Talking To Robots: Chatbots & The Future Of Customer Experience Management

By now it’s common knowledge that the customer experience is the most important factor of your business. After all, no matter what industry you are in, if you aren’t meeting your customer’s needs, then you aren’t operating at your best. With roughly one in three customers saying that they’d walk away from a brand they love due to a single bad experience, business leaders are realizing that they can’t afford to offer anything short of the best for their customers. 

We can see this in a number of trends that have taken hold over the past few years. Even before the pandemic, we saw many companies reworking how they interacted with their customers, especially online. Once business leaders realized the scale of COVID-19’s disruption, a new wave of digital transformation has followed, as companies worked to stay active and competitive. But more than just helping businesses survive, these new technologies are enabling the development of new channels of business and new ways to engage with customers.

Since many businesses lack the numbers to fully man the help desks and operate other aspects of the customer experience, they have heavily relied on chatbots to fill the void. This has had several advantages, not the least of which being that Millennial-aged consumers increasingly expect and demand the kind of seamless services and 24x7 availability that chatbots make a reality. 

There is still room for improvement though: with recent advancements to AI and machine learning technology, companies can greatly expand their customer experience management. Right now, virtual assistants often feel like a replacement for flesh-and-blood CX employees, but when they are supported by in-depth consumer data and conversational AI, they can be better than any human agent, able to easily understand, retain, and relay information so that your customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves. 

Ultimately, the goal needs to be to invest in technologies that provide consumers with a convenient omnichannel experience. One of the main reasons Amazon is a CX leader is that it has tweaked every touchpoint in the consumer journey so that it’s as simple as possible, while also providing customers several different options based on their personal preferences. Returns can either be handled through the mail or via return kiosks, and whether you are interacting with Amazon through its website, the app, or social media, it all comes together as one cohesive experience. 

Virtual CX agents can help companies achieve that same level of convenience and simplicity, allowing consumers to interact with their brands anytime and anywhere while providing an experience that’s on part with the best human agent. All that businesses need to do to get there is to recognize the technology’s value beyond short-term survival during the pandemic, leveraging it to take their customer experience management to new heights!