451 Research: Conversation Automation Is a Must for Companies

Businesses that adopt conversation automation solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are more likely to stand out in the market and successfully engage with today’s savvy customers, according to new data released by 451 Research, the global analyst and consulting firm that is part of S&P Global; and Conversica, the Silicon Valley-based provider of intelligent virtual assistants for the enterprise.

As customer expectations for communications from brands continue to rise, companies will need more advanced conversational AI capabilities critical to driving revenue success, the new data indicates. Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica, says the standard chatbots deployed on websites to help capture new leads are “yesterday’s AI” – well behind the technology curve.

“Customers are savvy to simplistic, rules-based bots, so conversational AI solutions absolutely must replicate the experience of communicating with a human to deliver real revenue results,” Kaskade emphasizes. “The chatbot is dead. The market demands a concierge who communicates via chat, email, SMS, messaging, social, and voice; holding a consistent and intelligent conversation across all channels and points in their buyer journey.”

Kaskade says Conversica’s conversation automation solution uses AI to deliver complex conversations, the program’s AI assistants autonomously engaging, nurturing, and qualifying customer opportunities so that revenue teams can focus on closing deals and growing accounts. “Each missed conversation can now cost more than ever before,” adds Kaskade. “The truly digitally driven organizations are not just managing data at scale, but they are actually creating ROI by maximizing the performance of their revenue teams using AI automation.”

Optimizely: Technology Is Fundamental to Driving Creativity

While the pandemic has significantly impacted the ability of marketing teams to guarantee exceptional CX, the right tools and technology can be key to driving creative ideas and successful customer engagement, reveals a new global survey from Optimizely, the San Francisco-based provider of a digital experience platform software as a service.

Results from the survey show that despite the challenges to marketing posed by remote and hybrid work, many marketers overcame barriers to creativity by relying on the appropriate content management, experimentation, and collaboration tools. Asked to identify the technologies marketers found most useful to continue creating effective CX, more than 40% named content marketing systems as their top choice to ease the creation and delivery of content to the right audience. Meanwhile, one-third chose video collaboration tools, and the remaining respondents felt that experimentation platforms and tools to test new ideas were the most useful.

“Creativity is essential when it comes to creating strong marketing campaigns that impress customers,” says Kirsten Allegri Williams, chief marketing officer (CMO) at Optimizely. “The pandemic caused all marketing teams to rethink not just how they define creativity, but how they inspire it and deliver creative experiences to customers. Remote and hybrid work won’t be going away anytime soon, and senior marketers need to be thoughtful—applying strategies and technologies that combine the art and science of marketing to ensure they continue inspiring creativity in their marketing teams, and in turn, drive strong customer experiences.”

The results of the survey are in the Optimizely report, The 2022 Marketer’s Experience: Dispersed Marketing Teams Impact Ability to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences. The survey of marketers in the US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Australia/New Zealand, and Southeast Asia was commissioned by Optimizely and conducted by Regina Corso Consulting.

Relay Network: Banks and Credit Unions Find Customer Engagement Difficult

Close to 80% of decision makers at retail banks and credit unions believe that re-engaging existing customers is more difficult than engaging new ones, according to a new Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Relay Network, the Minnesota-based developer of a customer messaging network aimed at helping companies connect with customers on secure feeds.  

Furthermore, most financial institutions struggle to deliver contextually relevant customer communications, and continue to suffer increasing rates of disengagement from their clients, who are choosing to opt out of any marketing communications coming from banks, points out the study, titled Reverse Disengagement with Contextually Relevant Content.

Related Article: At Bank Customer Experience Summit, Four Experts Share Digital Banking Insights

The study provides insights on four main challenges confronting banks and credit unions today. The first challenge is that the misdirected focus of banks on customer acquisition and customer journeys causes them to overlook their own customers and undermine their own customer engagement efforts, the study makes clear.

The second challenge is an inability among banks and credit unions to sustain the trust of their customers and anticipate their needs—factors that end up contributing to dormancy, the study notes. Such issues are problematic only because financial organizations are busy promoting products, instead of paying attention to their customers and serving what they need.

Internal silos and complex policies that stall communication strategies also present difficulties, according to the study, with respondents citing complex rules around ownership and customer relationships as obstacles that that prevent organizations from formulating a unified and cohesive communication strategy.

Finally, the study notes that interest in CX platforms is rising. To this end, nearly all of the study respondents have indicated plans to realign priorities and adopt new customer engagement and retention goals. “Forrester’s findings underscore the need for Relay’s feed technology,” says Matt Gillin, CEO and co-founder of Relay Network. “Relay Feeds help businesses drive more revenue and more valuable relationships with the people they serve.”

Gartner: Chatbots to Take Leading Customer Service Role in Five Years

Chatbots will be a primary customer service channel for approximately one-quarter of organizations by 2027, predicts technology research and consulting firm Gartner, Inc.

To be sure, chatbot use is already significant today. A Gartner customer service and support (CSS) survey of 50 respondents conducted online in January and February of this year showed that 54% of respondents currently use some form of chatbot, virtual customer assistant (VCA), or other conversational AI platform for customer-facing applications. And with chatbot deployment projected to rise in just two years, Gartner says some guidance may be in order, especially for CSS leaders seeking to effectively implement and measure chatbot performance as part of service and support channel strategies.

Among the recommendations that Gartner is making is for leaders to create a chatbot deployment strategy based on use cases and the complexity of service interactions, while also identifying the most relevant chatbot metrics—such as goal completion rate or abandonment rate—based on an organization’s unique context.

Leaders should then adapt those metrics to the baseline or desired metric performance level of the chatbot, and set up a cadence to review the chatbot metrics against the established baseline to gain insight into a chatbot’s strengths and to prioritize opportunities, Gartner points out.

Gladly: Customer Service Is Essential

A new report on customer expectations reveals that customer service plays an essential role in customer loyalty, which is proving in turn, to be the single most important indicator of a company’s long-term success. The report is from San Francisco-based Gladly, the provider of a type of customer service that the company calls “radically personal.”

Related Article: New Harvard Publications Report: Effective Customer Engagement is Critical

Findings from the report show that 44% of shoppers want brands to know their names and past purchases, while 66% say they prefer brands that can make personal recommendations based on their likes. And privacy is important to the first set of shoppers—the 44% group—who do not want any of their personal information to be divulged to advertisers, preferring that brands instead be the holders of their personal data.

As in the previous editions, the report makes liberal use of fun facts and numbers. For 42% of shoppers, for instance, it takes only two bad CX cases or experiences for them to completely stop buying from a brand. Overheard while enroute to the pantry: 58% would rather stand in line at the DMV than jump through hoops to get in touch with a live agent. And can it be true that the phone would remain the preferred method of contact for most customers, with email in second place and chat at a distant third? Just the facts, as they say. Finally, this little nugget: customers are people, not tickets, with 73% stating they wish to be treated like people, not case numbers, the report lays out in detail.

Created in collaboration with San Diego-based Stitch Marketing Research, the Gladly report collects insights from 1,500 US retail shoppers.