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As a business owner, you want to make sure your customers are getting the best possible experience when they interact with your brand. With the ever-growing competition in the market, it is important that customers have an enjoyable and helpful journey to choose one company over its competition. In today’s world, customer experience has become a major factor in determining the success of a business. Everyone wants to provide an exceptional experience for their customers and make sure that they come back for repeat business. This means ensuring they have a pleasant, efficient, and effective experience when they interact with your products or services. To make sure your customers have the best experience possible, you can incorporate a variety of strategies, including AI chatbots. So, are you ready to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement? You can supercharge your customers’ experience with simple tactics that go a long way. In this article, we will explore the best strategies to make customers feel valued.
What strategies did businesses increase their investment into for the last year?
Some 71% of customer experience decision-makers worldwide say that a broken customer service experience damages a company’s ability to generate revenues but less than half (48%) of US executives planned to invest in it last year, according to the August 2022 PwC survey. What does it mean? Businesses understand that customer experience is crucial for brand success but plan to invest more in digital transformation (53%), IT (52%), and cybersecurity and privacy (49%). Customer experience is connected to every element of the brand strategy and digital transformation is one of the key directions for improving it by providing more digital instruments – for communication, sales, marketing, data collection, data privacy, and others. Customers tend to prefer brands that provide more digitalized ways of online communication – a trend that increased even more after the pandemic. It also helps keep customers longer and makes them more loyal therefore should be part of the mainstream of the business. It is not surprising that 40% of the company plan to invest in innovations and 38% plan to focus on marketing, communications, and sales.
There are plenty of technologies that come to mind when thinking of the above directions of development companies’ plans for 2023. When looking for a solution that would cover most of them yet is fast to implement, easy to work with, flexible, and affordable to the company budget, the AI chatbot is popping up in the first position. It is not a coincidence that in April’22 CBInsights shared that the AI chatbot is the Number 1 solution chosen by the leaders of various industries. The reason is that while the conversational AI module in the chatbot allows for keeping the conversation, recognizing customer questions, and responding to them instantly, the other functionalities of the chatbot allow the business to use it actively in sales and marketing campaigns online and offline, to collect customer behavior data (replacing the cookies), taking inquiries, reservations and automating other routine tasks, entertaining customers and more.
What should be the leading priorities of marketers worldwide to improve customer experience in 2023?
As you can see on the graphic, 43% of people responded that creating and prioritizing a strategy is the way to improve customer experience. But what these s
trategies could be? One of the ways that are proven to improve CX is interacting with customers in a more innovative and engaging way along with a more personalized experience at any time of the day. That can be solved with a digital assistant on your side (site) – an AI chatbot that could take the responsibility to take care of customers at midnight, at 3 am without any need for breaks or sleep or whenever customers want to communicate with your brand without your employees’ interference.
How the AI chatbot is assisting the leading priorities of the marketers and helping them to improve CX?
- AI chatbots could improve the overall user experience by smoothly guiding your website visitors through the marketing and sales funnels within, created by your team, 24/7/365 instantly. Directing customers from all your social media accounts, email campaigns, or other places and from offline (via QR code) to one place could help all customers be served on time without any waiting from you to respond. Directing them to a precise webpage with concrete element opening in the chatbot from anywhere also is a win-win strategy for a more personalized experience. These functionalities are becoming very useful for those companies with a focus on a seamless omnichannel experience (21% of marketers worldwide have such priority).
- An AI chatbot also collects first and zero-party customer data that can be analyzed and used to improve your products, services, and overall business processes by giving your customers exactly what they want. 25% of the marketers have a such goal for 2023 and 31% go further into planning to utilize better the collected data. With the death of cookies in 2024, AI chatbots are taking their places as an alternative.
- Linking buttons, texts, or images on the website (with CTA) to an exact place in the AI chatbot (forms to fill out, cards with images with valuable information) is another way of more targeted strategy, for marketing and sales processes, and more personalized experience on the website. Only people that clicked would see the information that you give in the chatbot – those who are really interested in the information you are giving them will receive it instantly in a more innovative and interactive way. It’s the customers’ true needs and desires that matter and if you give them what they are searching for instantly, they could become loyal.
- Using gamification in the AI chatbot by creating fun games within the AI chatbot or by using its functionalities would help customers both interact with it and receive discounts, promo codes, or prizes therefore also improving overall satisfaction with the brand.
- Including conversational AI trained by your team to answer what your company wants customers to know is better than always trying to answer on time, but your lines are busy. Train your AI chatbot to the top 100 topics that your customers ask questions for. The top frequently asked question could be more than 100 – the more the better. Small talk is also a must if you want your customers to feel as if they are talking to a human being that turns out to be a helpful digital assistant with its own avatar and name and is always available to chat.
Factors that contribute to providing a successful customer experience and how the AI chatbot helps:
57% said that resolving a customer’s problems and issues is the way to provide a successful user experience. How to do it easily and fast? Train your AI chatbot on your site to help customers what they are looking for, answering their questions about your product and services, providing the most important information for their purchase or subscription, and making sure the AI chatbot can help with the most common problems and issues your customers have. Your AI chatbot could be the digital employee that takes care of many customers at once, in many languages at any time.
45% of businesses believe real-time connection is the way to provide a successful customer experience. Yet, many businesses struggle to connect with customers in real time because they need employees to do it and be available 24/7. Most regular businesses operate 9-to-6 and do not have employees to cover the communication during the night hours, weekends, and holidays. This is also the more expensive working hours. Yet, up to 80% of the communication is routine questions and tasks. An AI chatbot, on the other hand, is more affordable than ever before, like 1-2 coffees a day to serve without the need for breaks. It works 24/7, covers all shifts, and provides real-time assistance. An easy solution that needs proper planning, implementation, and maintenance to work in favor of all your customers, save time for all your employees for more valuable tasks, and save resources to the business to further grow.
40% of people in the research said that offering personalized experiences also contribute to the best CX. Well, everyone wants to feel special and valued by their favorite brand. That means making strategies and thinking of ways to provide a more personalized journey. We know that there are many ways of offering such an experience, but let’s share with you how this could happen in an AI chatbot on your site – the center of your business eco-system. People think of brands with a such innovative solution for self-service to be tech-savvy (87.62%), customer-oriented (83.81%), and proactive (85.71%), according to GoodFirms research (Usage & Statistics for an Engaging Online Chatbot Design). Many businesses may not be aware that AI chatbots can provide exclusive content, tailored specifically to individuals or groups of customers, partners, or other stakeholders. Such secret content can be used to engage with customers or partners in a more meaningful, or even fun way. It can be triggered by a question and provide personalized information that could help to improve customer service and enhance both website performance and user experience. It could be accessed also by a link to a concrete element in the chatbot sent via an email campaign or other ways online, or by a QR code shared offline.
Educating and advising customers along with nurturing them is also part of the personalized experience (30% of the businesses have such a goal) because giving them, for example, easy access to your top products and services or providing helpful how-to materials on how to use them in the AI chatbot is a way to help your customers choose your business over the competition.
34% of people think that collecting and using customer feedback to improve the CX is another way to do it right. Well, of course, considering what your customers truly need and want is the best strategy because you are answering to their desires, but sometimes this is difficult to accomplish. People need to be understood by the brand, need personal experience, to be taken care of at any time of the day, mostly after business hours, providing them with alternatives if you do not have the right thing they are looking for – instead of going to your competitors, and that how you can win their loyalty and retain them longer than expected. Using an AI chatbot for customer communication, your team will have full control not only over the content and the functionalities, but also over customer behavior statistics and other data to allow your company knows at any time what the users search for, are interested in, or complain about, to help discover new trends and make more intelligent decisions. This will also help create more accurate buyer personas (factor in the successful user experience for 20% of the businesses).
Aspects of poor customer experience or what not to do with your customers to not lose them, and how an AI chatbot can help:
34% of the respondent in the research “The 2022 State of Digital Customer Experience” by Verint said that it takes them multiple attempts to get a simple answer to their question. That’s not a way to impress. Having an available AI digital assistant to answer 24/7/365 could solve such issues so users/customers will be satisfied and employees – free from routine questions and tasks.
25% are frustrated when having to wait on hold when trying to speak to a customer service representative. Well, everyone wants to receive answers in real-time instantly. If you do not want your employees to be exhausted and stressed every day and to be more motivated to work without needing to answer boring questions, think of implementing an AI chatbot to help with such issues. This leads to the next one – 22% of people are not happy when talking to a bot to find out it does not understand them. It is easily avoidable. How the chatbot responds depends only on the business and its team, how they trained it, and if it was the right way. There are many mistakes that could be avoided to have the best functioning chatbot that does not make mistakes and does not leave a bad impression of your brand. Make sure your team follows best practices in chatbot creation, maintenance, and further development.
10% of the customers are truly frustrated by a company not understanding their interests and “mass-marketing” to them. Again, the AI chatbot could provide them with a more personalized experience, and the company could learn more about its customers too.
Which teams in one company should be responsible for the overall customer experience… and the AI chatbot?
There is not a single answer to this question, because big companies have and hierarchy and many levels of teams that are responsible for different topics because of the specific of the company industry but in fact every department, and every team member should think about the end-buyer satisfaction. Everything is connected to one company’s success. If it does not have a well-planned budget and strategy, everything could go wrong affecting the end-buyer, even if you are a manager, sales or marketing representative or other. We are only concerned about this 2.8% that think no one owns it to care for the CX. We hope they already have corrected their mistakes and are now successful by realizing that customers matter most along with employees and overall company success depends on satisfied customers.
As the AI chatbot is an extremely flexible software solution with various ways to use and goals to accomplish, for it to be successfully implemented and used it is also a team effort. Every department shall be not only aware of its existence, but also actively participate in the planning process, in the results review, and in the chatbot improvement and further development efforts.
Implementing an AI chatbot can greatly enhance your customers’ experience by providing quick and efficient responses to their inquiries, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving your overall business operations. To ensure the success of your AI chatbot, it’s important to tailor its responses to your brand’s voice, integrate it seamlessly into your website, and continuously monitor and update its performance so to provide the best customer care and experience. With the right strategy, an AI chatbot can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience and driving business growth. Are you sure you still do not want to improve your overall CX by using such an efficient solution? Start taking care to grow faster and stay competitive! Contact us to find the answers to your questions!