24 May The Power of Streamlining Customer Experience
I love how technology has streamlined consumer life. Amazon prime provides shopping from home and delivers purchases within hours. GrubHub delivers food to the doorstep of over 19 million users. What an upgrade from epic store lines, waiting weeks for a package, cooking and getting dressed to eat out. The power of streamlining customer experience saves energy, saves money, and saves time for the other things I want to do.
Shrinking Lines
I still value analog experiences, of course. Humans are social animals. As a consumer, I enjoy on-site shopping and events too. During times of economic uncertainty, those kinds of experiences are continually being streamlined to both save businesses money and improve customer loyalty. With the top 1% of customers being 18x more valuable than the average customer, the investment in customer experience is worth it.
My friend and I went to In-N-Out back in 2019 (California omnivores know the bliss that is In-N-Out), and experienced the shortest line I’d ever seen on a weekend or holiday.
The attendants already took orders the customer’s car window while you’re waiting in line. This time they added taking payment at the car window in advance. I think that was the reason the lines were shorter.
Investing in Customer Experience
The process could be streamlined further and a customer pain point avoided. The employee returned to us to ask for payment after taking multiple orders. She took the credit card and brought it back after payment was processed. This was extra work for her and a strange customer experience.
Paying in advance clearly moves the line faster. However, taking the order and processing payment in one seamless transaction is even faster. It also removes the need to take a customer’s credit card out of their sight and prevents errors. This may require In-N-Out to upgrade their system, but the benefit is being able to serve more customers in less time.
Investing in streamlining benefits employees and builds quality company culture.
Increase Employee Productivity
In-N-Out is known for taking care of their staff. They even have an umbrella with a drink stand outside to provide their employees with shade and hydration. That is huge during 100 degree days in a California summer. Plus above average industry pay rates for entry positions, six figure manager salaries, and benefits create an upbeat, efficient staff that make the customer experience positive too.
There is study data that supports the idea that happiness improves productivity. A 2022 University of Warwick study found happiness increased productivity 12%. This is similar to a 2017 University of Oxford study which found happy workers were 13% more productive.
The Social Market Foundation (UK)2015 study found that productivity increased almost 20% following simple offerings of drinks and snacks.
Automatically Monitor 100% of Interactions
Give managers and agents the support they need to provide customers the best experience. Streamline analysis of 100% of customer interactions with an AI fueled solution like CSAT.AI. Patented analysis of all customer instances allows for more robust data sets.
In addition, in-the-moment individualized automatic feedback reinforces positive agent training. This allows for agent pivoting during the instances to reduce churn, improve CX, FCR and other metrics.
Streamlining Customer Experience with Generative AI
Imagine a world where customer service teams could instantly decipher every interaction’s most critical aspects, saving time, optimizing responses, and enhancing overall client satisfaction.Well, that world is here thanks to generative AI.
Save Time, Improve Efficiency
Customer service teams deal with high volumes of client interactions every day. It’s an overwhelming task to manually track every single detail of so many tickets. Generative AI streamlines this process by summarizing the contents of each interaction, eliminating the need for managers and supervisors to sift through piles of data.
This increased efficiency allows customer service reps to devote more time to addressing complex client concerns and cultivating stronger relationships. Management teams can also identify trends, recurring issues, and customer sentiment more quickly.
That speed makes for faster resolutions and overall improvements in customer satisfaction. Management can then turn their attention to refining processes, developing new ideas and creating better connections with their teams.
“For example, the ability of generative AI to put massive amounts of information at the fingertips of CSRs greatly increases their capacity to resolve the customer’s problem more thoroughly and quickly than either a chatbot alone or a CSR following a rote script.”
“Generative AI Will Enhance – Note Erase – Customer Service Jobs”
– American Association for Physician Leadership
Improve Accuracy
Human error is inevitable, especially when dealing with high volumes of information. Integrating generative AI summaries into a customer service system can reduce errors.
This technology is able to distinguish the key points of each interaction, targeting essential trends or patterns that might otherwise be missed. Consequently, teams can rely on accurate insights to develop more informed strategies for addressing customer needs, thereby upgrading CX too.
“With any interaction that a company has with a customer, there should be some new learning about the customer so that in the next interaction, the firm can do an even better job at recognizing, requesting, and responding.”
“Create Winning Customer Experiences with Generative AI”
– Harvard Business Review
Enhance Decision Making
For managers and supervisors, generative AI summaries offer an invaluable resource to guide decision-making. Leaders have access to the data and patterns quickly so they can make decisions and pivot more effectively.
For example, an AI-generated summary may reveal a recurring issue like a mismatch in product offerings, a repeating problem in the response process or billing errors. Management can be proactive in creating solutions for these situations.
“..67 percent of leaders expect to boostAI/bots spending over the next year, with nearly half of respondents committing to as much as a 25 percent increase in budget. A fifth of leaders expect to increase these investments by more than 25 percent…”
Zendesk CX Trends 2023
Meet Customer Expectations and Support Agents
Customers want the fastest service and if AI helps them get it they are on board with it, as long as they have access to human support when needed. As a matter of fact, customers expect AI to be a part of their service. This is either directly or AI assisting the agents in addressing concerns like generative AI summaries do.
AI summaries do more for agents than save them time. They act as a training tool and support agents in evolving service by providing context and a sense of customer sentiment.
“Three in four consumers who have interacted with generative AI want and are comfortable with human agents using it to help answer their questions, but they also want the accuracy and empathy humans provide.”
“Consumers want generative AI and know it will change their service experiences”
– Zendesk
Foster Innovation and Long-Term Growth
By incorporating generative AI summaries into customer service systems, businesses propel themselves to the forefront of technology-driven innovation. Harnessing this powerful tool enables agile response in both service delivery and internal operations.
Companies can stay ahead of industry trends and competitors while fostering long-term growth. Plus the operational efficiency gains enable businesses to invest further resources in innovation which paves the way for ongoing success.
“Companies can’t afford to wait. Leaders must begin now to do the hard work of reinventing jobs and creating the most effective mix of human, automated, augmented, and emergent tasks in the context of the company’s specific business.”
“Generative AI Will Enhance – Note Erase – Customer Service Jobs”
– American Association for Physician Leadership
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly changing, customer-centric world, businesses must stay one step ahead to remain competitive. Streamlining customer experience benefits businesses, their workers and their customers. Generative AI acts as a powerful streamlining tool improving efficiency and accuracy, driving decision-making and fostering innovation.
CSAT.AI has added generative AI to its patented, award-winning support solution for customer service teams. Schedule a demo to discover how CSAT.AI can streamline customer experience for your business.
(This is an updated blog originally posted May 2019)
