Customer Spirit & AI - An Insightful Collaboration

--By CB Rajesh--

Today companies track customer behavior by cognitive means to promote their product & services. All that the customer needs to do is either search for a product online or click a banner inadvertently, it’s guaranteed that he or she will see the same product popping up on almost every web page or app they browse for the next few days. Now, this is the strength of digital footprint and tracking.

What if the same technology capability can be used to enhance customer experience? We then need to use the same digital footprint to design customer-friendly products & services. Such initiatives can be successful when we develop and use these capabilities to map, measure & track customers’ journeys end to end. This will include journeys covering purchase, usage, troubleshooting, exit, etc.  

Can we build intelligence to check for failures or breakdowns in the customer journey, if a browser or an app fails to load or log in, or if something goes wrong when the customer is transacting?  Is there a mechanism to trace these incidents and fix them even before the customer complains? In a different scenario, if the customer has given an adverse rating during an interaction then this intelligence can be used to fix the issue before the customer initiates the same journey again. It will also be an excellent opportunity to take the feedback to check his new experience and let the customer realize that the organization has worked on the feedback. This will reflect true customer spirit being displayed in customers’ minds.

In a nutshell, CRM systems are required to evolve beyond as a tool for customer interactions and start registering failures in customer journeys proactively, raising alarms, guiding fixing issues & measure effectiveness post troubleshooting. Future CRM must encompass features like customer journey monitoring, spotting opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell, and a tool for customer interaction along with a feedback-capturing mechanism. 

Today customers expect organizations to know all failures and take action proactively. They also want the organizations to communicate and give a dashboard view of all the deliveries. Customers are looking to reduce their efforts and customer-friendly brands are lapping up this opportunity to empower their end users by crafting friendly & transparent communication strategies. A payment reminder is also a communication; it depends on how and when you transmit them.

Today when we mention customer experience & AI together, the first thing that strikes our mind is a chatbot serving customers without human intervention. We now need to explore how the use of AI can transform customer journeys by designing personalized products and predictive service management. The key is to reduce customer efforts by gathering information about each customer’s journey without grouping & generalizing.