Using Data, AI, and Customer Engagement to Create the Total Experience
A company’s data is the backbone of its business, and proper data management can optimize customer engagement and customer's experience with your brand.
The typical business model is centered on a “funnel model” or a “purchase funnel,” which is critical for customer acquisition. Still, more can always be done regarding customer engagement and retention. To do so, utilizing the entirety of your organization’s knowledge, not only on specific customers but on business trends and developments, is crucial for success.
Forget the Funnel, Focus on the Flywheel
It’s essential to look at your customer engagement approach as a flywheel rather than a funnel. A flywheel is ongoing, and attention to a client doesn’t halt just because a single deal has been closed. A flywheel looks at the entire journey and ensures every interaction a person has with your brand is satisfactory and more. The flywheel model truly puts your customers at the center of your operation, leading to more opportunities, people coming back, and even advocating for your service by word of mouth or social media.
However, it’s one thing to talk about and another to know how to have success using this model. Information-driven systems can help drive the complete customer experience into existence by simply connecting every dot of data and putting it right at the fingertips of your employees—sales teams, marketing teams, support teams, operations, developers, and more.
If a company’s management is determined to achieve ultimate customer engagement, equipping their own workforce with innovative tools is an absolute must. Artificial intelligence-driven solutions are helping pave the way to improve the total experience (TX).
The Total Experience
The total experience links customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and multi-experience (MX) for an overall exceptional experience.
As alluded to, employee experience is as critical as any of the above “experiences” to achieve total experience. For example, giving customer support teams full access to searchable data improves the employee experience by making their jobs easier. When a customer support department's jobs are easy, this typically indicates happy customers and positive customer experiences. With connected information, the customer support representatives can have the solution to a client’s problem or concern in a matter of seconds. Quick access to corresponding data eliminates the stress of information hunting or waiting on a potential busy colleague that has the needed knowledge to get back to you.
Case Deflection’s Role in the Total Experience
The issue or situation being discussed often won't even reach the help desk because access to data can help you identify trends and potential problems well ahead of time. Identifying these patterns can lead to one of two things. Marketing, support, and sales teams can work together to write FAQs, blogs, articles, or tutorial videos that will help solve the matter at hand. Now, just visiting a dedicated area on your website will assist the customer with everything they need at the given moment or will need in the future. Another potential benefit is automated responses from a smart system that focuses on the customer’s description of their problem and points them to the right place. These tactics are called “case deflection,” which simply means customers can quickly help themselves rather than filing support tickets or dialing a busy customer service number. Practical experience has shown that case deflection can reduce support workload by 35 percent, a substantial marker.
The fact is, customers are clearly prominent to any business venture, but you need all hands on deck to retain them and keep them coming back. Artificial intelligence and machine learning methods not only give everybody in the picture (employees, users, existing and potential customers) access to quick and helpful information but continuously collect analytics behind the scenes. Analytics on a user’s behavior from their initial outreach to their last communication with your brand gives you invaluable insights into your company. These insights provide every member of your operation with a 360-degree view of all relevant information, leading to expert decision-making and a more productive workforce.
Above all else, the flywheel model assumes that a business can always be better in customer engagement and attraction. With the help of digitization and the appetite to innovate, companies can be more intelligent than ever before, and creating an effective total experience is just a few steps away.
Daniel Fallmann is founder and CEO of Mindbreeze, an international provider of appliances and cloud services for enterprise search, applied artificial intelligence, and knowledge management. From the company’s beginning, in 2005, Fallmann, together with his team, laid the foundation for the highly scalable and intelligent Mindbreeze InSpire appliance.