Customer Centricity, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Customer Experience | 2 min read
In the 21st century consumers have access to vast amounts of data. They are more powerful than ever because they have options. No longer are they tied to one provider of a specific product or service. If they don't like a certain organization they are a click away from finding an alternative. As such providing a great customer experience is crucial for any organization to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Below is a list of four categories any organization should invest in to improve their customer's experience:
Because of online channels, the balance of power between businesses and buyers has shifted significantly. Customers are more empowered and self-sufficient, and to get them to buy your products or services you need to fully understand who they are, what they like and dislike.
The more you know about your potential customers, the more successfully you will be able to develop meaningful relationships with them. Gathering as much customer data as possible will allow you to build a detailed profile of your customer’s needs, preferences and key characteristics.
The amount of data you can generate these days is huge and Investing in a proper analytics platform such as Qlik or PowerBI should help you in better building your customer's persona.
Email is the single most powerful channel you can use to communicate with and engage customers. It’s a direct and personal channel that allows you to foster a sense of customer loyalty and nurture relationships so much more quickly and easily than other digital channels. But as we mentioned before, customers in the 21st century are empowered and they know when someone is trying to sell to them or promote a product and the last thing they will entertain is being treated en mass.
Using a marketing automation platform like Exceeders | vbout will allow you to segment your customers into different groups based on the data you identified using your analytics and then send them individual and personalized emails, promotions and offers that resonate with their wants/needs and will rank high in converting them to paying customers.
People are social in nature, with nearly two thirds of customers in the region active on at least one social media channel. Which is an excellent free resource you can tap into to engage with these customers, understand what they like about your company, what they dislike, share your new products, services and promotions with them and potentially turn them into ambassadors that will promote your organization to their friends and family. Using tools like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Exceeders | vbout, etc... will help you manage your social media presence at all times.
Providing a great experience to your customers is one way organizations can count on to increase their revenue. You do this by providing a superb experience to their existing and potential customers. What you don't want to happen is having a customer who bought your product/service leave you and spread negative comments about you because your support team didn't help them in the right way as an example. Examples in solutions such as Dynamics CRM to manage customer service problems and deploying a virtual Agent to support your customers will help you avoid such scenarios.
Not all people are the same. Some like to talk on the phone, some prefer email, others prefer live chat or social. You can't force customers to connect with you on your terms. Consider investing in various solutions such as a Virtual Agent for Livechat, Exceeders | vbout for email & social communication, create self service portals that customers can use to solve their problems themselves and a convenient IVR solution from one of the top telephony providers allowing you to engage with your customers and solve their issues using the tools they feel comfortable with.
The most important asset for any organization that is selling it's products or services is their customers. As such the relationship between them and their customers shouldn't be under estimated and any investments the organization can make should be made there. The formula is very simple, Happy customers spend money and the more money they spend the more revenue you will generate.
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Originally published Sep 11, 2019 4:31:46 PM, updated September 11, 2019
3 min read
Cloud computing is an exponentially growing market. According to a study by Forbes, the public cloud computing market, including cloud applications (SaaS), development and data platforms (PaaS), and infrastructure (IaaS) services combined is expected to grow to $299.4 billion.
With new businesses rapidly adopting cloud-based apps, these solutions have become mainstream in the industry as well as personal life. From our daily emails to phone storage, practically everything is stored and managed by cloud computing apps.
However, the uses of cloud computing are not just limited to personal emails or storage. With cloud computing services firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.
In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive.
According to Microsoft,
“....cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change...”
Let's see the top five ways business are using cloud computing in their day to day operations.
The cloud allows users to enjoy network-based access to communication tools like emails and calendars. Most of the messaging and calling apps like Skype and WhatsApp are also based on cloud infrastructure. All your messages and information are stored on the service provider’s hardware rather than on your personal device. This allows you access your information from anywhere via the internet.
VEGA Messenger and iDenedi are our very own communication app that allow remote teams to work and collaborate from anywhere in the world - in a very safe and secure way.
The modern computing power and capacity of the cloud lets businesses to store information about user behaviour. This can be used to develop customised solutions, messages and products based on the preferences of customers.
Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant - all are cloud-based natural-language intelligent bots. These chatbots leverage the computing capabilities of the cloud to provide personalised context-relevant customer experiences.
Read More: How AI is Helping Businesses improve Customer Experience
When organisations choose cloud for data storage the responsibility of their data also lies with the service provider. This saves business the cost of infrastructure and maintenance. The cloud service provider is responsible for securing data and meeting legal and compliance requirements.
The cloud also provides more flexibility in the sense that you can enjoy large storage and on-demand backups.
Recovery is also performed faster in the cloud because the data is stored over a network of physical servers rather than at one on-site data centre. Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon S3 are popular examples of cloud backup solutions.
Read More: Check Out Our Managed Cyber Security Platform - ASPIDA
Whether a business develops application for web or mobile or even games, cloud computing services prove to be a reliable solution. Using the cloud, you can easily create scalable cross-platform experiences for your users.
Many of these services include many pre-coded tools and libraries — like directory services, search and security. Some will also offer full end to end service from strategy, consultancy, UX/UI, Development, QA and support. This can speed up and simplify the development process.
Learn More About Our Partner Knowarth and how they help enterprises build apps.
Many business management applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) are also based on a cloud service provider. Software as a Service (SAAS) has become a popular method for deploying enterprise-level software.
It ensures hassle-free management, maintenance and security of your organisation’s critical business resources and allows you to access these applications conveniently via a web browser.
Here is a use case of our partner, iSystems
As a busy distributor, iSystem's client, Oxford University Press needed a sophisticated solution to optimise its distribution and customer service operations.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations is a cloud-based business application platform that combines components of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), along with productivity applications and artificial intelligence tools.
iSystems supported Oxford University Press with a full integration between all the departments improved service by making current data available to all and streamlined order processing, saving OUP time and money.
Learn More About iSystems
Cloud computing services are still at a relatively early stage of adoption, despite their success stories. Many companies are still contemplating which apps to adopt and when.
However, their usage is only likely to go up as enterprises get more comfortable with the idea of their data being somewhere other than an expensive server in the basement.
2 min read
Artificial Intelligence or AI is one of the most disrupting technologies of the 2000s. Machines are getting smarter each day. While AI can create tremendous time and cost savings, it promises even bigger, more meaningful returns in another area: customer experience.
Businesses across the world are discovering new ways to leverage AI and their enhance customer experience and engagement.
In recent research, Gartner indicated that “in a few years from now, 89% of businesses will compete mostly on customer experience”.
In this post we will discuss some ways AI is already disrupting customer experience across the industries.
Making self-service more efficient
Everyone knows how excruciating it can be to just stay on hold for several minutes when we call a customer care number for a simple issue.
One of the most favourable aspects of AI is that it eliminates the need to put the customer “on hold” for the next available agent to help them with a simple problem like billing, booking or any trivial question.
AI allows companies to use chatbots to answer common customer service questions, and let customers resolve their trivial issues in a jiffy.
Back in 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 85% of customer relationships will be managed without human interaction.
Besides this, most customers don’t mind chatting with customer care chatbot. As long as they answer their question quickly, they leave as a happy customer.
Improving Personalisation for online services
Another important way AI is transforming the customer experience is by providing personalised content. Now a days we rarely have to search for the products that would fit our preferences. It’s so easy now to get a recommendation based on your past history.
For example: Audio & videos streaming services like YouTube, Netflix or Spotify or concerts and performances on Bands in Town. And anyone who has shopped on Amazon has seen products recommendations.
It is now possible for products and services providers to use technology to make intelligent and accurate recommendations to their customers based on their past purchase or browsing history.
Round-the-Clock Availability
AI never needs to sleep. Similar to empowering customers via self-service, AI also offers customers 24/7 support — something most companies would not be able to afford or staff just a couple of decades ago.
What’s more, 24/7 support isn’t just “good CX”— the stakes are high in today’s market. Most customers are not willing to wait until you open your doors to get answers to their issues. AI makes that possible.
Automated day to day assistance
Many households now a days use Alexa to turn on music or dim the lights. But more and more, companies are using Alexa, Google Home and other robotic AI to make their customers’ lives easier.
E-commerce stores have started to link Alexa and Google Home to allow customers to order products using voice commands. People can also purchase movie tickets and pre-order snacks before they even leave the house. These are just a few ways the AI is transforming the customer experience.
It can save significant costs
Our partner, Ubility AI recently supported two companies in France — DataSolutions & Retail Explorer in optimising their services using AI.
In the past DataSolutions and Retail explorer used to take all information in newspapers and magazines, scan them and identify prices and promotions from major retailers, enter it in their systems and then using the insights generated support their customers on how should they adjust their prices and offerings.
Until now this was a manual process. They used to scan all the pages and have people handling data entry manually loaded them into their system. This used to take on average 2-3 weeks costing EUR 50,000.
Using Ubility's image and text recognition they were able to automate 90% of the data entry tasks, which reduced the time required to do the job from weeks to days translating into EUR 40,000.00 savings per month.
Ubility AI is a leading provider of AI Solutions helping organisations optimise their work processes using technology.
Related: Meet the Experts: Khaled Dassouki, CEO, Ubility
As we can see, the entire goal of using AI to improve customer experience is to help your customers feel known and valued. Business should test the processes, re-test, and test again— from the customers’ viewpoint. The only thing worse than not using AI for CX today is using it inefficiently.
1 min read
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
Among our recent partnerships, we joined forces with Ubility.
To bring the service provider closer to YOU, we sat down with their CEO Khaled Dassouki, to gain firsthand insight on the things they do and the types of human capital profiles that drive their success.
Khaled is a Lebanese national with an engineering background and PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Security obtained at Université de Technologie de Troyes, France.
As a result of over 20 years in the field, Khaled decided to establish Ubility in France and build it on a base of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience, which was considered to be highly innovative as it was a niche field.
Khaled was quick to notice that there had been a shift in the way business was carried out, the shift had been made to be more customer-focused. With that came new challenges, the ease with which customers can connect with the business led to a huge influx of queries and requests for support, which was very time consuming, tedious, and required businesses to grow their customer support teams leading to higher costs.
While growing their teams did solve some challenges momentarily, organisations were quick to realise that the complexity and average time required to resolve customer challenges was growing which eventually led to dissatisfied customers. Not only that, customer service agents were quickly burning out as they were answering an ever-growing list of routine questions rather than helping solve complex problems and offering innovative solutions.
Taking all that into account, Ubility offered an AI-powered platform that learns from interactions between an organisation’s customers & their customer care team to enable quick suggestions of appropriate solutions that could solve a customer’s challenge in seconds rather than minutes.
In addition to that, Ubility also offers AI training for professionals in the IT industry, a sales chatbot that is based on a recommender system and knows the sales cycle, and AI Consultancy in which they are recruited to build and implement AI services in response to an assessment of an organisation’s processes.
Success Story
Ubility was commissioned by a Telecom operator in the gulf to assess and analyse their IT processes. After a thorough analysis done by their team of experts, it was concluded that a huge portion of their IT processes had an opportunity for automation.
After studying the best ways in which they could automate their processes, they determined that incorporating AI would allow the elimination of a manual process by looking at historical data. Instead of their operational costs raking up to 50,000 USD a month, they were now cut by 80% to be only 10,000 USD.
Intrigued and want to learn more?
Artificial Intelligence or AI is one of the most disrupting technologies of the 2000s. Machines are getting smarter each day. While AI can create tremendous time and cost savings, it promises even bigger, more meaningful returns in another area: customer experience.
If you are a customer experience newbie, the world must seem overwhelming to you.
The Challenge and How It Should Be Solved
