Trust is an essential part of any relationship, even between businesses and their customers. A customer’s relationship with a company can ultimately result in the success or failure of an organisation. When customers trust a business, they will keep coming back for more. This means greater advocacy, loyalty, and engagement from customers. According to an analysis by PwC, it has found that for 70% of consumers, trust in a particular business is an essential factor in buying decisions.
To build trust, businesses must uphold customer promises to keep them happy and achieve positive business outcomes. It takes monumental efforts to manually track and deliver on every customer promise. However, there are technologies that can help businesses deliver on their commitments.
The technology behind promise management
Every customer interaction ensues different follow-ups and outcomes. In most contact centres today, agents must register promises and commitments manually. They need to go back and forth, inputting data and reviewing multiple screens or platforms, to ensure that the commitment has been registered and is being fulfilled. This sometimes leaves gaps in closing the loop with customers – leaving customers frustrated with no follow-up from their interaction. Managing all these steps manually is time-consuming, laborious, error-prone, and frequently results in failure to meet customer expectations.
Promise management is one such example of how businesses and agents can rely on technology to build trust with customers. Automating after-call work (ACW) can reduce costly man hours spent on manually inputting ACW and make the best use of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer sentiment and intent, allowing agents to personalise every customer experience in real-time.
Right after every call, promise management is activated to help agents follow through on what was promised to each customer post-call. Relying on conversational AI and automation to extract and track these promises and commitments made in real-time, agents can then align expectations with customers immediately following the call and manage fulfillment after the call with ease. This process minimises – or even eliminates – costly human-errors that occur from inexperienced and/or overworked agents to deliver great customer experience and satisfaction.
The future of customer interactions
With that said, there is still much room to grow when it comes to how emerging technologies can enhance customer fulfillment. Conversational AI will continue to evolve into an even more powerful and integrated offering – a blend of voice with video and emotion AI.
The pandemic has changed the way businesses communicate with their customers, and there is much room for improvement in customer experiences by incorporating video and emotion AI. A survey on United Arab Emirates (UAE) consumer perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for video conversation revealed that 85% of UAE consumers are open to AI being used to enhance video call experiences.
Customers convey their emotions not just in what they say but in how they say. With emotion AI running in tandem with video conversations, it can give agents more insight into a customer’s emotional state, tone and voice quality, and even mood changes during an interaction. When agents have access to intel on how customers react to their service, this allows them to understand how customers feel about their service in real-time, allowing them to make decisions to serve and interact with them better.
The importance of delivering customer promises
Promises cannot hold if they do not have a due date attached to them. Unkept promises can hurt business reputation, and slow response times can lead to customer frustration and churn. When businesses are on top of following through with customers, this makes sure that they know what and when to expect to get what they want, keeping them happy and at ease knowing that businesses are there for them. Streamlined scripting, for example, is one feature that helps expedite customer resolution, which results in agents being able to inspire trust and confidence in customers, eventually building their loyalty to a brand.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: Uniphore joins Cisco SolutionsPlus partner program to enable better customer experiences
Promise management, video and emotion AI are some of the many possibilities businesses can explore to improve how they interact with customers by delivering on their promises. Organisations should not let poor internal processes and outdated, manual workflows be the information bottleneck that prevents them from delivering promised (and often times critical) services to customers.
