customer service habits

Going Back to Good Customer Service Habits with AI

Mom and Pop values of customer service still hold sway today. We have collected some of our favorites and added our own modern twist, with a double scoop of AI to top it off to help you improve your CX.

Value: Go to Your Customer

This is still valuable advice today. Location-based marketing is a popular method of sending out personalized offers to customers within a certain geographical radius. This technology takes into account a customer’s buying habits and preferences and pairs it with a predictive algorithm to craft a personalized offer unique to that customer. That customer is targeted through location-based services, geolocation, geo-fencing or even wi-fi.

The applications for this go way beyond marketing. Imagine your customer receiving real-time, accurate restaurant recommendations, an in-store product finder tool, or having the ability to place an order in advance or instantly check-in based on their proximity to their hotel.

Value: Treat Them Like a Human Being

Back in the day, good service meant having a conversation with your customer over the counter. You may not be able to have long conversations like that anymore, but putting a smile on your customer’s face is as easy as sending a personalized Tweet when they post about your company. Not only does this show you are paying attention to what customers are saying about you, but it also shows you are using their preferred channels to communicate with them.

Use your data insight to determine your customer’s preferred channels of communication and ensure they are integrated with your current CRM.

AI can also help you engage with customers on a personal level based on their state of mind. With a little help from voice analytics, sentiment analysis or even emotion AI systems running in the background, your agents can get a real-time assessment of your customer’s mood during the call.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, personal devices will know more about an individual’s emotional state than their family does. Imagine being able to send a personalized offer to customers having a bad day. The upshot of these capabilities for CX cannot be underestimated.

Value: Always Help Them Face to Face

While face-to-face interactions are not always possible in a digital society, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) have become the invisible helpers we did not know we needed. Ask a question and your VPA can do anything from turn on your favorite show, book a hair appointment or re-organize your calendar, all in a convincing human-sounding voice.

This type of indispensable self-service not only allows customers to help themselves, but it helps contact center agents deliver exceptional service.

62% of organizations interviewed for Dimension Data’s Digital Workplace Report expected to implement virtual advisors in their operations in the near future. These virtual assistants would respond to basic queries, reserving human expertise for more complicated technical issues.

Chatbots serve the same function on your website, just make sure your automated responses come across as genuine and align with your CX efforts.

Value: Send a Thank You Note

In the past, it was not unheard of for companies to send heartfelt letters to customers thanking them for their business. We are not suggesting you write your customers a letter and physically hand these over to your local mailman for distribution (although some e-commerce sites do include handwritten notes with shipping). What we actually recommend is thinking above the canned automated response that goes out to everyone who uses your product and using your data to craft personalized messages wherever possible.

BI systems that analyze customer data can tell you exactly when a customer usually goes on holiday, when they are celebrating a birthday and even when they need to take their car in for a service. Even something as simple as using their shopping preferences to recommend another product after they have placed an order shows you care.

Value: Never Keep Your Customer Waiting

Think back to your last trip to the bank or DMV. No one likes queues, especially when there are not enough employees behind the counters. Using historical data and workforce management tools can help managers pinpoint exactly what periods are busier than others, ensuring there is always enough staff on hand. Combine that with intelligent routing, which prioritizes and routes calls, means contact centers can effectively eliminate long queues. At least the digital ones.

Let us take it one step further by introducing match matching algorithms. Now, not only will your customer be connected quickly, that agent will be exactly the right choice for that call.

Value: Always Give the Best Service You Can

Today you are more likely to talk about the customer experience than customer service, especially when it applies to millennial customers. And this experience goes beyond resolving queries quickly. Contact centers need to capitalize on all the technological innovations available to them to ensure their customer journey is as smooth and frictionless as possible, whether it’s through offering a self-help mobile application, optimized routing to ensure short wait times, automated chat bots to deal with common queries or using data to deliver personalized service. It all comes down to how that customer experiences your business.

We cannot think of a better use for AI than that.

Do you want to read more about good CX habits? We recommend In this Age of Innovation, What do Customers Really Want?