Tag: improve customer experience

“A simple rule: always give people more than they expect.”    –  Nelson Boswell 

The cycle of business starts and ends with customers. Keeping them satisfied and happy is the number one rule of any business that dreams of being successful. Customer needs and expectations never cease, so businesses should always be prepared to meet and exceed their needs. Artificial Intelligence has been a substantial help in this area since the late 19th century, and it consistently finds new innovative ways to amplify its presence in modern businesses.

Meeting Customer Needs and Exceeding Expectations

Recent research reported that a good number of executives have already planned to invest more in rising technology to gain a competitive advantage. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, almost all businesses were forced to move to an online platform to survive, further underscoring the need to adopt AI technology.

It is extremely imperative to recognize and address the needs, desires, and emotions of people which change from moment to moment. Businesses have to provide their customers and clients with care beyond purchases and respond to the intricacies in their lives. In a world that moves forward so fast, it’s best not to fall behind.

Read more: Realizing Self- Service in Modern Customer Experiences

What Is Artificial Intelligence and How Does It Impact Customer Experience?

The textbook definition of Artificial Intelligence is – a semblance of human-like intelligence processed by machines, especially computer systems. AI is used by developers to:

• efficiently perform mundane tasks that humans otherwise do.
• connect with customers.
• recognize patterns.
• solve problems.

AI Customer experience is when artificial intelligence tools are used to learn about customers and improve their business experience. The AI technologies that are famously emerging include machine learning, natural language processing, automation, chatbots, virtual assistants, and even enhanced customer experience platforms.

There are three major ways in which AI impacts Customer Experience –

1. Better Understanding Of Customer

Artificial Intelligence combined with machine learning enhances the gathering and analyzing of social and factual data of customers, which then facilitates businesses to gain an accurate understanding of their customers. AI is known for continuously learning and improving from the data it surveys. This enables it to predict customer behavior perfectly.

2. Real-time Decision Making

Making decisions in real-time is the ability of AI to collect fresh data from current interaction with a customer and make a decision with near-zero delay. It is a very effective marketing strategy and often leads to predictive analysis, which is the process of analyzing statistics, data mining, and modeling to make accurate predictions.

3. Hyper-Personalization

Artificial Intelligence, along with all its advanced technologies, proffers content that is specifically relevant to the customer. This eradicates the need to search for services the customer requires manually and adds a layer of comfort to the business and its customization techniques.

Top Ways Businesses Use AI To Tweak Customer Experience

Following are the top 8 utilities that Artificial Intelligence provides to boost customer experience –

1. Personalization

Businesses can easily gain a clear picture of their customer preferences and requirements by using AI and ML technologies which acquire and analyzes social, factual, and behavioral data. AI is built to predict client behavior by regularly surveying and improving the data it collects. This facilitates companies to analyze customer demographics and personal preferences. This, in turn, highlights the relevant products and resources during the browsing process.

2. Chatbots

A chatbot is a conversational AI using machine learning and natural language processing. It is automated and programmed to pretend to be human and carry out programming tasks based on specific triggers. Its unique ability is to conveniently and efficiently generate conversations between two people.

The most commonly found type of chatbot is a “question-answer bot” —this form of chatbot refrains from using advanced artificial intelligence but instead accesses a smaller knowledge base and utilizes pattern recognition.

Artificial Intelligence powered Chatbots make a business’s presence accomplished by allowing customers to find what they are looking for while simultaneously delivering a seamless experience.

Did You Know: 35% of customers want to see chatbots being used more often to improve communication and offer a better experience overall.

The best examples of Chatbots are – Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Using simple rules and past interactions, bots provide insightful replies to any query, making their responses accurate, short, and creative.

3. Predictive Analysis

Predictive analytics, by definition, is to use data collected to predict a business’s future. It utilizes statistical algorithms blended with internal and external data to foresee future trends, ultimately enabling businesses to optimize inventory, enhance delivery times, boost sales, and reduce operational costs. A more accurate and punctual prediction occurs when Artificial Intelligence is added to the mix. Predictive analytics can be used by advanced analytics tools and machine learning models across any industry or business function.

4. Voice Recognition

The voice recognition model functions purely with the aid of AI to

• analyze the user’s voice and language,
• learn the words spoken,
• and then bring forth outputs with transcription accuracy as text data on a screen or model content.

With the help of this technology, devices can interact and respond to human questions in uncannily natural language.

With the ability to understand and converse with human language, Voice AI has opened up great opportunities for businesses to serve their customers better. It efficiently speeds up processes, increases productivity, and scales operations.

Approximately 55% of virtual assistant users prefer speech recognition apps be they proffer a complete hands-off operation of devices.

Examples of businesses that integrated AI for voice recognition and have successfully replaced touch-screen devices are – Amazon Echo, Siri, Google Assistant, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and a few others.

5. Sentiment Analysis

A sentiment analysis system collects specific customer feedback and uses it to improve company products and services. When AI technologies are fused with this system, it can identify objects or situations that customers feel any negative emotions towards as expressed in text. AI understands the undertone of a statement rather than simply noting a negative or positive connotation.

Sentiment Analysis is majorly utilized by marketers to better understand their consumers’ sentiments, beliefs, and motives perfectly to make advertising to specific groups effective. It has a wide array of benefits ranging from patient insights and online reputation management to competitor analysis and product development.

Almost all social media platforms use Sentiment Analytics powered by AI. This way brands and companies can keep track of the content being shared and censor or filter content that could evoke negative emotions and cause problems.

6. Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey map as the name suggests, is essentially the visual representation of the customer’s journey from brand discovery to purchase and post-purchase. It enables businesses to retrace a customer’s footsteps and see where their services might need any improvements or upgrades.

All through this journey, AI and Machine Learning play a vital role in ensuring a headache-free shopping experience. There are three essential stages to customer shopping: the Pre-Purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. With the assistance of AI and ML, customers thread these maps and help brands analyze and prioritize activities that impact customers, boosting internal collaboration and coordination.

The benefits of creating a customer journey map are that it helps:

• streamline the customer experience,
• optimize customer service costs,
• accelerate proactive sales solutions to customer problems, and lastly, boost customer retention rate.

Examples of businesses using customer journey mapping are – Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike.

7. Fraud Detection

Fraud detection is another surprising area that AI has a distinguished hold over. AI can work with internal security to help organizations improve and protect corporate activities. Businesses can use AI to examine large quantities of exchanges and unravel misrepresentation patterns.

In the case of online fraud detection and prevention, machine learning consists of a collection of AI algorithms that are specially trained with the company’s data to suggest risk rules. The business owner can then enforce the rules to block or allow certain user actions, such as suspicious logins, identity theft, or sketchy transactions.

When fraud detection is handed over to AI and Machine Learning, businesses reap great benefits like – faster and more effective detection, reduced manual review time, faster predictions with bigger databases, and cost-effective solutions.

8. Personal Data Protection

AI and Data Protection are like two sides of the same coin; both are very important, and one cannot progress without the other. We all see and know that AI technology is advancing rapidly; it raises important questions about the use of personal data and the protection and storage of said data in AI systems.

AI is frequently used to minimize the risk of privacy breaches by encrypting personal data and detecting potential cybercrime incidents. It is, therefore, pivotal for businesses to maintain a balance between technological advancements and artificial intelligence with respect for data protection rules and guidelines.

The main benefit of Data Protection Artificial Intelligence is the elimination of human errors and its keen sense for spotting new trends and patterns.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and many other grandiose organizations have implemented this system, and many more are predicted to follow.

Read more: How AI and ML are reshaping customer experience.

AI In Action – Use Cases

AI has been implemented in virtually every facet of our lives and in every industry imaginable. Here are 3 Use Cases that will give you a gist of how they can be applied successfully.

1. Chatbots Creating Engaging Learning Experiences

Learning experiences become unique and personalized when the right assistance is provided at each stage of learning. That’s where leading educational institutions are now deploying Automated Intelligence-driven ecosystems to facilitate students to interact with AI-enabled Teaching Assistants (AiTA). The system, when tightly integrated with other Teaching Assistant Bots, enables improved interaction, easy instructor-led training, and enhnaces student-instructor relationship.

2. Simplifying Claims Management for Legal Firms

A typical compensation claims processing takes up to three years for case settlement costing an average of $85000. It’s often challenging for legal firms to balance time, money, and the cases in hand. That’s why they are now implementing AI and machine learning to improve performance efficiency. Utilizing AI and machine learning to settle claims can help legal firms reduce costs up to 57%.

3. Netflix Gets You!

Netflix is the largest streaming platform, with more than 200 million customers globally. It gained a majority of its popularity due to its personalization feature. This streaming service uses AI to create a personalized home screen interface for individual subscribers and accounts. When viewers create a new account, they are directed to pick a few of their favorite TV series and movies. The AI at the crux of Netflix analyzes the data fed to it and provides recommendations similar to the favorites picked by the user. It continues to customize the suggestions displayed based on what the user watches.

4. Rolls-Royce Rolls Out Smart, Responsible Manufacturing

To exemplify the impact of AI on Predictive Analytics, we can look at Rolls-Royce, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aircraft engines. It deployed predictive analytics to help drastically reduce the amount of carbon produced in its engine’s product while simultaneously optimizing maintenance to assist clients and keep their planes flying longer.

5. Ask Julie!

“Ask Julie” is Amtrak’s virtual assistant. Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company of the United States has implemented this chatbot to the best advantage. Ask Julie has successfully helped provide Amtrak provide a seamless customer experience to “over 375,000 customers on their website each day and over 30 million passengers on over 300 trains each year.” The result – an 8X return on investment, more effective customer services. and reduced email costs.

Finding The Right AI Partner – A Few Tips

Digitalizing a business can be very daunting, especially when you want to integrate Artificial Intelligence into its core. Finding a partner who understands you and can communicate well with you is quite hard to find, but you must not give up hope! Keep looking because it is better to spend a little more at the start and have a quality setup rather than spend less and have a wobbly foundation that could jeopardize your whole AI implementation. Here are a few tips to keep in mind while looking for a capable AI partner –

1. Priorities

When looking for your potential AI partners, choose someone who can help the business and its employees prioritize and manage workloads.

2. Comprehend The Difference Between Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence

Although the two may sound like they perform the same functions, do not be fooled. They each have their own region of expertise so look for someone who acknowledges that.

3. Invest In The Right Tools

In the current economy, businesses can not afford to splurge money on luxuries. Pick a partner who understands your company’s budget and can plan a perfect setup for you.

How Fingent Can Help Seamlessly Leverage AI For Customer Experience 

Artificial Intelligence is a wide ocean of opportunities, if you have the right swimming gear, you can glide on its surface. Making the right decisions and trusting the right people with your projects should not be taken lightly. Fingent is committed to providing impactful software solutions to meet business goals seamlessly. Our certified experts focus on client-centered transparency and offer complete services with a wide range of Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Our team can boost your business to be more efficient and robust through intelligent technology. We have nearly two decades of experience and completely understand our client’s needs and requirements. Give us a call and let us know how we can help you.

Building Ground-breaking Customer Experiences With Augmented Reality

For the unversed, experiential marketing is a unique and effective way to build brand awareness through face-to-face connections with consumers. Unlike traditional or online marketing efforts, experiential marketing engages all the five senses that bring about emotions to form lasting memories and drive brand loyalty. It allows you to connect with your customers in the most relatable way while building brand awareness and loyalty.

So, how can companies effectively incorporate experiential marketing to make their products stand out? The answer is quite simple: by embracing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality technology boosts experiential marketing by allowing consumers to interact with products or services with improved personalization.

Read more: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality Detailed With Real-life Examples 

Benefits Of Using AR In Marketing

As stores closed their doors and people remained indoors, Augmented Reality has received a lot of attention over the last year and will become essential for retailers as stores reopen worldwide.

AR is bringing the in-store buying experience into consumers’ homes. Consumers can now virtually experience how a cute summer dress, a pair of sunglasses, or sneakers will look on them. As a result, AR boosts the customer’s confidence when buying online. AR is also an excellent solution for people who are worried about trying products such as garments or footwear that numerous other hands have touched before them. The technology allows consumers to make decisions safely, without physically touching sample products kept in the shops’ display racks.

Read more: How Top Brands Embrace Augmented Reality For Immersive Customer Experiences 

Sephora, a well-known cosmetic brand, has experienced great success with its Augmented Reality marketing strategy. The brand uses face recognition to help customers try makeup products before buying them in-store with their Virtual Artist app. Another example, Snapchat, which uses AR ads via snap filters.

Augmented Reality enables brands to show their customers what makes their products or services great instead of simply sending out marketing literature and thus allows them to connect with their customers better. This helps brands deliver memorable customer experiences and reduce costly returns.

Benefits Of Using AR In Experiential Marketing

1. Boost Sales

Let’s assume that you decide to re-decor your room. You will probably go through magazines and even visualize the furniture in the desired spaces. However, most often, you end up achieving a completely different outcome than what was intended.

So, that’s where AR comes into the picture. All you need to do is point your smartphone in the desired space, and you will be able to view (virtually) how your room would appear with all the desired items in place. This eliminates all the tedious trials and errors that can often lead to disappointing results. So, isn’t this unique and immersive approach a great way to attract your customers?

Read more: What are 3D Web Configurators? How do they Boost E-Commerce Sales and Drive Customer Satisfaction? 

2. Save Unnecessary Marketing Costs

If you think that the new-age technology of AR and VR would cost you a fortune, you’re wrong. With advances in technology, gadgets and other technology components are becoming cheaper. For instance, AR ads are more affordable than traditional mediums.

AR’s targeted and personalized approach helps save up a lot from your budget compared to the conventional ways of communication. Additionally, it can be used for marketing campaigns as it is a highly efficient tool for advertisers.

3. Overcome Language Barrier

There’s no denying that people are more attracted to visuals than texts. As a result, visual images seem to have a language of their own. Both AR and VR use visualization to their advantage and excel in the process of communicating through moving images. While you may need a language to operate at the base level, users can easily find what they are looking for using the multiple options available.

4. Make Content That Goes Viral In The Social Space

Given the situation we are living in, social media has never been more relevant. It has changed the rules of advertising, and everybody is adapting to it. Advertisers are leaving no stone unturned to ensure their content reaches every potential customer of their brand.

Both Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies have the potential to make your content go viral. It is not only engaging and entertaining but also fascinating. The content is compelling enough to attract people of targeted age groups and helps communicate the brand’s message correctly.

For example, recently, Inphantry, a Boston-based digital ad agency, orchestrated an immersive AR pop-up exhibition in a Houston shopping mall. This was done to promote Nike’s AJXX8 sneaker, its latest addition to the Air Jordan line. Customers were given challenges such as dribbling, jumping, etc., wearing the sneakers and the Jordan branded bracelet with an RFID chip to track their scores.

On completion of the challenge, the high-scorers could experience the Air Jordan pop-up museum and lounge. Additionally, the participants were encouraged to share their pictures (of their experience) on social media. This strategy attracted over 2500 users and created the much-needed buzz around the newly launched sneakers.

5. Conduct Virtual Events

The pandemic has wreaked havoc in our lives both physically as well as emotionally. Most people are still not open to the idea of going out in a crowd, even at the cost of missing something important. In such cases, AR and VR technology comes to the rescue. The immersive technology allows the audience to access desired events virtually. Considering the times we live, immersive technologies are indeed a boon!

AR and VR platforms enable brands to engage and launch their offerings by organizing virtual corporate events, expos, and conferences.

6. Fulfill Training Needs

If any of your products or services requires technical training to understand its aspects, VR technology is what you need. It provides a personalized and interactive experience where the user can understand the product/service virtually. Moreover, this approach is highly effective as it can be re-run multiple times.

Additionally, the user can practice using the VR headset for as long as desired. This reduces any operational risks that the user could experience while using the actual product and helps educate them about it skillfully. That said, using AR/VR technology for training your users is more fun than traditional training sessions.

Read more: How Virtual Reality Improves The Standard of Medical Education and Training

7. Enhance Customer Service

The main goal of any business is to ensure that their customers are satisfied and thus increase sales. AR and VR technology can help educate customers in a fun way and help them make informed decisions. This prevents any conflict of ideas that may arise in the consumer’s mind. Thus, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality help in increasing customer satisfaction and sales.

Scale Your Marketing Efforts With AR

Summing up, it can be said that businesses must earnestly consider using Augmented Reality to boost experiential marketing and create ground-breaking experiences that will set them apart from others.

If you’re looking for a unique and one-of-kind opportunity for marketing and advertising, you can collaborate with Fingent. We software development experts offer immersive and interactive experiential marketing solutions using AR and VR. Explore our offerings by simply giving us a call, and we will be delighted to help.

How Extended Reality Is Transforming Business Environments?

Picture yourself diving into crystal-clear Grecian waters or taking a walk on the moon, all the while sitting in the comfort of your home.  As fantastical as this may seem now, Extended Reality is making this possible as we speak. What is Extended reality and what are its powerful real-world applications? Let’s check.

Understanding What Extended Reality Is

Extended Reality is a blanket term that encompasses all virtual and real environments generated by computer technology. This includes components such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality. Extended Reality is poised to completely revamp the way businesses interact with the media and has the potential to allow seamless interaction between the real and virtual worlds allowing its users to have a completely immersive experience. 

Three Remarkable Components of Extended Reality

These components fall under the category of immersive technologies that can affect our perceptions. Here is a little bit about them:

Virtual reality: Virtual reality transposes its users to a different setting through a simulated digital experience. It makes use of a head-mounted display (HMD) to create an immersive experience by simulating as many experiences as possible. Virtual reality app development has witnessed significant adoption in industries like healthcare and real estate. 

Augmented reality: Augmented reality services have emerged as a powerful tool in various industries, including healthcare and real estate. With the development of augmented reality apps, businesses can enhance user experiences by overlaying digital elements onto the real world. This technology offers exciting opportunities for immersive and interactive interactions, transforming the way we perceive and interact with our surroundings.

Mixed reality: Being the most recent advancement among reality technologies, mixed reality is experienced through mixed reality glasses or headsets where you can interact with physical and digital objects in real-time. 

Related Reading: Augmented Reality Vs. Virtual Reality – The Future Technology

The implementation of these technologies through extended reality is enabling businesses to create innovative solutions and increase customer engagement, reduce human error and improve time efficiency. 

5 Powerful Real-World Applications 

“The market for Extended Reality is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of more than 65% during the forecast period of 2019-2024,” says Mordor Intelligence. 

Check out these five real-world applications of extended reality:

1. Entertainment and Gaming

The entertainment and video games industries are the foremost users of Extended Reality. Camera tracking and real-time rendering are combined to create an immersive virtual environment, allowing actors to get the real feel of the scene, thereby improving their performance. The extended reality also allows for multipurpose studio environments, thus reducing the cost of an elaborate movie set.

Video gaming is enhanced by the ability of Extended Reality to create a comprehensive participation effect. This allows users to dive into a completely different reality. Other entertainment events such as exhibitions and live music can also be enhanced by the capabilities of Extended Reality. 

2. Employees and Consumers

• Training: Extended Reality allows employees to be trained and educated in low-risk, virtual environments. Medical students, surgeons, firefighters, pilots, and chemists can closely simulate risky scenarios with minimal risk and less expense. The experience they gain will prove invaluable when they handle real-life situations.
• Information: Replacing physical manuals, Extended Reality can enable technicians to focus on the task without having to flip the pages of a manual. It can even connect an expert remotely to the real-time issue for his expert advice. This would save organizations a whole lot of money, and more importantly save them valuable downtime as they wouldn’t need to wait for experts.
• Improve customer perspective: Simulating virtual experience brought on by specific diseases and impairments can help doctors and caregivers receive empathy training. 

Related Reading: How Top Brands Embrace Augmented Reality for Immersive Customer Experiences

3. Healthcare

Extended Reality is improving healthcare by streamlining medical procedures while enhancing patient care. Allowing surgeons to visualize the complexities of the organs in 3D, it is enabling them to plan each step of a complicated surgery well in advance. Essentially, it is ensuring that surgeons can perform surgeries in a more safe, effective and precise way.

4. Real Estate

Extended Reality makes it easier for real estate agents and managers to close a deal by enabling prospective homebuyers to get a real feel of the property. The layout scenarios that are enabled by Extended Reality enhance customer experience while providing strong business opportunities. 

Related Reading: AR and VR- Game Changers of Real Estate Industry

5. Marketing

Extended Reality enables marketers to give their consumers a ‘try before you buy’ experience. It allows consumers to be transported to a place, immerses them in that world and motivates them to explore it. As an example, Cathay Pacific used a 360◦ video with hotspots to help potential customers experience the brand firsthand. That increased customer awareness by 29% and brand favorability by 25%. 

Face the Future with Extended Reality

There are many more advancements and applications to be discovered with Extended Reality, and it is soon going to be imperative to competitive advantage. Don’t let your business fall behind. Consult with Fingent, a top custom software development company, today and ensure you stay ahead of the curve. 

With over a billion smartphones and over 179 billion mobile applications downloaded in a year, mobile development has clearly taken center stage in the world of computing.

Enterprises and developers who have developed state-of-the-art cutting edge mobility solutions cannot rest on their laurels though. The world of mobility is ever evolving, with new breakthroughs and refined systems relegating existing technologies and methods to the back burner, at a rapid pace. Here are some of the imminent future trends that are sure to shake up the world of app development and disrupt the ecosystem as we know it today.

The Rise of Internet of Things and Mobile-connected Smart Objects

About 101.9 million wearable devices were shipped in 2016, and these numbers are growing exponentially. Additionally, about 26 billion connected devices, from toys to domestic appliances, from medical devices to controllable power sockets, and much more are expected to be up and running by 2020.

Wearables have been popular for quite some time now, but wearables are evolving, becoming smarter than before, as epitomized by Apple Watch, Microsoft’s HoloLens, and other gadgets. Such smart wearables would be deeply integrated with apps, to deliver a well-synchronized and complete experience for users. Apps in the IoT age would evolve to become a personal-area network hub and a central console for hundreds of connected things around users. The connected things, wearables, and other gadgets would deliver relevant real-time information to users, analyzed into actionable information.
Apple’s “Homekit” range of products, which enable wireless and electronic control of household appliances through a smart home app is a portent of things to come. Likewise, applications such as self-driving cars, deep freezers that read tweets, and more are all on the verge of becoming mainstream, and apps that power such technologies will become commonplace.

Apps to Facilitate Even Deeper Personalization

Apps have an inherent advantage of being able to leverage the unique capabilities of mobile devices. Many apps already leverage features such as GPS, location based services, voice and facial recognition capabilities and other capabilities. Going on, as the marketplace becomes more competitive and technology unlocks new potentials, leveraging such features would become the norm rather than the exception. The magnitude of the capabilities would also increase.

It is going to get better. For instance, modern smartphones have location sensor capabilities that use multiple positioning methods to provide different granularities of location data. Apps would leverage such capabilities to ascertain the user’s location to within a few meters and offer highly relevant and extremely personalized contextual information and services. Several day-to-day activities, from ordering groceries to calling an electrician, and several high-end applications related to security, gaming, vehicle navigation and more would become not just possible but also seamless, leveraging such capabilities.

Apps to Become Technologically Richer

As the app marketplace become increasingly crowded and user attention becomes short, app developers would deploy techniques to deal with challenges such as partial user attention and interruption, in a big way. Some of the innovative features tipped to become commonplace soon, includes circular design pattern, interactive content layers, intelligent manipulation of content to allow users interact with the content in further detail, and much more.

Such innovations would come on top of the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other technologies. Research major, Forrester, estimates more than 300% increase in investment in artificial intelligence in 2017, compared to 2016. App developers are tipped to incorporate advanced analytics, cognitive interfaces, and machine learning techs in a big way, to deliver hyper-powerful apps.

Cross-Platform and Cross-Device Development

The mobile space is highly fragmented with different operating systems, device configurations and screen sizes. This is unlikely to become passe anytime soon, and in fact, the fragmentation may accentuate as new mobility inspired hardware and software hit the market.

The sustenance of such a fragmented ecosystem would mean app developers adapting to roll out cross-platform apps in greater numbers. HTML5 may have been a false flag, but newer solutions are on the anvil to make apps work on all platforms.

Cloud adoption of apps would also rise in a big way compared to the present. A Cisco research estimates cloud apps to drive 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2019, with 11-fold growth, or a CAGR of 60% from present times. Services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive are only the tip of the iceberg, compared to what lies ahead.

There will be a tectonic change in the programming language in use as well. For instance, while Objective C is the incumbent language for developing iOS applications, Swift, the next-gen programming language has already caught the fancy of most developers.

Overall investment in enterprise apps is slated to grow. An Adobe study reveals about 77% business owners finding enterprise apps advantageous to their business, and 66% of them increasing their investments in this front. However, enterprises seeking to get returns on such investment need to go beyond merely adopting the latest technology. They need to ensure the enterprise apps they roll out are robust and customized to their enterprise. A tie up with a sound partner, whose sole focus is app development, and who has a talented team to back up their claims works wonders.

The customer is truly the king in today’s hyper-competitive environment. Businesses who are too busy to pamper the customer would soon find themselves free of hassles, as customers move elsewhere and the money starts to dry up.

Improving customer service is the name of the game when it comes to retaining customers. Providing a superior product that satisfies customer wants is the basic requirement to remain in business. But in today’s tech-neutral and information age, many providers can offer the same thing. As such, service becomes the key differentiator. Businesses who can offer superior products and back it up with top-notch customer service rakes in the moolah.

So how to go about improving customer service? Regardless of how customer service is to be improved, the underlying solution is to streamline workflow.

Need for Speed

Speed is of the essence in improving customer satisfaction. Today’s customers, born and bred in a fast paced world are attuned to getting things done instantly and do not like to wait. Forrester estimates 45% of US customers will abandon an online transaction if the business fails to address their concerns or questions fast enough.

Enterprises can respond with speed and agility only if they get their workflow right.  Often, the required information is trapped in silos, preventing the executive from accessing it in a timely manner to serve the customer. In many cases, the customer interaction touch points are messed up that executives delay in contacting the customer who initiates a query.  

Customers who cannot get in touch with a responsible executive when they need to are invariably lost forever.

Need for Accuracy

Along with speed, it is also important to get things right the first time round. It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience. The implications are more ominous in today’s highly competitive environment where a wrong move must simply push the customer away to a competitor.

Automation drives accuracy. the A main cause for errors is disjointed systems and manual working. Many processes are still done manually, simply because no one has the time to digitalize it, or because the best quick fix to overcome a disjointed system is manual intervention. Automating whatever possible, and integrating manual processes to the enterprise system contributes to accuracy in a big way.

Need for Customization

Today’s customers prefer marketers to engage with them on a personalized basis.  Even without personalized one-to-one interaction, deep segmentation to offer special discounts and services, location based instant-offers, and more, reaps rich rewards. There is also benefit in understanding the customer, and offering something of value, in terms of curated content.

The role of analytics is crucial in getting personalization right. Integrating big data analytics to the workflow allows the enterprise to gain insights about the customers, their background, buying habits, preferences, and more, and enable dealing with them

Need for Flexibility

Today’s businesses have no option but to fine tune their systems and workflows around the customers. The old functional workflow, or arranging workflows and systems according to organizational departments, and expecting customers to make adjustments are today a sure-shot recipe for disaster.

A case in point is the need to offer multiple touch points for customer support.  Research by Salesforce estimate 61% of customers prefer phone assistance, 60% of customers prefer email, 57% prefer live chat, 51% prefer dealing with an online customer base, and 34% of customers prefer “click-to-call” support automation. Successful businesses build their workflow along such popular channels, rather than, say, not make available live chat because it is inconvenient for the workforce and an added overhead.

How to Streamline the Workflow

The root cause for disjointed workflows and silos that impede efficiency, and by extension come in the way of improving customer service is many work processes being developed on an ad hoc basis when the need arises, and such process lingering on.  The enterprise needs to bite the bullet and review existing workflows, with an aim to smoothen it, keeping the customer in mind.  Keep the end in mind, and work backwards, rather than try to define an end by defining the most convenient workflow.

It helps to adopt a granular approach, breaking processes into discrete steps. Such an approach allows the top management to set policies, the middle managers to issue guidelines, and empowers customer facing staff to do what is required at the moment. Needless to say, such an approach has to be accompanied by a culture of openness and empowerment.

In today’s mobility driven age, developing mobile apps and solutions for customer support and other critical functions allow employees to react instantly, and engage with the customer at the time of their choice. Powerful mobile apps, residing in the cloud, drawing in the most relevant information from all sources empower field service technicians, marketers, top management, and others, by enabling them to engage with customers in an informed manner, without dilly-dallying for the need of information or resources. It also allows customer service and other executives to engage with customers as soon as they initiate a conversation, equipped with full data.
Having a partner who knows their stuff is essential in developing solutions for streamlining workflow and improving customer service. An experienced partner can offer proven and practical data-driven solutions to solve your workflow issues effectively. When you partner with us, you can leverage our skilled and talented team for whom developing solutions to streamline your workflows is their primary focus. You can also leverage our years of experience in the field, and spare yourselves of expensive trial-and-error, or investment to reinvent the wheel.