Given consumers interact with a complex mix of touchpoints for brands, how seamlessly these integrate, and how immediate and personalized it is for them, will play a significant role in their success. A recent survey found that 64% of consumers and 80% of business buyers said they expect companies to respond to and interact with them in real time.
With so many companies now employing sophisticated AI systems and Augmented Reality that provide a highly personalized and rich experience while providing customers with an immediate response, immediacy has become an integral part of creating a strong customer experience.
Some companies have been creating immediacy options for almost a decade. Amazon created Mayday in 2013. This was a single click video chat solution with a tech support rep 24/7 that allowed real time interaction in which the customer could see the tech support person and the tech support person could see their screen to guide them what to do. The average response time was 9 seconds in 2013.
Currently, outside of AI solutions, there are two main options currently being used for this – increased staff, or digital assistants. Neither of these are ideal. The financial costs of dramatically Increased staff is cost prohibitive, and most digital assistants without AI are very limited and exceptionally frustrating to deal with in my experience. To create a highly performing digital assistant is a costly procedure.
But, there is good news. There are cost effective ways that AI can provide this by plugging into your existing systems. Some of these are even free for a limited amount of interactions (e.g. for up to 500 interactions a month).
The advantage of using an existing AI enabled chatbot, is that the NLP (Natural Language Processing) and deep learning elements have already been developed so the high cost part is done. You are subscribing rather than inventing. And they have all the aspects you would expect in a AI-enabled bot. No scripted responses based on specific text input but actual detection of user intent with their questions. You can configure them easily for your needs and utilize multiple ones for different stages of the customer journey so each one is expert in that aspect of interaction needed at that point in time.
I have found 4 outstanding examples of these – each of them has won Turing prizes – which means that they fooled a panel when the panel had to choose which responses were from humans and which were from bots. The panel could not distinguish between it and a real human. One of these has won the Turing Prize 4 times. I am writing a guide to these and will be identifying different challenges of customer engagement, and how they were overcome by these different specific chatbots. That may help you understand which options suit your needs best. In addition to answering general questions, these are specialized to answering medical questions and can be adapted for your medical affairs call centers and other interactions as well. There are so many high level options available now to do this so the choice depends on what your use is for.
When considering where you could employ these, a useful place to start is the customer journey. Most companies have developed detailed and complex customer journeys and understand how and where and when the customers come in contact with their brand in the various touch points, throughout the customer journey. Consider that and use that knowledge to consider how you could utilize immediacy in each stage of that journey.
Conclusion
Immediacy in customer response is a critical part of customer engagement. Many companies address this with increased headcount or digital assistants. Unfortunately, increased headcount is costly, and manty digital assistants are limited in their interactions. AI solves this problem with a plethora of natural language processing and deep learning engines that can fool panels of experts as to whether they are a human or a bot. A lot more detail on the different AI-enabled bots that are best for different situations will be covered in future articles.
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