The do-it-yourself ethos has gone digital. In today's impatient world, the old adage "If you want something done right, do it yourself" has become a mantra for customers seeking instant gratification. Consumer self-service is surging as people take control of their service experiences, unwilling to wait on hold or wade through FAQs. They expect speedy solutions at their fingertips – never more than a few clicks away. Companies must digitally empower their customers with AI-driven tools and intuitive self-service options or risk losing out to those who do. The power now rests in the hands of the DIY consumer.
Their growing option of choice is digital self-service. Customers don’t always want to speak with an agent. In fact, many avoid it because it may involve long wait times, multiple queues, and being shuffled from one agent to another. That means businesses need to be ready to help customers help themselves – no matter where they start their journey.
The age of the DIY customer is here. Recognizing that every customer is different, and every journey is unique, your success hinges on arming them with tools to independently overcome any (or as many) issues as possible. But beware – flimsy chatbots spell frustration, not resolution. To truly empower problem-solving customers, you must provide intuitive self-service they can trust. This is your chance to give people the experiences they crave – solutions at their fingertips instead of obstacles in their path.
Get it right, and you’ll earn enduring satisfaction and loyalty. Fall short, and your customers will take their business elsewhere. The choice is clear – equip them to help themselves or watch them go where their needs are met. The DIY – “Digital It Yourself” – generation is taking control; don’t let inadequate self-service tools leave your customers out in the cold.
Bot technology is evolving rapidly. With recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing with real conversational data, bots can now mimic human conversations. This presents a pivotal moment for businesses to rethink their digital transformation strategy. The goal should be creating intelligent bots that provide exceptional self-service experiences.
To start, companies must make their bots more lifelike. After all, today's consumers expect quick yet natural conversations when engaging with chatbots. By leveraging advanced AI, businesses can develop bots that understand nuanced customer questions and provide satisfactory solutions. The payoff? Reduced response times, lower operational costs, and increased customer satisfaction.
Additionally, intelligent bots help deliver ultimate convenience with personalized, efficient interactions. With access to customer data and profiles, sophisticated chatbots can tailor conversations to individual needs and preferences. This level of personalization bolsters positive brand perceptions. For these reasons, forward-thinking companies are revamping their digital transformation around AI-powered bots. The ambition? Developing virtual assistants that converse like humans while delivering efficient, customized service.
But first, companies need to commit to fast tracking their move to full digital CX operations. But don’t worry. It’s easier than it sounds.
Move to the cloud. Now!
In June 2023, NICE CEO Barak Eilam gave the keynote address at Interactions 2023, the largest CX industry event in the world. Besides showcasing groundbreaking AI innovations for the industry, his presentation focused on three basic steps necessary to provide exceptional digital CX: Move to the cloud, restart your digital transformation, and think big with AI.
The first step of moving to the cloud is foundational and crucial for any future innovation progress. Cloud technology was introduced 10 years ago, and the level of innovation has increased exponentially ever since. Becoming cloud-powered will increase your CX agility and reduce costs by eliminating tech inefficiencies, constant repairs, lengthy upgrades, and complicated integrations. Working from the cloud also improves productivity by streamlining multi-site operations with global routing and reporting across channels and sites.
Yet, even with all those advantages, companies are falling behind. According to Gartner, only 30% of new digital workloads are deployed by companies on cloud-native platforms as of 2021. Those forward-minded digital leaders recognized that the nature of business was rapidly shifting, so getting ahead of it became mission critical. Others are quickly following the charge. Gartner analysts also found that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025. You need to be one of them.
According to Barak Eilam in his keynote speech, the customer service industry is dealing with an explosion of customer interactions that grew 100X in the last decade alone with CX complexity increasing 10X every five years. You can’t satisfy that skyrocketing level of service demand stuck in the same antiquated level of thinking and technology you’ve been using.
Move to the cloud. Now! Then, it’s time to finish that digital transformation you never completed.
Restart (or start) your CX digital transformation
“Soaring demand for digital service is driving organizations to accelerate their digital customer experience transformation and drive full resolution on their digital platforms,” said Barry Cooper, president of the CX Division for NICE.
To deliver extraordinary self-service and CX overall, companies are seeing the reality that it can only happen through digital transformation. Every day the world shifts deeper and deeper into the digital landscape. That’s where your customers exist. That’s where you must exist.
CX digital transformation means implementing a digital-first, customer-driven mindset to improve operational efficiency and streamline processes. More companies are realizing the importance and value of this mindset. A Gartner poll revealed 59% of the responding CX leaders plan to improve, automate, or eliminate inefficient processes, while 51% plan to devote more resources to migrating volume to digital and self-service. A report by IDC stated organizations are set to spend $6.7 trillion through 2024 on digital transformation.
Surprisingly, there are several organizations that haven’t taken the initiative yet. Or they started only to stall for various reasons. One major speed bump is they were using CX technology that wasn’t capable of meeting expectations for them or their customers, especially through self-service. Either companies decided to save money and buy less-than-reliable tools (which some are still doing) or an effective option wasn’t available at the time.
But that second excuse is no longer the case. A truly effective and innovative option now exists. If your digital transformation is stuck, it’s time to restart it. If you never began the transition, now is the perfect time to do it with a same platform that can also take you to the cloud: Enlighten XO. Enlighten XO excels at accelerating CX digital transformation. But where it truly shines is through intuitive AI-powered self-service.
Think big and deliver smarter self-service with AI
“Self-Service is the front door to your company; all interactions start from it,” said Kate Leggett, VP and principal analyst for CRM and Customer Service for Forrester Research. “Organizations need to understand that self-service is the first way for customers to engage, wherever they are in their journey.”
The 24/7 self-service option has quickly become a key CX strategy. Along with the increase in business spending on digital, there is a substantial rise in customer expectations for organizations to resolve more inquiries through self-service. Yet the delivery of that option still hasn’t lived up to the promise. Why? Because too many companies just aren’t ready for it.
Organizations are employing chatbots that only resolve a fraction of interactions. That’s because the bots are built on data sets not focused specifically on CX or they’re manually created using a narrative approach where humans simply guess which phrases customers might use to express intents. This approach is reactive, time-consuming, and inaccurate because it limits learning capacity and requires manual updates. The result is poor outcomes and decreased customer satisfaction, as well as higher costs as customers are forced to talk to an agent.
Bots need to be much more than just simple tools that automatically shuffle limited responses from a set of pre-written answers that aren’t helping customers. They need to get in touch with the reality of what customers are truly thinking and what they really want (i.e. the voice of the customer). How? By organizations implementing a data-driven approach that takes insights from millions of live agent-assisted interactions to consistently improve self-service answers and resolutions.
And that’s possible with Enlighten XO. Not only will this innovative cloud native CX solution help accelerate your digital transformation, it will also increase the power of your streamlined self-service applications by automatically generating insights from human conversations to build smarter self-service with advanced AI.
Enlighten XO makes your self-service smart and your company look smarter
Enlighten XO takes the guesswork out of self-service development with purpose-built AI models that identify customer intents, training phrases, and problem-solving activities that ensure success. Armed with superior data and insights, organizations can simplify CX to make journeys more delightful and seamless by making self-service brilliantly human.
Leveraging over two decades of expertise and billions of conversations, Enlighten XO empowers businesses to construct optimal self-service applications utilizing conversational data and futuristic AI. Moreover, Enlighten XO harnesses the world’s most massive syndicated live interaction dataset to inject data from previous interactions, thereby optimizing future self-help experiences.
By analyzing customers' voice and text interactions, AI can swiftly identify, discover, and generate solutions. Consequently, Enlighten XO assists companies in providing the phenomenal CX that satisfies customers and magnetizes new clients.
But why stop at smarter self-service? Flaunt your company's ingenuity too! Discover how your business can transform CX into a competitive edge by refining every digital experience – from web and mobile to chatbots and knowledge bases – with Enlighten XO as the core of your digital CX.
Get started today with a free proof-of-concept at nice.com/enlightenXO. Then read the Conversational AI Unveiled white paper from Opus Research and watch a demo of Enlighten XO.