Q&A: 3 Bold CX Predictions + How DaVinci Can Support Your CX Strategy

In this Q&A , our founder and CEO, Anthony Uliano, and David Grant, Customer Success Account Manager share their insights on 3 bold predictions for the future of CX and how DaVinci can support your CX strategy. They discuss how emerging technologies such as AI, self-service and automation, along with shifting consumer behaviors, will transform the way companies interact with customers. Take a deep dive into how these changes will impact the landscape of customer experience, emphasizing the importance of personalization, convenience, and a seamless experience across all touchpoints. This Q&A is a must-read for anyone interested in staying ahead of the game in customer experience.

CX Prediction 1: Hyper-personalization is the next frontier.

With the increased demand for digitalization, customers are expecting a unique experience from brands. For companies to set themselves apart from the masses they will need to invest in technology that creates hyper-personal communication. Luckily, a lot of technology now supports you in getting more insights and awareness of your customers.

What are some examples of that you’ve seen in the industry of hyper-personalization?

Tony: Hyper-personalization is really about responding to the customer in responding to them in the way that they intend. So it’s typically using AI; that’s a lot of the buzz around hyper-personalization. It’s being able to use AI to train it to be able to respond in, in a custom way. But hyper personalization or personalization is really about training, perhaps systems, and your agents and ensuring that you can customize and have the caller or the customer feel like they’re receiving personalized service. Personalization could be as simple as using recent activities to pre-route callers.

For example, I recently took a flight, and my connecting flight would be late or late for it. And when I called in to schedule, the line was too long at the airport. They already knew I was on an active reservation, so that’s an example of personalization. They were able to jump ahead in the queue because I was currently in the middle of a flight. So that’s a good example. And there are a lot of other ways of personalizing. Things like being able to send a caller to the last agent they spoke to. It’s any of these things. It’s combining. You don’t necessarily have to integrate AI. Still, it’s taking in that data and being aware of the types of interactions you want to have and where are the points that you can customize that interaction rather than just executing a flow as you as the business wants it to be. It’s being able to tailor that interaction to be more around the customer’s intent and so using AI with the chat button interaction or even voice conversations.

The other term used is called next best action, which is basically trying to figure out based on how the interaction is going, either in the chatbot or the voice conversation through transcription. It’s figuring out what keywords are coming up and using those keywords to tailor a response. So those are some things we’re seeing in the industry.

What is your vision for DaVinci play in the hyper-personalization with customer experiences?

Tony: We’re helping a lot of customers to enhance their agent’s experience and the customer’s experience by providing additional data to the customer. Even so, we’re helping with the routing. We can help by looking up more data in the CRM system. And many companies miss an opportunity to use their CRM application, which has a wealth of customer and interaction data using, to personalize the interactions.

So, we’re helping a lot of businesses and using that data to route calls to either the last agent they spoke to, or if they recently logged a case, maybe they’re calling on behalf of that. So it’s making sure that that data is there to help with that interaction of personalizing it. But we’re also doing things like enabling transcription for a lot of our customers and being able to recommend that next best action. So, whether they’re using something like Salesforce or Dynamics, we’re able to enable transcription from a number of the providers to be able to recommend based on keywords or even the emotions that are coming up in the call, sort of the path that the agent ought to take.

But we’re also our view is as we’re also going beyond that. And so, we are also combining other activities. So we’re taking even activities that might happen at a physical location or in other ways, we’re taking those activities and using things like geolocation or even photo identification. And David, you probably have a couple of customers you can share specifics on.

David: I talked about how we’ve been working with various customers from Ameris of different backgrounds of verticals. And one of them is near and dear to my heart because this is where I was stolen from if you will, is the car business. We do work with the car dealership, and some of the ideas that we have that we’re hoping to see implemented here in the near future is nobody likes going to get their car serviced. It is not a pleasant experience. You always feel like you’re about to leave. Spending money you did not think you would ever have to plan to spend.

So how can you make that experience better for everybody involved? One way is to scan the license plates as they come in. Now, this is something that dealerships already use in various different technologies. They can scan your license plate and see if your vehicle is out of alignment. They could upsell you and recommend an alignment. Now that works for everybody, but how can we take that data you’ve gathered on that license plate and make that into a better overall experience? You can use that data to see exactly how long somebody’s been at the dealership if you scan it when they come and when they leave. You know how long the appointment was and how long your customer was in that dealership. You’ve probably got some industry statistics you could work against the ideal time for somebody to be there. For example, with DaVinci, you could gather all that information. You can integrate all of your business applications to generate reports that help inform your customer’s experience in the dealership.

Now, what are you going to do with the customer while they are sitting there? Great. If you’re integrating all of these business applications, you can actually screen, pop or alert the salesperson who sold that customer the car that their customer is sitting there. You know, for lack of a better term, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their car to be serviced. As a former car salesperson, our time was not always used appropriately. You’ve got time to get up from your desk, talk to your former customers, and build those relationships. This is just an example of how Tony’s talking about leveraging AI, leveraging all of your businesses and applications, and integrating them isn’t reserved only for a call center environment. There are many other examples of retail locations where something like this could be useful.

Now there is another customer we’ve been working with various financial institutions here at AMC since I’ve been here. Voice authentication has become a very hot topic, if you will, in this space, and fraud is a big problem. Of course, we hear about it in our daily lives, identity theft, and things of that nature. Voice authentication is one way to add another layer of protection. And so with DaVinci, we’re going to be able to ensure that those that are taking phone calls can very quickly authenticate who it is that they’re speaking with and be able to log that authentication into the customer direction record so that if they have to transfer to somebody else because the person they’re speaking with doesn’t know the answer, the next person can speak with confidence almost immediately as soon as the call is transferred.

There are many ways that using DaVinci and some of the technological advances that are coming in our space to better the agent experience and customer experience and really make the most of everybody’s time while they’re on interaction or in a retail store.

Tony: And I want to add one quick point to that, David because it’s a great scenario with voice biometrics. One of the things that we did was for one of our customers, we calculated the cost savings, and it turned out that across all of their branch employees, it was saving them per call it was $29,000 a year in savings off of that just adding the voice biometrics and having the call time reduced, it saved a lot of money. So with personalization, you can find that balance, as I talked about earlier, a lot of companies are trying to take on this technology and do something with it and improve the customer experience at the same time. They’re looking at the bottom line, so adding voice authentication accomplished both. It helps you, and it helps the bank improve their customer experience because the customer doesn’t have to answer many questions about who they are.

And it also reduces the call time and gives the agent a better idea and more comfort that who they’re talking to is who they are talking to. So that’s a great example. But there are so many different ways that the industry is personalizing, and DaVinci can also help personalize.

CX Prediction 2: A continued push towards smart self-service while focusing on employee experience.

In a recent Harvard review 80% of consumers said they prefer to try and resolve issues through platforms like search engines, forums, and a brand’s website before they reach out for live assistance. This is interesting because of a lot of agent turnover being an issue right now.

What are some examples of that you’ve seen in the industry of good self service?

Tony: For me, I’ve used self-service as being on a continuum. And so there are a lot of examples of self-service, like websites that let you update your address which is an example of one side of self-service that has been done for a long time. Self-service needs to really be considered as part of the whole journey that a customer has and make sure that you are involved, all the other interactions too.

As you pointed out, I know there’s a huge trend for customers wanting to self-serve, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s just a black-and-white thing. It’s more than just that they’re going to self-serve. They also want to have light assistance or full assistance. And when that’s happening, they want that interaction flow to be maintained. They want to feel the positive interaction throughout that that that whole cycle, throughout that entire journey. So, one big example of self-service or chatbots, and so chatbots are everywhere. Unfortunately, most of them are poorly maintained or not aligned with the goals of the customer. They’re aligned with the business’s goals, and you must strike that balance so chatbots can certainly reduce the call volume and benefit both the agent and the customer if done correctly.

There’s a lot of work around this area, so those that aren’t doing it well are constantly training, monitoring, and looking at that customer data. They’re looking at how many of those interactions on the chatbot are escalating to an agent. When they do escalate to an agent, was that an appropriate path? Was it a predictable path, or were they just super frustrated with this chatbot or the website? Then they’re calling into an agent, and they are frustrated. And so, I think that that certainly self-service is a big trend, and I’m really happy to see that the industry is taking it more seriously and investing more time and in good in looking at the customer journey and building out better models than what is out there today.

David: To chime in, there are situations where customers prefer to use it. It doesn’t necessarily fall into the self-service side of things, but they want to text or chat with an agent, rather than get on the phone with them. Still, in many cases, the gatekeeper is a chatbot before it allows you to actually talk to a real person.

Personally where I run into this is when I’m trying to do something with my cell phone. I don’t want to call somebody and buy a new cell phone because I want to read everything I’ve said because you never know what might get tacked on that you didn’t remember saying yes, two, or so on. And if you have a record, it’s way easier to go back. You’re like, oh, yeah, I did ask for the screen protector, may oops, that’s my fault. But to get to that person is sometimes very frustrating. So chatbots can be excellent in pointing you in the right direction on a website or quickly linking you to a knowledge article that helps answer your question. But for a chatbot to serve a good purpose in helping employees and helping the people using them, they need to provide an easy-to-understand off-ramp to actual assistance from a real-life person.

I bet that in that Harvard survey, if they had asked those customers in the middle of trying to solve a problem if they wanted to use a chatbot or talk to a person, that same 80 % of people would have said I wish I could get a hold of a human being right now. So, it’s a fine line that the industry is trying to figure out, and there’s no right answer yet. But the answer to me that makes the most sense is to try a chatbot and see if it works.

For you, but make sure you provide that easy off-ramp to be able to get in touch with an agent. Hopefully, over time you can reduce the number of those agents that must take those requests because you can learn your lessons from why somebody is taking those off-ramps.

Tony: And that is a great point, David. That off-ramp is important. And so I think you have to look at the whole, the whole customer journey both on the, on the website and the even before even arriving at your own website what are they doing to self-serve and do research and all of that when they get on your website. I think a lot of businesses as I said earlier, they’re looking at it from their goals, what are they, what does the business trying to accomplish. 

The first thing you need to do is look at what the customer is trying to accomplish, and some of the things that we’ve done is we’ve made sure that we’re when there is an escalation to an agent. We’re making sure that we’re providing that full transcript of what happened on the chatbot, what happened on the website, passing that information hopefully into an AI. There are extra points for those businesses that take that transcript and don’t just push it to the agent expecting them to review the whole thing, but parses through it and suggest to the agent the next best steps. So that way, they can more efficiently help the customer and allow that customer to feel confident that they can self-serve, and whenever they want to engage with a live agent, they will not have to repeat that whole process. That’s a lot of what we’re doing with our customers around self-service.

It’s really trying to identify where a customer wants to start an interaction on their own and then when they want to seamlessly transition either to, as I said, either to like a light assist model or to like a full assist interaction.

CX Prediction 3: Investing in digital transformation to continue to orchestrate better experiences.

What are some examples of that you’ve noticed in the industry with investing in digital transformation can orchestrate better experiences?

Tony: So, I think a lot is going on, as I talked about when we first started around digital transformation. And in some ways, it’s becoming almost an overused phrase. We must figure out what it means, the benefits, and what technology will help with those benefits. Some vendors like Salesforce, for example, embed contact center capabilities on their own stack. And there are even some cast vendors like Twilio that are adding CRM capabilities into their stack. So these larger vendors are merging. A lot of the technologies and on, in one way, may be good for customers, but there are better trends for customers from our discussions.

Many businesses are trying to go beyond just handling voice, SMS, and chat. They want to build that seamless experience for their customers and agents. And so, our view is that orchestration interaction orchestration is where the industry needs to go. It is not just offering you all the tech stack’s pieces. Still, it’s orchestrating all those pieces into a seamless experience that improves the customer’s and agent’s interactions. So there’s much investment around transformation, and so for us, when we’re working with customers, we really want to take more time and figure out their goals and what they have for their customers.

How are you creating a more streamed lined CX?

Tony: We worked with a customer who they are in the business of delivering cement. We have geolocation tracking of the truck. As that location as the truck gets closer to the onsite location, the crew has to get ready to accept this wet cement into their foundations. We alert the form on site that the cement is coming. We look at the journey for the customer that goes beyond its spans with the contact center and goes into brick and mortar and is an example of field service. So we’re looking at it as our DaVinci platform allows you to manage all these interactions and then orchestrate them for the best customer outcomes for the agents, users, or employees.

The other thing we’ve found is a lot of businesses are being pitched and need to abandon all the investments they’ve already made. Many companies have invested heavily in their premise communication systems,. But they are being told that they can’t transform unless they drop all of that and move over to a CCaS or something like that. With DaVinci, that’s the other thing we do for our customers. We’re helping them add modern services like transcription, voice biometrics, and geolocation to their existing infrastructure. Where businesses are slowing down and trying to leverage as much of their existing investment as they can also while dramatically improving their customer experience.

That’s another way in our model for DaVinci. We can orchestrate interactions across all those different stacks, from premise communication to cloud communication to transcription from other providers to voice biometrics, etcetera. We can combine all of that in more of a seamless experience.

David: One thing that you mentioned, Tony was there are those large companies like Salesforce that are really trying to put their arms around all of it and own every piece of it. And one thing that is to be wary of in that regard is that you become beholden at that time to the road maps of these larger companies. You’re allowed to look beyond the roadmaps of these large companies. And one thing that DaVinci gives you is options. This isn’t necessarily a critique of them as much as it is just a reality of a large business. You have roadmaps, you must stick with them, or else things will never get done. But the benefit of the DaVinci setting is that it gives you options to expand that functionality and not an obligation to wait for somebody to tell you when you can do it. 

Tony: We try to promote our customers to own their transformation. There are a lot of vendors out there that are preaching that you’ll transform if you invest in their stack. As David pointed out, it’s not to be critical of any of those vendors, but the most powerful transformation is those companies own themselves where they look at what they’re trying to transform, how they’re looking to transform their customer’s experience, not necessarily just taking advice from one vendor, but looking at all the different investments companies made the best decisions they can about how to orchestrate all of that to improve customer service.

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