of AI-powered customer support solutions are clear, implementing such solutions requires careful consideration. CMOs should evaluate their organization’s specific needs, customer base, and existing infrastructure to determine the most suitable AI solution. Collaboration between marketing, IT, and customer support teams is essential for seamless integration and deployment. Integration is the key to driving success as well as initial adoption. AI, if used correctly, can integrate into existing business functions and enhance current customer support processes. Companies like yours can more easily justify an investment in AI technology if it can improve existing processes versus an investment that requires costly new processes be created to support its function.

Conclusion

In the competitive landscape of Fortune 500 companies, delivering exceptional customer support is a strategic imperative. AI-powered customer support solutions empower CMOs to quickly deliver assistance at scale to customers. This helps companies realize improved satisfaction scores, customer loyalty and reduced support costs.

Leveraging AI to enhance your company’s existing customer support efforts can not only save you money, it can grow your business as well.

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New Research Uncovers the Drivers of Customer Loyalty

customer loyalty

I recently came across a new research study from Cheetah Digital (via MarketingCharts) that uncovers the reasons why customers have a ‘favorite’ brand. The study surveyed over 5,000 customers worldwide to determine the factors that drove brand loyalty. I wanted to cover the top seven drivers of customer loyalty:

The Top Seven Drivers of Customer Loyalty

Provides a Consistent Customer Experience (80%) I think an important caveat is that the brand provides a consistently GOOD customer experience. The experience is part of the brand, and according to this study, it’s the top driver of brand loyalty.

If a brand makes the effort to create a good experience for the customer, that communicates to the customer that they are valued and appreciated. You will see that valuing and appreciating the customer are common themes on this list of drivers of brand loyalty.

 

Rewards Customers For Their Loyalty (78%) This is the where most brands make their biggest mistake in attempting to cultivate brand loyalty. Most brands confuse rewards and incentives in the context of brand loyalty. A reward comes after the purchase. An incentive is given before the purchase in an attempt to change customer behavior.

A reward creates loyalty to the brand, an incentive creates loyalty to the incentive itself. For example, look at the classic punch card, designed to ‘reward’ the customer with a free purchase afer a set number of purchases are made. Maybe Pizza Hut has a deal where if you purchase the lunch buffet 10 times, you get a free purchase.  This is an incentive to change behavior, and it builds loyalty to the OFFER, not to the brand. You will be more likely to continue to purchase the lunch buffet at Pizza Hut UNTIL your punch card is filled. When you claim the free lunch buffet, then you have to start again at zero.  And your loyalty to the incentive resets to zero as well.

As I explain in this post; If you want to build loyalty among your customers always remember: Loyalty is built by saying ‘Thank you!’ for existing behavior, not by offering coupons as incentives for new behavior.

 

Uses Customer Data In a Way That Makes Them Feel Comfortable (74%) Data privacy is top of mind for all customers. Most customers are very concerned over how their data can be used, or misused by brands. Transparency is imperative to building trust with consumers, and that’s especially true when it comes to customer data. Brands that are clear and forthright with how they collect and use a customer’s data are more likely to build trust with customers, which is the prerequisite for building loyalty.

 

Treats the Customer as an Individual (74%) This speaks to the desire that customers have for a personalized experience. Every customer has different wants and desires, and when a brand can give us a personalized customer experience, the brand is communicating to us that we are worth communicating to as an individual. It shows us that the brand appreciates us enough to put forth an effort to customize its communications with us.  That communicates respect and appreciation, and it makes it easier for us to adopt those same traits back to the brand.

 

Strives to Develop a Relationship (71%) This is one of the biggest misconceptions that brands have when communicating with customers. Most brands attempt to develop relationships with NEW customers, but ignore CURRENT customers. This thinking is completely out of phase, new customers typically have no interest in building a relationship with a brand. On the other hand, repeat customers are more likely to be loyal to the brand and more likely to be open to developing a relationship with the brand. Additionally, repeat customers can better serve the brand as they have a better understanding of its products/services and can better promote the brand to new customers.

 

Surprises Them With Rewards They Don’t Expect (64%) Unexpected rewards communicate appreciation. But remember, an unexpected reward is a ‘thank you’, not an incentive to make a future purchase. Sending a customer an email with discount codes for a ‘secret sale’ isn’t an unexpected reward. It’s an incentive to make a purchase, and your customers will see it as such. But a handwritten note from the manager thanking the customer for their business and delivered with a small box of gourmet cookies, that’s an unexpected reward and the customer will love and appreciate the gesture.

 

Treats Them Like a VIP (58%) This ties in with the previous point. The brands that do the best job of cultivating advocates understand the importance of their current customers and treat them as the special customers that they are. A good way to treat current customers as VIPs is to appreciate and reward them for what they are doing to help build and promote your brand.  Say ‘Thank you’ with no expectation of future purchases, but as appreciation for past behavior. Communicate to your customers what impact they have on your brand and thank them for it. You will find that by doing so, your loyal customers will work even harder for your brand.

 

Want to learn more about how to build a brand that cultivates customer loyalty?  Here’s every article I’ve written on brand loyalty.  Have questions about how to implement these strategies for your own brand?  Feel free to email me and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

 

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Brands With Happy Customers Have One Thing in Common

They value their customers and communicate this through their actions.

When I talk to companies and clients and how to create passionate customers that love your brand, I typically talk about how rock stars have fans or how sports teams have fans. I talk to companies about how much of an impact it would make to their business to have customers that loved them and who were actual fans of their brand.

Almost always, the company will push back. “We aren’t Taylor Swift! We aren’t the Alabama Crimson Tide! We sell boring widgets, we aren’t rock stars and never will be!”

Rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars. They have fans because they put in the work to cultivate fans. Rock stars understand that they can create fans by engaging with their customers and communicating to their customers that they appreciate them, and love them.

Your company can and SHOULD be doing the very same thing. Here’s a couple of examples I have come across recently to give you inspiration:

Lego’s wonderful letters to customers

Lego has a long history of sending compassionate, humorous and thoughtful letters to customers who contact them with questions, praises and complaints. Often, these personal responses are to children who have perhaps lost a lego toy or have a question about one.

Here’s a recent example:

In this example, a customer named John bought a $350 Lego Star Wars set from Target. The set is apparently fairly hard to find. He took the set home and began assembling it. Toward the end of the process, he discovered that a bag of pieces he needed to finish the set was missing! He didn’t really have the option of returning it to Target, since he had already started assembling it, and since the store likely wouldn’t have a replacement in stock anyway.

So he contacted Lego directly.  Here was Lego’s response:

Dear John,
Thanks for getting in touch with us and providing that information! I am so sorry that you are missing bag 14 from your Mos Eisley Cantina! This must be the work of Lord Vader.

Fear not, for I have hired Han to get that bag right out to you.

Have a bricktastic day and may the force be with you.

 

The response is compassionate, humorous, and above all communicates to the customer that they heard them. It then tells them what will happen next to resolve the issue.  Perfect!

Not only will this delight John and give him a reason to buy more Lego sets, but it’s also a big source of positive PR for Lego. If you do a simple search on Google or Twitter you can easily find many mentions of Lego sending similar delightful letters to customers. All of these stories enhance the Lego brand and give more people a reason to buy from Lego.

 

The massive BBQ one streamer is holding for his Twitch subscribers

I’ve talked before about the amazing job streamer/content creator NickMercs does in creating and cultivating his community of Twitch subscribers, called MFAM. Nick is very loyal to his followers and goes out of his way to communicate this to them. Often, when he adds new brand sponsors, part of the deal will be that the brand has to give money or prizes to his subscribers. On a recent stream, he claimed that during the Holiday season of 2020, he gave close to $250k in prizes and cash to his MFAM community.

Nick goes out of his way to show his followers that he loves them, and they love him right back. To close out Summer, next weekend he is throwing a special BBQ for MFAM, all for free:

I follow a lot of streamers on Twitch and YouTube. Very few of them make the effort that Nick does to connect with his subscribers, and to communicate to them how much he appreciates them. As a result, they appreciate him even more, and the snowball just keeps rolling downhill.

 

Build a culture of customer appreciation

Most companies are dead set on acquiring new customers, but then when they make the first purchase, then they become a ‘current’ customer and it’s as if they enter this dark void and the company no longer cares. Smart companies, the ones that excel at creating happy and loyal customer, focus on customer retention as much if not more than customer acquisition.

You retain customers when customers feel happy and satisfied with your brand. By constantly listening to your customers, communicating with them and showing your appreciation, you keep them as customers. What’s more, those customers you keep go out and recruit new customers for you. Which greatly reduces your customer acquisition costs.

Having passionate fans doesn’t happen by accident. Taylor Swift doesn’t have fans because she is a rock star anymore than Nick Mercs has fans because he’s a Twitch streamer. There are plenty of rock stars and plenty of Twitch streamers who have almost no fans.

Happy customers don’t happen by accident, they are earned. Put in the work, show your customers that you love them, and mean it. That’s how you create happy and loyal customers.

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How to Create Customer Loyalty After the Product Purchase

Let’s say for every product you buy, there are one of three outcomes as far as your satisfaction with the purchase:

1 – Indifferent. The product does what you expected it to do, no more or no less.

2 – Upset. The product doesn’t meet your expectations.

3 – Excited. The product exceeds your expectations.

 

If you are indifferent toward your purchase, the odds are that you aren’t likely to praise or criticize the purchase to other customers. Likely, it was an inexpensive purchase, and you really didn’t have high expectations for it to begin with. For instance, if your purchase cost a dollar and was a complete disappointment, well you are only out a dollar, so you are less likely to be as upset with the quality of the product.

If you are upset or excited with your purchase, then that means you want to talk about it.  You want to share your experience with others. Interestingly, Guy Winch has found that 95% of the time when a customer is upset with a purchase, they will tell other customers, and won’t tell the company that made the product! According to Winch:

“Research has found that 95% of consumers who have a problem with a product don’t complain to the company, but they will tell their tale to eight to 16 people,” he says. “It’s unproductive because we’re not complaining to the people who can resolve our issue.”

Venting also floods the bloodstream with cortisol, the stress hormone. “We tell ourselves that we need to get it off our chest, but each time we do, we get upset all over again,” he adds. “We end up 10 to 12 times more aggravated.”

Isn’t that fascinating, in a depressing sort of way? But it makes complete sense that retelling a negative experience with a product to other customers would make us more upset with the purchase. And the customers we are talking to would likely want to be supportive and sympathetic toward our anger, so they may say they agree that the company was in the wrong, which would make us even MORE upset with the purchase!

Which is honestly a bit unfair to the company, when you think about it. Because we didn’t reach out to them and give them a chance to help us with our problem.

Let’s come back to this in a moment and talk about what happens when you are excited with a purchase. You tell other customers, right? We know this is true from our own experiences for many reasons. We want to share with others what worked for us. Also, we probably want to ‘brag’ on ourselves to a degree by sharing what a ‘smart’ purchase we made.

The point is, we talk to others about our purchase in either scenario. But if you think about it, even when we have a positive experience with a purchase, are we really that likely to reach out to the company and communicate that to them?  Probably not.

So the onus, rightly or wrongly, is on the company to do everything it can to encourage the customer to give feedback on the purchase. If the customer is indifferent toward the purchase, they will likely ignore the request.

But if the customer is either very upset or very excited with the purchase, an invitation to give feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Now, many companies aren’t thrilled with the prospect of hearing from angry customers. It’s just human nature. But, if you can give a customer the support they need post-purchase, you greatly increase your chances of converting the upset customer into a happy one.

And remember, happy customers are your best salespeople. They acquire new customers for you!

So think about how you can better connect with your customers after the purchase. This will only improve and enhance your customer loyalty efforts. And if you want to learn more, we will be discussing this topic tonight during #ContentCircus on Twitter, starting at 7pm Central. Follow me on Twitter, and watch my tweets, the topic will be How to Create Content For Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey!

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The Business Link Between Customer Empathy and Brand Loyalty

The other day I was talking about mapping content and marketing to the buyer’s journey with Alexandra. Alexandra mentioned what comes after the purchase, and that’s when we began to discuss the role of creating and cultivating brand loyalty. We then had a fascinating discussion about the role that empathy for the customer plays in creating and cultivating loyal customers. I started doing some research into empathy and I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic here.

Let’s first examine some of the drivers of brand loyalty:

  • We trust the brand. This trust can be established via a consistent experience, customer support, following through on brand promises, etc.
  • We relate to the brand. Here we feel we have common interests and values as the brand We feel as if what’s important to us is also important to the brand.
  • We feel that the brand acknowledges us and appreciates us. They listen to us, they communicate they hear our feedback and act on it. This also leads to us feeling a vested interest in what happens to the brand. We will promote it to other customers, we will defend it against criticism.

 

Now let’s look at empathy. According to Greater Good Magazine, empathy is “used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.”  All of this ties into the drivers for brand loyalty; Trust, understanding, being able to relate to the brand.

Empathy for the customer is a paramount skill to have if you are working in customer service. And quite often, customer service is called upon post-purchase, by the customer. Which is also the point at which brand loyalty often is created or enhanced.

A big part of showing empathy to someone is making sure that person understands that you are listening to them, and you are being considerate of their feelings. Whenever I consult with companies on addressing customer complaints, I always stress to them that the company should never apologize unless they actually did something wrong. I tell clients to focus on listening to the customer, and making sure they know that you are listening. That’s far more important than simply saying ‘sorry’. Upset customers want to know that you are listening to them, that you have heard and understood WHY they are upset, and that you give the customer a solution for their complaint.  Starting a customer service interaction by saying “Well I’m sorry that happened to you!’ and then NOT solving their problem, can actually lead to more anger and frustration for the customer. Communicating that you are listening is more important than saying you are sorry.

Taking the time to listen shows that you DO care. It’s critical that your brand listens to its customers, especially when they contact customer service, post-purchase. It’s also important that even though the customer is very likely upset, the main thing the average customer wants when reaching out to customer service, is a rep who will listen and understand why they are upset. This communicates that the brand values that customer and their feelings.

Feeling appreciated is one of the key drivers of brand loyalty. Also keep in mind that everyone, your customers, your employees, we are all under additional pressure and stress right now. Communicating you appreciate others has never been more important. And it will never be more appreciated by others.