Bengaluru, India, Nov 30, 2022: In the face of rapid digitization, businesses around the world face increasing globalization and profitability challenges. With competition at an all-time high, the only way to differentiate oneself and stand apart is by ensuring an incredible customer experience.

So much so that the term, Customer Experience or CX, as it is called, has acquired a new meaning to encapsulate the holistic management of perceptions and feelings of the client even before their actual interaction with the product or service begins. Competitive advantage is increasingly being defined by a business’ ability to gather, analyze, and employ consumer data at scale and on how it engages with AI to understand, model, and customize the consumer journey.

The more embedded capabilities like automation, segmentation, intent detection and localization, all enabled by technological advances, are in a business, the higher the quality of customer experience. Building these experiences takes significant time and costs given how technologically complex they are.

Customer experience around the world has started including technological advances using chatbots as cognitive agents for enhancing  machine learning (ML), natural language generation (NLG) and smart workflows, and India is leading the curve on CX with some players delivering personalization using BOTs at a scale that could only have been imagined a decade ago.

With the support of these new players, traditional and more progressive Indian industries like BFSIs today have been quick enough to up their digital game using chatbots. All this is possible because companies have been able to bring cloud and AI-powered voice, messaging, and contact center capabilities under a unified and easy-to-deploy platform.
According to the 2022 Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report, 88% of Indian businesses have accepted the fact that customer experience has a direct impact on business performance. Here’s a look at some prominent automated processes and components that are helping redefine CX in India. 

1. Enhancing chatbot experience: Most Indian businesses are choosing chatbots as the first line of interaction between the brand and consumers have made it super convenient for customers to transact, get support, and experience superlative buying experiences through hyper-personalization at scale. This has helped quicken customer service operations for simple, routine and repetitive queries, in turn reducing live service queues. The data collected from customer-chatbot helps firms in analyzing consumer-behavior and predicting usage patterns.

Companies are finding innovative methods to make their chatbots more personalized by using human-like voice interfaces that extend some humanoid traits in bots. This affords customers a conversational experience rather than a robotic one in their interactions with chatbots.
Undoubtedly, in emotionally charged situations companies will need to bring in human agents. However, yet again, the unified platform with customer history at one place, will help  the human agent too to have rich interactions based on their historical interaction with the company.

2. Unified journeys across multiple touch points: Most businesses agree that consumers are on a journey rather than a one-time interaction with the brand. And therefore a brand should be able to talk to customers in multiple ways and be available to the consumer across different platforms to ensure engagement and build loyalty.

Communications tools need to include diverse interfaces including text, rich media, images, videos, multiple languages and more. The more diverse experiences allow organizations to create more engaging, visual and conversational experiences to interact with, understand and resolve consumer requirements.

Automation also enables all queries and redressals from different platforms into a unified and integrated system enabling consistent and bespoke  responses as appropriate. This strategy creates a positive impression on the consumer’s mind of being looked after and being valued by the brand.

3. Consistent pre-and post-sales processes with enhanced knowledge base: The power of data has already been proven on the business scene. Any response to a consumer needs to be made with a strong information base. The automation of CX allows AI to dig into cross channels and become a single source of knowledge that powers both chat-bot and human agent service. The vaster the knowledge base, the more the ability to assist smartly. It also enables consistency in response which customers appreciate. 

4. Intent detection, segmentation and localization: Based on interaction data, localized feeds, speech and text analysis, these new tools enable market segmentation, predictions of market trends and understanding customer expectations by region. The same localization tools can then be used to offer targeted solutions to consumers when they are mulling a product or service.

Deep learning tools that aid segmentation also help salespeople in targeting the right customers at the right time. With improved insights on intent, companies can create bespoke and more refined and curated engagements. It also gives businesses a sense of impact of their predictive strategies and enables them to prepare for handling elevated volumes.

The tools aided by machine learning can also help detect customer preferences based on their search history and identify customers with a proclivity to stay with a brand vs those with a high probability of churn.

5. Improved listening skills, gather more useful feedback:  Chatbots, robots and NLP designed to simulate natural language conversations also allow firms to improve listening capabilities  and automate the collection of customer feedback and behavior analysis. Improved feedback in turn improves resolution and allows enterprises to synergize their automated responses with human assistance by detecting more complex requirements. This naturally helps improve customer satisfaction by offering a first-call resolution.

The AI-powered landscape of CX has made it possible, for the first time forever, to make customer interactions faster, better and cheaper all at the same time. The new advances in CX help deliver improved experiences with reduced costs and time. This in itself should prompt businesses to shake off outdated processes and invest in technology and data talent to enhance their customer experience.

It is evident that some companies have already mastered the skills better than the others. Businesses must learn from current pioneers and customize the solutions to suit their enterprise to offer empathetic and bespoke consumer experiences at scale.

Written by Sachin Bhatia, Co-Founder and CGO, Exotel

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About Sachin Bhatia:

Sachin Bhatia is the CGO and Co-Founder of Exotel. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Technology, specializing in computer science from IIT Guwahati and has over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. In 2003, Sachin founded Ameyo, a customer engagement platform with robust contact center capabilities, which merged with Exotel in 2021, making Exotel the largest cloud-based communication engagement platform in emerging markets. Sachin is passionate about scalable web solutions that solve problems for medium sized businesses, and is strongly influenced by the power of analytics in his work at Exotel.

About Exotel

Exotel is the emerging market’s leading full stack customer engagement platform and business-focused virtual telecom operator. Incorporated in 2011, Exotel’s world-class cloud-based product suite powers 50 million engagements daily for over 6000 companies in India, SE Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Today, some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets (Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, GoJek, Byju’s, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, Oyo, etc.,) manage their customer engagement with Exotel’s omnichannel contact centre, a suite of communication APIs and conversational AI platform over the cloud. They’re a $100 million Series D funded company with $50 million in ARR.

For more information, please visit https://stg-exotel-staging.kinsta.cloud