CX in Retail: Future-proofing your customer experience

Customers have more choice and control than ever over how they interact with you, so it’s vital to work out how to provide continuity of experience across those different touch points. And remember: today’s digital consumers aren’t just comparing the experience you deliver with that of your direct competitors, but against top performers in other industries like First Direct, Uber and Airbnb. That means your CX platform has to not only keep pace with customers’ digital expectations, but put you out in front.

Today’s “hot button” topics in CX—automation, machine learning, micro-apps and chatbots—will be tomorrow’s must-have capabilities. That’s why our platform comes pre-loaded with smart app automation, asynchronous messaging, next-generation engagement that takes advantage of the Internet of Things, and Bring-your-own-bot, which blends artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable a deeper understanding of customer interactions across channels. It’s not so much a feature set as a vision for elegantly bridging the customer experience across new apps and devices.

If all that sounds somewhat faceless, meet Kate. She is the personification of blended AI that comes with our innovation framework, and uses her own micro-apps and natural language processing to deliver proactive and predictive experiences. She’s fluent in Big Data, playing nicely with the likes of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. But being a modest kind of girl, she also recognises when customers need a real, live agent to solve their problems, and hands over gracefully to the appropriate human.

Clever tech aside, the whole point is to allow organisations to communicate more easily and effectively with people while running a smarter business. It’s not about replacing or hiding agents—it’s a way of delivering a personal service supported by technology.

It needn’t be daunting: the key is to start with something that solves the customer problem or improves the customer experience. Digital transformation inevitably involves a level of cultural upheaval, so it’s important to find some quick wins—opportunities to show the business how you can do things differently—and then watching the commercial performance flow from those initial implementations.

Learn more and check out the Industry Report – Contact Babel: The Inner Circle Guide to AI, Chatbots & Machine Learning