Customer Engagement in 2021 – The Shorter The Better

    Businesses are using advanced technology to shorten customer conversations and the entire engagement cycle.

    Lately, companies are seeing a change in customer behavior and buying patterns as a result of the pandemic. This is putting more pressure on the IT team – in order to respond to new customer requirements and enhance the customer experience. Hence, brands are prioritizing using advanced technology to make the engagement cycle short and meaningful.

    As a result, global CXOs are focusing on keeping customer conversations. Businesses are implementing new digital technologies – although there are concerns related to cash-flows. Substantial progress in AI-enabled speech-to-text, as well as text-to-speech solutions, have facilitated in providing a seamless voice-driven customer experience.

    A recent Gartner study revealed about 25% of customer service functionalities would utilize virtual customer assistants by 2020. In fact, agent calls capacity dropped by 20% even though most centers were able to restore about 50% of lost capacity – claimed Pindrop Pulse Flash. Business leaders noted a slowdown in the customer engagement lifecycle.

    Read More: Customer Data Platforms and Their Role in Driving Marketing Initiatives

    Conversational AI and ML are helping enterprises to analyze human speech patterns to get more result-oriented interactions with their audiences. Automating speeches for customer issue resolution and engagement can considerably reduce the average time a customer spending on the phone – to resolve a query.

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    Paul Stoddart, CMO at Epicor

    Paul Stoddart, CMO at Epicor, explains,
    “To successfully reach individual, marketers must strike the right balance by making their message powerful enough to resonate to the core individual person, and at the same time, make sense in other areas of their lives, whether it’s their specific job role or the company they work for.”

    Lately, contact centers across the world are going via their customer support queues at a faster pace, controlling cash-flows and slashing costs amid the economic crisis. Furthermore, voice-based AI is a primary factor that is helping to engage with a less tech-savvy target audience.

    It is no secret that the contact centers are the bridge connecting brands with their customers. Currently, more customers are also looking for a better experience – in addition to the quality service. In this context, Paul also added, “Goodbye B2B and B2C, Hello B2i. There is no longer delineation between types of marketing. All marketing is about a brand reaching an individual person, and as we enter 2021, B2i will only be more prominent.”

    Unsurprisingly, this digital era allows consumers to rate interactions with the call center representatives – which is a critical business aspect. COVID-19 has pushed most businesses to reanalyze their essential decisions linked to customer engagement and their buying journey.

    Read More: AI data report shares what ad creative will work in 2021

    In today’s world, the more human interaction and personalization are, the more satisfied the consumers will be. Hence, CMOs are focused on retaining customers by making investments and upgrading their creativity for long-term benefits. This is certainly because consumers are swamped with marketing messages from their preferred brands than ever.

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    Mirko Holzer, CEO at BrandMaker

    Mirko Holzer, CEO at BrandMaker, concluded,
    “Given this, marketers will need to boost relevancy as well as their creative juices to cut through the clutter and stand out. Connecting with target consumers, who are increasingly more online, will be more challenging this year, meaning close consideration to content and meaningful messaging will be imperative.”

    Clearly, “the right technology can help marketers to score and prioritize content to directly trigger the content-creation process so they can more efficiently create, distribute and launch the new content they need to engage consumers,” added Mirko.