A customer is one of the most crucial aspects of a business enterprise. For any business to succeed in the long term, it is really important to have a loyal customer base, which is only possible by delighting customers through personalised experiences.
In the competitive business age, customers have several alternatives and customer retention is a major challenge. Leveraging the advantages of technological advancements, a business can easily satisfy and retain its customer base and improve the efficiency of the business.
>See also: 3 ways to transform the customer experience
Let’s take a look at some of the most promising technologies and how they help businesses improve the customer experience journey.
1. Chatbots
Chatbots are the latest revolution in the business landscape. With the help of AI-powered chatbots, businesses are better equipped to handle customer service functions. These virtual assistants fulfil a customer’s demand of getting instant service support from a business.
Chatbots are easy to deploy for a business and can provide instant support via voice, mobile app, instant messaging, SMS, or website. As these bots promise quick response times, customer queries are handled efficiently, improving customer satisfaction and experience with a business.
2. Big data analytics
According to a survey by Salesforce, 57% of the total consumers willingly share personal data with companies that promise to send personalised offers and discounts. With massive data inputs received by a business through various activities, it becomes increasingly important for them to analyse this data and use it for delivering a better experience to end consumers.
>See also: How to improve customer experience with the internet of things
This is where big data analytics come to a business’ rescue. With the help of big data analytics, growing businesses can conveniently gather useful insights into consumer preferences and behaviours that help them provide personalised services. The nature of personalisation helps a business build a loyal customer base and improve revenues over the long term.
Big data analytics is transforming the way businesses interact with customers. The technology helps a brand/business understand customers’ problems, aspirations, and expectations, which help in quicker resolution and providing tailor-made solutions according to personal expectations.
3. Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has taken the business landscape by storm, owing to the enormous potential benefits it projects for business growth. With the help of artificial intelligence-powered tools, businesses can pump up the business process automation and can strike up conversations that are relevant to the individual customers.
AI is empowering customer support conversations and improving decision-making abilities within organisations through automation. AI helps humans to provide proactive and actionable responses to customers quickly, improving customer satisfaction, eventually.
Pypestream – a progressive tech company made use of artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience using a B2C messaging app. This app, developed by the startup, enabled businesses to chat with customers securely using mobile devices.
>See also: AI’s impact on customer experience
Being a quick, secure, and reliable portal for businesses, as well as customers, the app helped consumers to switch on the ‘Pypes’ for the businesses they want to interact with. At the same time, the ‘Pypes’ helped businesses message the end consumer using subject-specific channels, called ‘streams.’
As these interactions are completely private and are of interest to both the businesses and consumers, the app helps businesses avoid wasting time due to handling multiple customer support channels, and provide quick service resolution to end consumers.
4. Virtual reality
Virtual reality is the most recent technological breakthrough that is transforming the consumer experience landscape for modern businesses. Virtual reality has the potential to completely alter the consumer experience as we know it.
VR can engage customers in a better way, as the technology is designed to provide a complete sensory experience that captures the attention, imagination, and senses unlike any other technology present in modern times.
Offering an immersive experience, VR is helping businesses to engage consumers in a better way than other technologies, motivating consumers to interact in a better way with a product/brand, delighting them.
>See also: 4 factors set to impact customer experience management
One of the growing, Irish brewing businesses, Guinness, leveraged the power of VR to introduce the latest range of beers by setting up VR tasting booths in Tesco stores across the UK, to stimulate consumer senses and engage them in an immersive experience.
The brand’s master brewer, Peter Simpson, through these VR booths, took unsuspecting buyers on an immersive journey through a narrative that was topped with the right colors, textures, sounds, and movements to attune consumers to the fresh flavours of newly introduced beer lines by Guinness.
5. Internet of Things (IoT)
Numerous scientific studies and industry surveys already predict that businesses will be the greatest beneficiaries and adopters of IoT solutions in modern times. As IoT solutions help businesses lower operational costs, and increase productivity and expansion, businesses are actively adopting such solutions to engage customers with delightful experiences.
As IoT solutions enable a business to deploy effective promotional campaigns across different platform through a relationship between digital and real world activities, these have a great potential to attract consumers towards a business service or product.
The biggest example of success of IoT for a business enterprise is the adoption of FitBit in common lives. FitBit, a fitness-monitoring device, ideally depicts how real-world hardware promises valuable social capital for a user.
>See also: The 3 types of analytics set to transform customer experience
As the device monitors fitness activities in real time and helps users directly upload the same to social platforms to receive appreciation, it motivates other prospective users to buy the device and engage with the brand, thus, improving business prospects. Simply, the adoption of IoT by FitBit has helped the brand start a fitness revolution online and engage customers in a better way than any other method.
These modern technologies are transforming nearly every domain in the customer experience for business. Many businesses have already benefitted from using these technologies, and it is on the business to improve efficiency, productivity, and growth prospects by continuously evolving, using such modern technologies.
Sourced by Sawaram Suthar, head of marketing at Tagove
