Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Mike Murchison, CEO and co-founder of Ada
2020: The Year Automation Finally Takes Center Stage
Consumers today are overwhelmed with digital experiences. New brands and platforms are always competing for their attention, but when every chatbot experience feels the same, none really stands out.
Last January, Gartner predicted that one of the three key things business leaders need to do in 2019 is, “Deliver more personalized customer experiences that rely on increased automation.” Highly-personalized automation drives customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, but organizations struggled to successfully introduce personalized chatbots. While it may sound ironic to use AI to fix the personalization problem, 2020 will be the year that organizations finally figure out how to use automation and AI to create loyalty and revenue-generating experiences.
Despite investment in improving the customer experience by providing AI-powered customer service chatbots, there still is an emotional disconnect between customer and brand. In 2020, brands will use AI to bring authenticity to chatbot conversations. Proactively engaging customers using personal information and history tailored to the customers’ specific interests, accounts, and geographies will make self-service experiences feel more emotional.
This will have a ripple effect on the customer service center. To bring authenticity to chatbot interactions, organizations should put the power of AI into the hands of the people who know and interact with customers best: customer service specialists. These professionals have years of expertise in measuring customer success and can build, update and measure chatbot success – in a nutshell, making sure that chatbots are empathetic,personal, and beneficial to both a company’s CSAT and the bottom line. To drive automation strategy, we’ll see the continued introduction of new Automated Customer Experience (ACX) Departments – completely new teams dedicated to owning AI strategy from end-to-end.
As businesses realize the benefits of personalized self-service customer support, the role of automation will shift from being simply a ‘band aid’ solution that augments the agent experience – to acting as the first line of customer service, before agents, that underpins the entire customer journey. With automation solving more than 80 percent of customer inquiries, businesses will be able to re-allocate their human resources to focus on more meaningful conversations that drive sales and loyalty.
2020 is the time for customer service to take the spotlight. As self-service is introduced across the entire customer journey, customer service teams will soon become self-sufficient, no longer dependent on the business to bail them out. Automation not only has the potential to save organizations millions – it can also drive new revenue, consequently shifting the traditional support model from a cost center to revenue center. By offering upsells, cross-sells, and personalized promotions unique to every customer, the right automation platform has the potential to untap a completely new profit stream.
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About the Author
Mike Murchison is the CEO and cofounder of Ada, the leading Artificial Intelligence platform for enterprise customer service teams.
