Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms
Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven by social, cultural, and economic changes. And yes, “digital” is the fodder fuelling these experiences. So, putting it in simpler words, the quality of the digital experiences businesses deliver to their customers is foundational to their success in today’s landscape.
After all, products and services are commodities that can be easily imitated and lose their differentiating value in the long run. But it’s the emotions and feelings that customers take away that matter the most and create memorable brands at the end of the day.
But, it’s not just about the customers anymore. To create exceptional experiences, it is vital to focus on providing meaningful employee experiences. After all, fulfilling even a minor customer request requires coordination amongst different departments at the workplace. A great employee experience makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and serve customers better. Moreover, it is only an engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic workforce that would work towards reaching outstanding CSAT scores.
Hence, intelligent, future-oriented organizations understand that they cannot separate customer (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies into silos anymore. As important as it is for CX and EX to function outside the formerly created vacuum, it is equally vital to strengthen “experience” strategies with thoughtful user experiences (UX) and flexible multi-experiences (MX).
As put forth by leading analyst firm Gartner, “MX, UX, CX, and EX (or, simply “total experience”) are inextricably intertwined in the digital experience economy.”
In its latest report, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022,” Gartner defines?total experience (TX)?as “a business strategy?that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.”
Through holistic management of the expectations of various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and vendors, TX boosts confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
So, how can an organization optimize experiences for its customers, employees, and other stakeholders?
The simple answer lies in?enhancing the everyday interactions?that make up a considerable chunk of a typical day at work. And mature conversational AI technologies and platforms can play a significant role in this.
Let’s explore further.
Understanding Total Experience From An Organizational Perspective
By 2024, Gartner estimates that?organizations providing TX will outperform competitors by 25%?in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. Additionally, by 2026,?60% of large enterprises?are expected to employ a total experience strategy to transform their business models and achieve “world-class customer and employee advocacy levels,” in which both groups are motivated to promote the corporate brand.
So, what is total experience from an organizational perspective? TX consists of the following four components?
Jason Wong, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, rightly stated, “While excellence in one area is valuable, the organization as a whole can be further strengthened if these four disciplines are intertwined as a Total experience (TX) strategy so that they mutually reinforce one another.”
As discussed above, everyday business interactions amongst the different stakeholders, including customers, employees, support agents, suppliers, and vendors, drive overall experience management in any organization.
These stakeholders demand?new-world experiences?that are?A) personalized, B) consistent, C) resolution-driven, and D) enable faster decision-making. Often, these interactions are routine and repetitive, leaving massive room to automate and optimize them using the latest technologies. Additionally, even though managing individual stakeholder experiences may be effortless, problems arise at the points where they intersect.
With an explosion of interactions taking place across different channels, how can organizations deliver new-world experiences for everyone at scale and ensure seamless TX? Moreover, most prevailing digital technologies in the workplace fail to understand the context and respond conversationally to customer and employee queries, consequently increasing human dependencies and operational costs.
The solution lies in deploying?AI-first conversational technologies?that work in tandem with chatbots, voice bots, and other virtual assistants to offer contextual, meaningful, and personalized engagement to customers and employees, and a rich user experience with real-time alerts, nudges, and contextual information.
Conversational AI Platforms For Total Experience (TX)
An integrated conversational AI platform brings CX and UX together by helping users build automated workflows and deliver intelligent conversations that delight customers and engage employees.
Conversational AI platforms ensure a robust total experience (TX) by integrating powerful UX and MX and building intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that provide user-friendly, consistent, multilingual experiences across numerous social, messaging, web, and voice channels.
Customer Experience
Chatbots and voice bots deliver exceptional, quick, personalized, and resolution-driven customer support. These bots leverage powerful AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand customer sentiment, learn from past customer behavior, and recommend the right products based on their interests, activities, and profiles.
Employee Experience
A conversational AI platform can make employees’ lives easier by building chatbot personas for every need. Be it HR, IT helpdesk, business intelligence (BI), or the intranet, employee-facing bots answer simple and complex queries, perform day-to-day tasks, and fetch relevant information.
Additionally, agent assist bots simplify the access to the CRM system and knowledge base for agents, providing contextual information and suggestions about the customers in the middle of interactions.
User Experience
A chatbot’s UX comprises its usability, accessibility, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Enhancing these three aspects constitutes an exceptional user experience. Simply put, the faster the bot is able to understand and execute the user’s request, the better will be the UX.
With the latest advancements in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, a conversational AI platform can ensure users have a seamless, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees, understand their needs better and quicker, and offer maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions.
Multi-Experience
Conversational AI platforms allow users to experience personalized engagement across multiple channels (social, web, voice, etc.), through multiple devices (mobile, desktop, smart speakers, etc.), and across multiple languages (multilingual functionality).
How Can Acuvate Help?
Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that helps clients build intelligent chat and voice bots using its enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies and armed with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by 150+ customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.
What’s more, you can offer customers the convenience of conversational IVR support with text-to-speech bots and the option to interact in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.
It is a low-code platform that can be deployed both on-cloud and on-premise and provides integrations with 100+ enterprise systems, including Office365, PowerBI, Oracle, SAP, and much more.
To know more about BotCore, please feel free to?schedule a personalized consultation?with our experts