An increasing focus on using digital channels poses both exciting opportunities and challenges for businesses everywhere, especially where innovation matters. In this webinar, executives from WhatsApp and leading Voice AI company, Curious Thing, discuss the latest technology and channels to improve engagement, efficiency, and ROI of your business-customer communications.
The topics tackled in the webinar included the value proposition of new communication channels for businesses – how leading companies are improving the effectiveness and efficiency of their communications without driving up costs; understanding the shift in communication channels – How new technologies benefit customers and how businesses can meet evolving customer expectations; and getting the most out of new technology – a deep dive into lessons learned from companies using these solutions.
The panellists for the webinar were Adam Bowden, APAC Head of Client Management (Business Messaging) at Meta; Sam Zheng, CEO and Co-founder at Curious Thing; Rik Johnson, Head of Solutions at Curious Thing, and was moderated by Jean Alfonso-Decena, Founder & Executive Director at InSilence AI.
Paving the way for a higher level of customer service
Customer experience is a key focus in every company. Moderator Jean Alfonso-Decena kicked off the webinar by asking the audience if they had incorporated any communication channels in their business to streamline operations and improve the experience. The audience poll revealed that 80 per cent of those who answered ‘not yet’ were soon making this a priority.
Commenting on how emerging channels or innovative technologies are helping pave the way to a higher level of customer experience, Bowden explained, “We look at customer experience as being able to give customers a seamless experience, being able to engage with them at all stages of a customer journey. Whether that’s discovery, marketing, lead generation, transactional, or customer care, I think what is important now is to have that one seamless experience and to provide that experience where the customers are, not where businesses expect customers to be.”
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Johnson echoed this by explaining that customer experience is an inherently personal expectation that each of us has which is part of the challenge in the communication space. “It’s about how to make it seamless and easy and how to meet people where they want to operate, but that doesn’t mean that everybody wants to have the same experience,” Johnson explained.
“There have to be options, channels and variety there for people who want to interact in different ways. So in many ways, it’s a very personal relationship with a business,” Johnson added.
To this, Zheng added that “Building trust is essential to delivering on the ‘what’ and ‘how’. You can also invite customers to help shape their experience – decide what the best timing is for them. That’s my view of what good customer experience is.”
Connecting with businesses in today’s landscape
According to Bowden, the way people communicate with businesses is changing and that’s been accelerated because of the pandemic around the world. Now, people are messaging businesses of all sizes. Not just in enterprises but in SMBs as well – communication is happening for a variety of reasons. “People want to engage for different reasons and they want to do it in the same way that they chat and communicate with their friends and family. They want businesses to come to them wherever they are, rather than reaching out to businesses to start the conversation.”
Zheng added, “When businesses think about touch points, they think about key customer milestones. Today, thanks to lots of technology companies, the definition of touch points are massively changing. Most businesses are required to create touch points more intelligently. You need to be proactive and very responsive at the same time. This is the trend we have seen in a lot of businesses, especially B2C. It’s a challenge and also a great opportunity for large businesses like Meta and smaller organisations like Curious Thing.”
Larger platforms like Meta have found their way around this. “We don’t have independent touch points with customers at Meta. You do not have one single touch point for customer care, sales, product information, or discovery. A customer chooses their stage of the journey and none of those is in isolation,” explained Bowden. According to him, customers that want to speak to a business with a support issue are likely to be the same people that businesses want to speak to about a new sales opportunity or get information from to help them in a future state.
He added, “I think what businesses are starting to understand is that you cannot segment those touch points across different departments and different channels. You need to bring that conversation to one place, so that’s just creating a little more complexity for organisations, but from a customer experience standpoint – that improves it significantly.”
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Curious Thing addresses this challenge by pioneering the use of voice AI to have purpose-led conversations with customers, especially proactive conversations. “We’ve been speaking to people from various demographics, particularly different age groups and it’s been astonishing to learn that customers who are over 60 years old are quite happy to speak to a pleasant robot if the robot will get the job done. It’s all about the outcome and the convenience, and being very transparent. Go in open-minded because customers will surprise you as to what they’re open to. The end result of the interaction is the thing that matters to them,” said Zheng.
“What’s important is we are reinventing how touchpoints are created even before people realise that – okay, I need to talk to someone,” he added.
Johnson, who comes from the world of call centres and was previously a customer of Curious Thing, cited a concrete example: “We had a challenge at the start of the pandemic where we needed to call 200,000 people in a day. You can’t do it with people; we couldn’t conjure them out of thin air – so how could we get a critical message out to people within an eight-hour span to find out who needed help? We had to find those needles in the haystack and bring them back in to be able to give support where it mattered most.”
She added, “It really showed me how we tend to think AI is going to solve these commoditised problems; essentially give AI the work that humans don’t want to do. But it’s actually more about finding ways to get humans to the work they want to do.”
Meanwhile, Bowden argues that not every person wants the same type of experience. “It’s amazing how many of those issues can be solved by a chatbot. Even though we might say ‘I want to speak to a person,’ we actually want the most efficient and quickest way to solve the problem. If I can have an interaction with a chatbot and solve that problem in five minutes, I would be happier than being on the phone waiting for an hour to speak to an agent,” he explained.
For businesses, Meta puts a lot of emphasis on three key things: relevancy, timeliness, and expectancy. If you are not delivering across those three, you are likely providing a poor customer experience.
Checks and balances in emerging customer communication channels
When we talk about channels, it’s about letting people direct their own journey. How can businesses help you get to where you want to be?
Johnson remarked, “We ask customers after their call a lot of the time. How did you find this? Did it meet your expectations? The responses are surprisingly positive, particularly when you’ve got the right use case. In the health sector, we’ve found between 75 and 85 per cent of people are very positive about being able to speak with an AI bot. Because it’s available, they understand what it’s there for and they feel supported and connected with the organisation.”
For Bowden, he believes that the challenge is figuring out where your customers are spending time and what your macro-based challenges are in those markets. “Internally, what we found is that a lot of businesses don’t necessarily have all of their different systems set up to be connected. If you have a sales system, a customer support system, and a product-based system for example, and they’re not well integrated, then it could be a very hazardous approach to engaging with customers.”
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When it comes to anticipating changes in the customer landscape, the panel believes that it’s a matter of understanding your customers. Bowden pointed out that nobody could have predicted that a pandemic was going to come. “It’s more about how you become agile to be able to shift and evolve very quickly,” he explained.
The panel agrees that every interaction with a customer is a learning opportunity and as long as you learn through every touch point, you will be evolving at a pace that is similar to your customers’ changing behaviour. “I think it’s quite difficult to get ahead of that but as long as you are in line with that, you’re going to be successful,” Bowden added.
Meanwhile, Zheng explained that it is important to be curious about your customers. “Businesses should try and understand what the customer really needs, and learning from every opportunity adds to that. That’s basically where we want to go – enable businesses to be more curious so they can do better for their customers,” he elaborated.
To check out more insights from our esteemed panellists, watch the webinar here. Also, you may see general responses to several questions raised during the webinar here.
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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Curious Thing
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