If your digital customer experience strategy doesn’t include messaging and chatbots in the next 2 years, you’re going to get left behind. Matt Hooper of IMImobile PLC (LON:IMO) looks at how companies will have to embrace automation and conversational commerce to keep customers satisfied and retain market share.
The digital advantage
In an interview at WEF 2017 in Davos, Barclays Plc (LON:BARC) UK CEO Ashok Vaswani said: “Frankly, the digital revolution is bigger than the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution… And, therefore, when we think about it, we think about it end to end.”
This last bit is particularly important, which we’ll come back to.
A company that is transforming customer experience as part of its digital strategy has 4 massive advantages over its competitors. It can:
- Personalise messages, products, services, even prices in real-time based on data – customer history, lifetime value, lifecycle stage, location – enhanced by analytics and modelling.
- Proactively engage customers to pre-empt customer service issues and create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Automate – or if not desired, at least make as efficient as possible – interactions, transactions and entire processes both from the customer’s side and in the company’s back office or supply chain using chatbots and other AI applications.
- Communicate over digital channels at the customer’s demand and ensure consistency and fluidity of customer experience across multiple channels (omni-channel).
