How to Drive Business Innovation During a Global Crisis

Estimated reading time: 4 - 5 minutes

Delivering on big initiatives during a volatile time doesn’t have to be put on hold, in fact, it's the time to accelerate them

As I described in part 1, during uncertain and stressful times on your brand, option one is to panic, or another way is to keep a cool head and actually embrace this time as an opportunity to propel your business forward.

A good place to start is with customer support and service, whereby you can define strategies that help you to reduce the operating costs from your legacy channels like phone, email and chat, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately redefine the workplace with your agents. 

In the world that I operate in, which is to help brands become intent-driven businesses through adopting a trusted conversational AI, there are tons of practical steps that can be leveraged quickly that all help with the above goals. Here are just a handful.

1. Make it easier to communicate with customers digitally. Like what we saw coming out of 2008, the crisis almost forced many large brands to make the pivot to a digital- and mobile-first approach. We had to, doing business any other way was too expensive and pissed off customers. Just look at how many banks, for instance, made the move to digital banking in the face of lower interest rates, closing branches and the layoff of staff.

"The goal is to differentiate your product or service offering in a simple way that leaves your internal teams feeling strong and your customers feeling heard and delighted. For example, for many banks, the last recession became the moment to (finally) respond to their customer’s desire for a simple, online banking solution.”

Mike Maddock, Forbes, 2019 

I haven’t been shy in preaching that the next major shift in commerce will be the move to Conversational, in that as customers, we should be able to simply message a brand or call out in our living room what we want, and like magic, we get it. The new digital economy over the next several years will be measured on fulfilling consumer intents in a highly personalized way, not trying to target and influence customers. Those days are numbered, and this current Black Swan of coronavirus may very well accelerate its death.

So what is at the heart of being a conversational brand? It means before we buy things or get customer support, we have questions and we want to do it in a manner that is natural to us, like we message our own friends and family several times a day.

• Retailers. There will be a massive shift to shopping online over the coming months with consumers fearful of visiting stores. You'll also face supply chain constraints. Reduce anxiety and friction by making it easy to get answers, seek help and shop on your website, app and messaging channels like Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp and others in a conversational way.
• Healthcare. There is still a lot of confusion, fear and questions out there where your brand can help bring insights and helpful information to keep the public safe. What about launching a conversational bot that is easy to interact with to get helpful answers during a highly uncertain time. A client of ours has done just that.
• Travel. Airline and hotel brands are going to get hit hard. The need to communicate easily, efficiently and effectively is paramount. Keep loyalty high by honoring 2020 status for 2021 for your top tier customers and endeavor to wipe out significant operating costs by shifting from expensive contact channels to conversational ones.

2. Shift expensive communication channels, such as phone calls and email, to messaging. Phone calls into your brand is likely the most expensive contact method. Consider these very fast, effective and practical ways to shift that call volume and other expensive methods to more cost-effective and efficient messaging channels. 

• Deflection: One of the fastest and most effective ways to shift expensive call volume to messaging and keep consumers in a digital world is through IVR deflection. When they dial in, offer the ability to stay on hold or press “1” to move the conversation over to messaging. This can be done high in your IVR tree or for specific intents to help manage volume or prove out the capability. We’ve seen on average 30%+ of call volume shifting to messaging in the first 100 days with this solution.
• Interception: Another great way to offer consumer convenience while reducing OPEX is through intercepting calls before they even happen. Apple’s Chat Suggest is a great way to get phone calls on web searches, your site, in your app and other places moved to digital two-way conversations. Plus, it takes little to no IT effort, so it’s a very fast deployment.
• Promotion: Some brands are launching without phone numbers and offering messaging instead. By promoting messaging with a button, short code or QR code where you would normally offer a phone number, it’s a great way to keep contact center costs in check while also making your customers happier.
• Kill your gateway fees: Each time your brand sends an SMS alert, whether it be for a travel update, a shipping notification or reservation confirmation, you are paying for that message. Here’s a recent example from UPS where I got seven texts in short succession. Wow!

That’s a huge cost burden and not very scalable, especially during tough economic times. Instead, you need to consider richer messaging channels like Apple Business Chat, Google RCS and others.

There are no gateway fees associated with sending messages on these channels. You only need to pay for an underlying Customer Service Platform (CSP) that you’ll need anyway to manage your digital contact center of excellence. Shifting those one-way deadend SMS alerts to no-fee two-way conversations is a great way to delight your customers and your boss!

3. Lead with AI and automation. The notion that bots are built to replace human jobs is a big fallacy. The real story of good automation for customer service, commerce and marketing is about empowering your current employee base and making them super workers.

You should be able to shift the role of bot building from IT to the hands of your best conversational designers — your contact center agents. They are an untapped asset in the organization where you give them the ability to be assisted by AI when responding to customers, and then they monitor bot conversations and step in and take over when necessary, quickly and easily fine-tuning the bot so that you can scale your automation and conversational operations.

This will also keep things fresh in your Contact Center and ensure they don’t hunt down their next job because you’re now offering them a whole new career path.

4. Make it easy for those contact center agents to work from home. If things get really bad and employees are mandated to work from home, an archaic legacy contact center operations setup is going to leave you in a major pinch. Now is the time to be evaluating a secure private cloud solution that makes it easy for your contact center agents to work from anywhere.

5. Launch quick-start programs. Hackathons, for instance, are a great way to keep morale high among your employee base, and there’s no reason you can’t host a virtual one. It’s a great way to test your internal communications infrastructure investment (i.e. Slack), while also generating great ideas your company can implement. The key is moving fast. For instance, we worked with one major global airline, and they were able to develop really compelling consumer experiences and chatbots in less than 24 hours using the right tools. Also, your partners should be able to offer programs that get you off the ground and making an impact in days, not months. Every missed day will hurt you in this environment.

Uncertainty is scary, but it doesn't have to be.

Let's be safe. Let's be smart. Let's make each other better.

You may find useful: Expert Guide to Conversational Commerce

I am VP of Strategic Account Solutions with leading global conversational AI company, LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN).

I work with the world’s largest brands helping them to become intents-driven businesses through adopting a trusted conversational AI and using an expert-guided operational blueprint.

?We’ve “built our muscle” by leveraging rich B2C conversational data over the past 25 years, and most recently, by helping over 300 leading global brands shift to an asynchronous communication model.

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