4 tips to quickly improve your customer experience this year

IN a saturated market where differentiating your business from the competition is difficult, providing a good customer experience (CX) can provide you with the edge you need.

According to a 2017 Gartner survey, 84 percent of organizations said they expect to increase investments in customer experience technology in the year ahead.

In advance of their event in Tokyo today, here are a few recommendations Gartner has for business leaders looking for the best and most effective way to conceptualize, design, implement, and improve their CX:

Virtual customer assistant will provide the quickest return

Using a virtual customer assistant (VCA) or a chatbot to help customers work through their basic yet important queries can be significantly beneficial.

Customers get optimized responses to questions that are as basic as how to start up your product or change its settings, and customer service representatives can reserve their time to only deal with complicated issues.

According to Gartner research, organizations reported a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat, and email inquiries, after implementing a VCA. Companies also found evidence that using a VCA increased customer satisfaction and delivered a 33 percent saving per voice engagement.

Mobile apps will die soon, so focus on messengers

You have a smartphone and you’ve got so many apps on in there, but how many of them do you really use every day, or even once a week? Not many, are there? They died in your phone.

That’s the fate of mobile apps, and it’s why companies are thinking about steering away from them. In fact, 20 percent of companies are going to abandon their mobile apps by 2019.

Gartner’s research suggests that metrics measuring the success of mobile apps are missing the mark due to the cost of support, maintenance, upgrades, customer care, and marketing to drive downloads.

So, if not mobile apps, what should you focus on? Build a presence on Facebook Messenger and WeChat. Using consumer messaging apps, built on these platforms, you’re going to truly stay close to your customers.

Technology will play a key role in improving CX

When you think of customers and the fact that they’re increasingly connecting with your brand on digital channels, it makes sense for you to spend more on tech that will improve their experience.

According to Gartner’s research, two-thirds of all customer experience projects will make use of IT, up from 50 percent in 2017 by 2022.

The only CX projects that don’t rely on technology are recruiting, training, governing and managing customer-facing employees. Although the channels used and the processes followed in these avenues are also slowly getting a larger share of the organization’s tech budget.

AI, analytics, AR, VR, and MR can transform your business

If you’re looking for key technologies that can transform the customer experience, think of artificial intelligence, analytics, artificial reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality.

By 2020, 30 percent of all B2B companies will leverage AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes and more than 40 percent of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience.

By that year, Gartner also predicts that AR, VR, and MR immersive solutions will be evaluated and adopted in 20 percent of large enterprises as part of their digital transformation strategy.

 

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