Congratulations! You’ve adopted the strategies and techniques we covered in part 1 and part 2 of our series for effectively applying AI to support your organization. If you have, you know you’ve vastly improved the ability of digital-first users to find what they’re looking for, and automated your lead capture mechanisms and sales workflows.
There’s a final step – servicing, and retaining those customers you’ve fought so hard to acquire. It’s crucial that you put the same level of effort into customer retention and satisfaction as other initiatives towards the top of the funnel. Let’s dive in, and share some ways to help introduce AI-powered solutions to help with service and retention.
It's All About Relationships
Satisfying your customers is an ongoing challenge. Their needs change over time, so you adapt or risk loosing them. Digital-first customers want immediate responses, the ability to engage with you on-demand on the channel of their choosing, and never want to repeat what they already shared. How do you adapt? Recognize the landscape we’re in, new tools to support these activities are available today without large budgets or drawn out implementation timelines. Consider the the lifetime value of each customer.
Customer Lifetime Value
You’re probably well aware of the lifetime value of your customer, so you know that keeping them satisfied is key to the success of your business. Listed below are a few opportunities for you to leverage the power of artificial intelligence for customer satisfaction and retention.
Digital-first users especially want to drive their engagement autonomously. Allow them to achieve their goals using a capable virtual assistant, intelligent search, and make sure you or always optimizing the experience.
Remember that proper monitoring includes reviewing transcripts of what users are asking for, and adapt to fill in the gaps in the service you’re providing them.
With an AI powered solution, the interface changes from buttons and menus, to a conversational paradigm. The unbounded nature of AI presents a great opportunity for you to redesign how you think about customer service in general.
The latest conversational AI products have the ability to adapt to the user’s natural language. Sophisticated users also appreciate the freedom, flexibility and time savings they offer. For example, ordering a product on a traditional website may take multiple clicks to get to the point where they make a purchase…but a conversational UX can allow ‘one shot’ ordering. I’ll take a large thin crust pizza with pepperoni and sausage please.
Providing a blank text bar for the user can be intimidating. They have no idea what they can ask, or how to even ask it.
Offer a helping hand in the way of auto-suggestions and auto-completions to make the user work ‘less hard’.
Meeting your customers where they are is obvious, but the devil is in the details.
Consider that the experience with your organization will continue on a single channel, or multiple. You need to provide consistency across all of them, by identifying who they are (and remembering!!!).
Case in point, a user may reserve a hotel room on a website, then use chat to check the status, then change the reservation via sms text. You need to be able to stitch together this digital journey seamlessly.
We hope you gained valuable insight from our series on digital-first users. The goal of these articles is to help you think about these challenges in meaningful ways that force you to take action.
The point isn’t for you to know how to offer these next generation AI solutions, but to understand what they are, and how they can be introduced today. Contact us to discuss how we can help any size business support digital-first users.
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