Digital transformation refers to the integration of new digital technologies across multiple business areas, including manufacturing, retail, and more. It changes how businesses operate and interact with their customers.
Digital transformation may require fundamental changes of a company’s business model, but it can help them make smarter decisions, increase sales and customer loyalty, and decrease marketing spends. Keep reading to learn more about how digital transformation can elevate your business.
Digital transformation can optimize businesses in everything from sales to insurance. Here are some ways that digital transformation can impact different business sectors:
Digital transformation in sales can help companies make intelligent decisions about consumer behavior. With the ability to collect and sort through large amounts of customer data that spans the entire buyer journey, companies can improve everything from inventory to how customers first interact with their products.
Digital transformation in retail takes time-consuming tasks like estimating inventory and both streamlines and infuses them with data-driven insights. In this example, retail analytics and automated inventory can make inventory management easier and more accurate. Consumer interactions with retail brands can also benefit from customized events like personalized chatbot and email messaging.
Digital transformation in marketing can help businesses increase their quality leads while decreasing the amount they need to spend to do so. It can optimize marketing growth through tactics such as analytics tracking and marketing automation. Marketers can better personalize the customer journey with data-based insights.
Digital transformation in insurance can make it easier for potential customers to compare plans, enroll, and file claims. And unlike in the past, where every action had to be done with a human agent, digital transformation can allow these processes to easily be completed online.
Customer service can become more impactful with digital transformation. Chatbots can answer customer questions that don’t require an agent, allowing for smaller headcounts and significant time savings. Case routing systems can benefit from natural language processing (NLP), which can help determine when a question is too complicated for a chatbot and send the query off to the appropriate subject matter expert.
Other benefits of digital business transformation include:
From AI-powered messaging with [24]7 Conversations™ to Q&A chatbots with [24]7 Answers™, our advanced products and technologies will give your business the tools it needs to evolve and succeed, including:
Contact [24]7.ai to see how your company can benefit from digital transformation.
One customer. One conversation. The end of starting over.
In today’s digital world, your customers want to self-serve and demand experiences to be more personalized and delivered on their terms. Consumers are continuing to purchase in greater numbers using digital channels. Companies must be prepared to deliver a personalized experience for digital consumers.
Since consumers are no longer bound by the traditional paradigms when interacting with companies for service, the traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has to evolve to fit the digital consumer. This doesn’t mean your IVR is obsolete and you have to start over. Rather, there are things you can do to augment and improve the service your IVR provides to your customers.
In many cases, companies are embracing today’s digital consumer trends and technologies to engage their customers throughout every step of their journey. IVR systems traditionally used to route billions of calls and provide a basic level of self-service, have been a workhorse on the front lines of customer service for decades. A modern IVR, however, can be the missing piece in the digital consumer’s journey. While the digital age has made shoppers more tech savvy and digitally minded, they certainly haven’t abandoned the phone channel; they’re just using the phone in different ways:
Customers prefer to self-serve for answers and only resort to the phone channel in instances when they can’t find the answers or complete their journeys on digital channels.
Customers entering the IVR are often well along in their sales and service journeys using other channels. When they do eventually call to complete their journeys, their expectation is that the phone channel becomes a natural extension of the journey they already started. Customers don’t want to have to repeat themselves when moving from, for example, the web channel to the phone channel.
With many calls being ‘escalation’ in nature, the traditional rudimentary IVR features for self- service and routing will only serve to frustrate savvy customers who expect service quickly.
Since they started their journey on the web, why force them to leave? (Hint: You shouldn’t.)
Digital consumers expect an interactive experience across all channels—including the IVR. Unfortunately, most often the IVR experience isn’t interactive. In addition, those who are on the web and on the phone simultaneously have to track two fragmented interactions. This results in a disjointed experience requiring higher customer effort, especially since voice interactions and web content typically are not designed to work well together.
For companies to optimize their IVR to keep pace with rising consumer expectations, it requires fusing the website with the IVR to transform it to a “web-aware” IVR. A modern, “web-aware” IVR delivers seamless cross- channel customer experiences, with lower customer effort and frustration.
Reduce repeat contacts: Allows customers to complete transactions and resolve issues quickly leading to lower service costs and customer effort.
Eliminate channel switching: Customers that can’t self-serve on your website and must pick up the phone to call are already on their second channel. By knowing where the customer is in their journey, the IVR is better able to predict the intent and complete the journey quickly in the IVR.
Reduce agent transfers: A web-aware IVR that understands customer intent and captures key customer information along the journey will be able to route the call to the agents with the correct skill, thereby reducing unnecessary transfers.
Eliminate repeat information: Preserves content when customers switch between the web and IVR channels, thus eliminating the need to repeat information.
As a first step to make your IVR web-aware, it’s important to focus on the highest- value customer journeys. This requires the use of structured and unstructured data to understand where customers fail to accomplish what they’re trying to do. Understanding this will help since the same intents are carried to the IVR. The next step is to find the right channel strategy to address those intents for customers who departed from a sale or service journey depending on the value and intent. Finally, experiences need to be designed for journeys where customers strayed or discontinued. For example, knowing the customer’s web presence when they call the IVR allows you to dynamically offer the right experience.
While looking at the data, the primary task is to analyze channel leakage patterns. For example, look at whether customers are leaking from web to IVR, web self-service to chat, or chat to IVR for specific sales or service journeys.
The next task in using data is to focus on the right journeys in addressing intents. Certain intents and journeys are great candidates for self-service. Others require assistance and end up getting escalated to agents. Assessing those journeys (their volumes, value, and how best to treat them) will help companies understand how best to solve the right problem.
One common scenario today is consumers who would first go to the web to change their address on their account. However, if the customer can’t find where to make the address change, they would most likely call to speak to an agent to help assist them. Once they call in and reach the IVR, using presence, the IVR is aware that the caller was recently on the web and knows precisely what they were doing. It can prompt them appropriately, and, if they are still on the site, push them a widget on the website that allows them to quickly update their address on their account page. Understanding this intent and correlating across all journey touchpoints will help understand leakage patterns and typical intents of customers.
There are three key elements to ascertaining a complete picture of customer intent. The first element is using predictive models to understand intent. Shaping an experience based on intent makes it more personalized, thus lowering customer effort.
The second element is making the experiences as conversational as possible. For example, a virtual agent or chatbot— which is at the “front door” on the web just as the IVR is the front door to voice agents in the contact center—should be highly conversational. Providing a consistent self-service experience via a virtual agent requires unified natural language models that work across the IVR and virtual agent. All of this helps to increase self-service levels.
The third element involves leveraging the most advanced speech technology. For example, leveraging Deep Neural Network (DNN) technology in speech can dramatically improve the ability and accuracy of the recognition in the most challenging acoustic environments. It makes the speech engine much more effective in addressing different accents, particularly for people who are non- native speakers of a language or when there is a lot of background noise. The upside is that it’s a lot easier to understand what the caller says so the experience can be treated appropriately. The above three elements work together to help anticipate and understand what each and every customer is trying to do.
Although email and phone continue to be dominant, a broader set of channels has been deployed in the last five years. Using digital channels such as chat, messaging and social has increased interactions, reduced call volume and lowered repeat contact rates. Meanwhile, adding digital channels has improved customer service metrics.
- Gartner, Market Trends: Customer Service and Support, Worldwide - 2020
The final element is the choreography of a consumer’s experience within and across channel pairs such as web to IVR, virtual agent to messaging, or mobile app to agent. Channel orchestration combines different channels either simultaneously or sequentially. It depends on the nature of the experience and what needs to be done.
For example: a customer calls into the IVR to make a payment to their credit card and is offered an opportunity for a credit card upgrade, at which point the customer is transferred to an agent and completes the journey online.
This multimodal experience allows companies to drive revenues by upselling customers, deepening the relationship with customers by offering products most relevant to them, and by lowering customer service costs by engaging with customers using the right channel for the right customer intent and journey. Once the journey is completed, the mobile app can be promoted with an option to download, thus promoting digital adoption.
Research has shown the majority of customers begin their self-service journeys on the web. Similarly, a majority of customers cross channels if unsuccessful on the web. So, this third element in making an IVR web-aware is to determine the most logical channel pairs for your company. What are the high- volume channels that people use and tend to escalate from one to the next? Web and phone will be the logical starting point for most enterprises.
Let’s look at an example of how these can be woven together: a consumer receives a fraud alert and engages with both the IVR and web to solve it. The company notices suspicious charges on a customer’s credit card and the IVR proactively calls the customer to confirm the charge. The journey starts when the IVR calls the customer on their smartphone and notifies them of the unusual activity on their credit card. The IVR sends the customer a message with a link to a web page that lists the credit card activity. The customer reviews the list of charges and confirms that the charges are in fact theirs.
The digital integration of web and IVR makes the customer journey more personal and conversational, giving the customer a natural way to interact with less effort for their customer service needs.
Digital transformation has led to demanding expectations for customer experience where companies must deliver a consistently personalized, on-brand experience for each individual customer, at every touchpoint–anytime and anywhere. Companies looking to continue to grow their revenues, deepen relationships, and reduce costs would do well to learn more about their customers’ needs, intents, and expectations. A modern, web-aware IVR helps companies bridge and connect channels to deliver the holistic, personalized, and continuous customer experience when high-value journeys leak from one channel to another. Replacing traditional IVRs with today’s web-aware IVRs will enable companies to be well positioned to adopt a customer-centric model which will help drive business outcomes.
Learn more about AI-powered conversational IVR.
Although email and phone continue to be dominant, a broader set of channels has been deployed in the last five years. Using digital channels such as chat, messaging and social has increased interactions, reduced call volume and lowered repeat contact rates. Meanwhile, adding digital channels has improved customer service metrics.
- Gartner, Market Trends: Customer Service and Support, Worldwide - 2020
The digital transformation of customer service is changing the game for both businesses and consumers. As more and more customers prefer to self-serve, social media platforms have gained popularity for customer service—in some cases overtaking chat, email, and website interactions. Many customers are using Direct Message (DM) and Facebook Messenger, for example, for quick, easy responses in a channel they’re already using anyway. And then there are the infinite possibilities of Apple Business Chat.
Business Chat is a powerful platform for businesses to connect with customers directly in Messages. Customers can start an Apple Business Chat conversation from Safari, Maps, Search, and through Siri, to ask questions, resolve issues, and complete transactions.
So how does Apple Business Chat fit into the digital transformation of your customer service? How does it differ from other self-service channels? And how can businesses looking to adopt Apple Business Chat get the most out of this platform, and provide a frictionless customer service experience? Let’s start by looking at the evolution of customer service—which is really the evolution of self-service.
In the last two decades customer service has come a long way, with technological advances driving huge leaps forward. Prior to the mid-90s, the only option for customers needing anything from answers to a simple question to help completing a complex transaction was to pick up the phone and speak to a live agent. Next came email, and every business built a website and customers were able to find help online.
After that came chat, followed by mobile. By and around 2010, many customers preferred using social media for customer service, because they were already using it and getting rapid responses. Conversational commerce is on the rise, with companies leveraging chatbots or virtual agents (VAs) across devices and channels to engage customers in smart two-way conversations as effective as, if not better than the best live agents for a seamless, connected journey.
Where does Apple Business Chat fit into this picture? Messaging use is on the rise, now overtaking voice as the preferred means of communication. According to Facebook, 56% of global messaging app users say they’ve messaged brands to get more information in all stages of the buyer’s journey.1 Messaging must therefore go hand-in-hand with conversational commerce to take self-service to the next level.
“Conversational Commerce enables two-way communication with the customer. It doesn’t just tell them things, but also learns from them, hears their questions, and builds a relationship.”
—Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI, Founder of Chatbots Magazine
With so many messaging platforms available, what makes Apple Business Chat different from Facebook Messenger and other popular apps? Why should businesses consider adding yet another channel to their customer service arsenal?
Apple Business Chat offers some key benefits for both consumers and businesses. Anyone using iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch can search and discover businesses using native apps. The same way Apple apps offer an icon to connect users directly to the company’s website or telephone number when they search for a business, a direct connection to the company’s Chat service within Messages is offered—which the customer is probably already using to chat with friends.
Unlike some other messaging app providers, Apple is well known for protecting privacy and maintaining security, and conversing with a business in Messages instead of on a social media messaging platform allows consumers to keep personal information off public forums. Plus, there’s no need for businesses to maintain a social presence to support this customer service channel—another key differentiator from Twitter and Facebook Messenger.
Business Chat has the added benefit of an integrated payment solution—Apple Pay. This makes it even easier, and more secure, for customers to complete transactions within the app. While Apple Business Chat alone can’t support complex transactions, companies with an intelligent back-end platform in place can combine customer service and shopping in a preferred channel to reduce friction even further. With proactive notifications like order status, shipping, and fraud alerts, businesses are able to use rich templates and layouts to ensure a consistent brand experience.
Apple Business Chat enables companies to deliver direct, personal support in a single thread. But alone, it may not deliver the seamless, superior customer experience you and your customers require. To make Apple Business Chat a great customer service channel, businesses will need to integrate it with an intelligent, predictive analytics platform with a backend that can drive a superior experience for today’s customers.
For example, Apple Business Chat could be integrated with an intelligent chatbot to facilitate a natural language conversation and provide customer service in the simplest form possible (i.e., answering questions) while also improving self-service rates. As questions get more complex, it can be integrated with live chat (human agent) to provide direct, personal support and retain the full context of the interaction in the same screen for speedier resolution. Not having to repeat yourself when you escalate from a chatbot to a live agent eliminates friction and creates a holistic, continuous experience.
Another key advantage to integrating an intelligent back-end platform is the ability to gather deep data analytics and predictive insights. Applying advanced text-mining in Apple Business Chat and voice-of-customer analysis for chat and VAs can help continually improve the experience for future customers.
An equally important question is how these fit into the bigger picture of digital transformation. While many organizations are focusing their efforts on funneling customer service contacts into digital channels, many are still facing challenges keeping them there.
When customers go into digital channels to try and self-serve but can’t easily find the information they’re looking or the interaction is not to their liking, they’re quick to abandon the channel and pick up the phone. This is a real problem for businesses that have invested a lot into digital channels thinking they will not only improve customer service but also reduce costs.
To increase channel containment, control customer service costs and drive the evolution of self-service forward, companies must understand the holistic customer journey. Providing the best possible customer experience in any channel is the only way to achieve true digital transformation and prevent abandonment.
Customer journeys are complex, and rarely involve a single interaction on a single channel. To create a seamless, continuous experience across channels, devices, and time, channels must be connected and integrated. Companies need to let customers choose how and when to connect with their brand. It’s all about making it easy for customers to do business with you. For companies planning to adopt Apple Business Chat, it’s important to consider how it fits into the complete customer journey.
Leveraging natural language technology enables companies to understand the conversation— what a customer means, not just what they say. But this can’t happen in a single-channel vacuum. To enable a satisfying, two-way conversation, you need additional context from other channels to provide the best service and help them resolve their issue. Integrating Apple Business Chat with an intelligent chatbot, for example, will inform the conversation about who the customer is and what they’re trying to do. Leveraging data and chatbots will help companies keep customers in the digital channel, and keep them happy. With this approach, you can improve net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction while also reducing costs by delivering an optimal self- service experience. Everyone wins.
Smart companies are moving away from channel- centric engagement, where each interaction is viewed and managed independently, and customer behavior is isolated. Intent-driven engagement enables companies to anticipate consumers’ needs, create a holistic, smooth experience across channels, and deliver memorable moments. The key is leveraging data and tying experiences together to create the best experience possible.
Here are some simple steps companies can take right now towards achieving digital transformation:
Leverage natural language technology to enable natural, open conversations in text or speech. This reduces customer frustration and helps you understand the problem so you can resolve it faster. Use data from your systems combined with artificial intelligence to accurately predict customer intent and deliver personalized, contextual engagement. For Apple Business Chat, integrating an intelligent chatbot as well as live chat when required will enable you to provide the best customer experience and get the most out of this channel.
Let customers decide how and when to interact with your brand by offering presence across all channels, multiple devices, over voice and text. Stitch interactions together and provide seamless navigation and a channel-agnostic experience. Integrating Apple Business Chat is easy if you already have the platform to support it—it’s just one more way customers can choose to contact you.
Fact: Consumers today like to self-serve. Companies need to make automated interactions smarter and more accurate. Plus, automating more interactions lowers customer service costs. So how do you make them better? By leveraging your long history of customer interactions (data), using artificial intelligence and machine learning to continuously improve and evolve, and choosing a future-ready, unified, scalable platform.
Engage customers at the right time with the right message. Increase self-service rates and integrate escalation to a live agent to complete the transaction when needed. Achieving digital transformation also enables companies to reduce handling time for live agents by transferring context of escalated calls, further lowering customer service costs.
To deliver a superior customer experience, businesses need to be channel agnostic and offer a consistent experience wherever customers prefer to engage. Apple Business Chat is a channel of choice for many consumers because it protects their security and privacy, they can search and discover businesses easily, and it offers an integrated payment option. But it can’t succeed in a silo. To make the most of this new opportunity, companies need to integrate intelligent and predictive technology and integrate customer service channels to support and deliver the seamless, superior experience today’s consumers demand.
Contact [24]7.ai to learn more about AI-powered conversational IVR.
Conversational Commerce enables two-way communication with the customer. It doesn’t just tell them things, but also learns from them, hears their questions, and builds a relationship.
—Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI, Founder of Chatbots Magazine
Digital transformation of the customer experience has changed how we interact with customers.
While the average American home has 9.2 connected devices,1 the average human attention span hovers at just eight se
