Customer Experience And Communications: The Future Is Now
As the tech world advances, a million-dollar question keeps emerging. How does improving communication affect what we now call Customer Experience or CX?
And in an era where companies are adopting hybrid work models and desperately moving towards cloud and unified communication platforms in drones, how will the Customer Experience evolve in the next few years?
Well, here’s what we think.
Three ground-breaking concepts and trends will push ‘CX comms’ (or Customer Experience-related Communications) forward.
1. The Emergence of AI In 5G mode
One of the main advantages of 5G technology will also be the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — at least on a much greater scale than what we have at the moment.
As its facilitation will be easier, businesses will be more enabled to use cloud systems, integrate virtual assistants, bots and make real-time collaboration all the more possible.
The COVID-19 pandemic set the perfect stage for the use of AI for CX and its inevitable importance.
As people remained in their homes, contact volumes for businesses rose. However, companies that had virtual assistants were able to dodge the chaos by retraining their bots to respond to pandemic-specific questions.
Post-COVID, the trend is bound to continue.
Having proven its worth, AI will witness new levels of demand.
Chatbots of all kinds from FAQ bots to Virtual Assistants will enable the delivery of personalized CX. In that way, companies will be able to scale up communication and live out their brands’ values consistently.
And here’s something you might want to know.
Companies with a CX mindset drive revenue 4–8% higher than the rest of their industry peers.
With that said, the answer to whether Customer Experience is a need or want is, well, BOTH. It’s both a need and a want!
Businesses should want to have enhanced communication channels and customer experience touchpoints with their buyers, plus they need to have it to differentiate themselves in the market.
Amazon does it, and so can your business!
2. The Shifting Goalposts Of The Future Of Work
“I see one of the biggest opportunities of 5G to be in the future of the workplace. Technologies like extended reality (XR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), enabled by 5G, have the potential to allow us to have face-to-face chats with coworkers and experience the physical atmospheres of our offices without having to leave home. Through full-scale automation and use of industry 4.0 technologies, 5G will also transform industries across many verticals” — Wojciech Bajda, vice president and head of Ericsson GCC in Arabian Business.
As we write this, a more significant number of companies today have gone hybrid, as opposed to the reality a few years back when physical offices and physical communications systems were all we knew.
True, the pandemic caused much of this shift, but it’s important to remember that any massive change needs some kind of support to stick. So the transition towards a virtual-run workplace can only stick if the actual people living through it benefit from it and can adapt to it.
And the thing is, more workers today also prefer a hybrid model 83% of the time. Such an arrangement is also said to yield higher productivity levels than the traditional office setup plus it can save quite a few coins for the organisation.
So as we live through a time when that once proverbial “future of work” has become a reality, many more opportunities are available to us and our organisations.
And since the entire idea of the “future of work” has come years (possibly even decades) before most of us expected it to arrive, we must get used to playing catchup. That will be the only way for us to survive and thrive because the very concept as we know it is continuing and will continue to evolve every single day.
That means our tools and platforms also need to evolve with the times.
If our employees work more and more remotely and our customers search for answers to their questions less and less traditionally, things have to change.
Our communication and how we think about the concept can not afford to remain static.
With the emergence of 5G and AI, communication lags, time zone challenges, remote team synchronisation, and anything-less-than-24–7–365 customer service can be 100% avoided.
Customer Experience agents will need to incorporate new-age tools, tips and tricks, 24/7/365 and as quickly as their customers’ communication needs & avenues multiply.
3. The Common Ground: #HumanisingCommunication
This third one is pretty simple. No surprises or ground-breaking revelations!
It is just the simple idea of humanising communication.
Today, even as technology improves, 82% of consumers want more human interactions.
But the big question is: how can you stay “human” even as you sign on to more technological solutions for your growing Customer Experience needs?
There is no absolute answer to this, but the trends show us that AI technologies are advancing.
And thanks to the latest machine learning and natural language processing abilities, they can offer the necessary empathy — or that “human” element that we all seek.
According to Forbes, such technologies are “capable of bidirectional human-like communications that pinpoint a customer’s exact needs and decision-making drivers”. And isn’t that a significant step forward towards humanised communication?
We think it is!
Today, many companies are already leveraging AI tools to manage much of their business communication since they offer better, faster, round-the-clock responses, thus increasing revenue and slashing budget lines.
4. Go “Unified” Or Go Home!
This last one results from the current “future of work” trend and concerns from millions of CFOs around the world.
How do you enhance team communications at scale without adding more zeros to the budget lines and without stressing employees with endless logins, hundreds of passwords and a gazillion notifications?
The answer? Go unified.
With how our work styles have practically evolved with various real-time communication tools, Unified Communications (UC) systems are no longer just an option — they’re a must!
And not just for businesses that need them, but also for companies playing in that field or related fields.
All you have to do is simply look at what’s happening in the market.
Zoom is a comprehensive video conferencing software platform that doesn’t yet provide a fully-fledged UCaaS suite, but it plans to soon. A couple of other single-line communication service vendors are rolling up their sleeves with plans to either start cross-over product lines or merge with complementary providers.
So the motto across the industry seems to be “Go unified, or go home!”
How do we know?
Because we sing that very motto during our own team meetings!
The “unified communications” market might look like a small one at the moment but do not underestimate it.
Stiff competition is expected in the coming years, thanks to the increasing demand and value for UCaas (or Unified Communications As A Service) in the coming years.
Conclusion
We hope you learnt something about the future of customer experience with regards to communication. With this new knowledge, we know that you can make the most of your business communications.
If you have any questions or comments about the post or want to learn more about what we do and why we do it, please contact us anytime via hello@telebu.com
We’ll be happy to hear from you!
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