The document discusses improving customer experience through three steps: syncing customer data across channels, predicting customer needs through conversational analytics, and delivering personalized assistance through intelligent virtual agents. It highlights how top companies are using virtual agents to answer over 100,000 customer questions daily and increase self-service traffic and sales. The key takeaways are to use customer data to predict needs, provide consistent information across all channels, and eliminate data silos through knowledge management.
1. Identify Your Customer’s Stress
& Make It Go Away
A primer for digital marketers and online businesses on customer experience management
Presented by Chris Ezekiel
@chrisezekiel
2. Just a little about Creative Virtual
• WHO WE ARE: Creative Virtual is a leader in self-service customer
experience solutions for over 10 years.
• WHAT WE DO: Our technology helps optimise the customer
support, sales, marketing and call centre teams to reduce
costs, increase online sales, and achieve operational excellence across
mobile, web and social media channels
• WHO WORKS WITH US: Global organisations like
HSBC, Citibank, Autodesk, Verizon, CA Technologies, E*TRADE, Tesco
Mobile, and Lloyds Banking Group rely on our technology.
• WHERE TO FIND US: We have offices in the
UK, USA, Netherlands, Australia and Singapore. You can find us online
at www.creativevirtual.com or follow us on Twitter @creativevirtual.
4. You’re Stressing Out Your Customers
You strive for
engagement, b
ut when
customers
reach out for
help – you
drive them
away!
5. Customers are DYING for your Attention!
Source: LivePerson: The Ideal Online Experience Survey, 2013
6. They Use Multiple Channels To Talk to You
2012
2009
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Live Agent
FAQs
Email
IM/Live Chat Click to Call
Source: Navigate The Future Of Customer Service. Forrester - February 1, 2013
Forums
Virtual Agent
SMS
Twitter
7. And Make Choices Based On Your Response
55% bought from a different company after
having a bad customer experience.
Source: DimensionalResearch.com, ZenDesk.com
12. Great Service Leads to Great Results
Mobile
Mobile
Web
30
60
52
%
Increase in
Sales(1)
%
Increase in
Customer Satisfaction(1)
Source: ₁ Navigate The Future Of Customer Service. Forrester - February 1, 2013 / ₂ DimensionalResearch.com, ZenDesk.com
%
Increase in
Sales(2)
14. The 3 Steps
PREDICT
DELIVER
Knowledge Management
Conversational Analytics
Intelligent Virtual Agents
Sync data across all
channels
Predict what customers
are going to ask next
Deliver
accurate, consistent and
personalised data across
all touch-points
SYNC
15. SYNC: Knowledge Management
• Eliminate departmental silos
• Manage cross-channel content from one
platform
• Create customer specific conversations
for virtual and live agents
16. PREDICT: Conversational Analytics
• Use customer feedback to
power your decisions.
• Gain insights into customer
behaviour and interaction.
• Understand what questions
are going unanswered.
17. Data Helps Optimise Customer Interactions
Source: Aberdeen Group, 2012:
Multi-channel Contact Center: Establishing the Tie Between Mobile and the Customer Experience
18. DELIVER: Intelligent Virtual Assistants
• Multi-channel:
– website, blog, smartphones, tablets,
game
consoles, Facebook, Twitter, etc
• Always On/Always Available 24/7
• Engages with thousands of
customers simultaneously
• Lower cost per conversation
19. Virtual Agents Achieve Many Multi-Channel Goals
Source: Aberdeen Group, 2012:
Multi-channel Contact Center: Establishing the Tie Between Mobile and the Customer Experience
25. Three Key Takeaways & Action Items
• PREDICT: Answer customer questions before they ask
them. Use conversational data.
• DELIVER: Provide access to
consistent and accurate information
that is personalised and available
everywhere. Deploy intelligent
virtual agents.
Customer Experience
Revenue & Retention
• SYNC: There is only one company in the eyes of the
customer. Eliminate silos using knowledge
management tools.
26. What the Future Holds for Digital Marketers
• Customer Service becomes
the New Marketing.
• Mobile becomes the primary
communication channel for
customers.
• Organisations become more
widely hyper-connected.
• Virtual Agents live online
and offline (think kiosks and
holograms)
27. Get in Touch With Me
By email:
chris@creativevirtual.com
On Twitter:
@chrisezekiel
On the web:
www.creativevirtual.com
Editor's Notes
WHY CUSTOMERS ARE AGGRAVATEDYou didn't/won’t deliver on your promisesThey can’t reach you (not open, takes too long, they get cut off)Info not up to date/correctNot willing to be helpfulAgents have an attitudeThey can’t find what they are looking for quickly, easily Image URL: http://goodtoknow.media.ipcdigital.co.uk/111/000002432/3678_orh220w334/a-woman-getting-annoyed-on-the-phone.jpg
You’re inability to service customers effectively, has consequences, affects brand perception and sales.
Different channels have different answers. There is no consistency. Little personalization. But so many channels are hard for organizations to manage. Departmental silos mean different departments have/provide information. But customers see you as ONE company. They don’t care about internal workings. Need to provide ONE COMPANY VOICE. Trend 1: Channel preferences are Changing Rapidly Customers expect to use a broad variety of communication channels — self-service, voice, digital, and social — to interact with a company. Voice is still the primary communication channel that all demographics use, but voice is quickly followed by self-service channels, chat, and email. And channel usage rates are quickly changing. In the past three years, Forrester has seen an 18% rise in online web self-service usage, a 39% increase in the use of communities for customer service, and a 43% rise in chat usage (see Figure 3). In addition, newer channels such as cobrowsing, virtual agents, and SMS have gained traction. Consumer usage is one factor in choosing which channels to deploy; another factor is ensuring that the channels deployed support the corporate brand. For example, for an investment firm catering to high net-worth individuals, voice and other live-assist channels rise in importance compared with a retail brand that caters to a youth audience for whom online, chat, and social channels may be more important.In 2013 and beyond, customer service professionals will work on better understanding the channel preference of their customer base and better aligning their channel strategy to support their company’s brand proposition. They will also work to guide customers to the right channel based on the complexity and time sensitivity of interactions and put proper escalation pathways in place to ensure a seamless transition from one channel to the next without losing context to ensure a pain- free service interaction.7
Respondents with good customer service experiences where more likely to increase their purchasing activity, while more than ½ of those with bad experience bought a different company. 58% said they are more likely to tell others about their customer experience today than they were 5 years ago. It’s no secret that consumers are increasingly sharing information online. For businesses, this means positive customer experiences are more valuable then ever, especially since bad experiences have long lasting results.
There has a been a paradigm shift in the way customers want to interact. They are demanding self-service and want to engage with you on their terms – when and wherever they want.
Smartphone use is growing seven times faster than traditional desktop Internet access across the EU (Comscore, May 2012).
Talk about why personalization is so important to engaging with customers
Trend 2: Mobile solutions are Becoming a Must-have More than one-third of US online adults own a smartphone; 43% of them fall into Forrester’s SuperConnected consumers category.8 SuperConnecteds use their phones for information, research, commerce, and service. Mobility is gaining in importance in customer relationship management (CRM), not only because of increased consumer usage and satisfaction with this touchpoint, but also because of productivity gains. In a recent BearingPoint survey, organizations reported that mobile CRM delivered a 60% increase in customer satisfaction, a 30% increase in sales, and a 30% increase in productivity.9 Today, virtually all customer service vendors offer some mobile customer service capabilities.10 Many specialty customer service vendors supporting field agents also have robust mobile extensions of their applications. However, customer service mobile applications remain nascent as more companies focus on their mobile marketing, sales, and eCommerce mobility strategies.In 2013, customers will demand greater ability to interact with customer service organizations via mobile devices. Customers will also demand multimodal capabilities from mobile devices — for example, reading a FAQ while speaking with a customer service agent. Companies will respond to this challenge by creating centers of excellence that span marketing, customer service, eCommerce, and IT functions that are responsible for crafting a company’s mobile engagement strategy and designing mobile architecture blueprints to manage companywide mobile technology investments.12 More companies will move away from duplicating their web presence for their mobile offering and will focus on deploying the right usage scenarios that add value to customers in a mobile environment, with focused user experiences that allow them to accomplish tasks efficiently.
98% of the 120,000 questions asked.
User Feedback“Absolutely fantastic service, much easier than I expected.”“Very helpful thank you”“Very useful as I will be going to Europe in May thank you.”(January 2010)
Between January & December 2010:FiOS TV’s monthly call avoidance increased by 68%, finishing the year with an average of 34.08% Call Avoidance.High Speed Internet’s monthly call avoidance increased by 59%, finishing the year with an average of 27.26% Call Avoidance.
Great customer experiences leads to increased revenue and retention.
Not just sales & marketing, but Sales, Marketing & Service