Interacting with consumers over the internet is not new, but it has grown in popularity since the outbreak of the pandemic. Businesses will learn how to become more agile in meeting changing customer needs as long as they continue to listen, adopt new tools, and build communities.
Whether organizations were ready or not, they were forced to go through a decade’s worth of planned digital transformation overnight. Customer expectations have shifted dramatically in terms of communication styles, digital experiences and tools. Businesses had to adjust swiftly to meet customers where they were today as face-to-face interactions become digital.
Customer experience (CX) teams and marketers should not aim to replicate the in-person experience digitally to reach customers in an increasingly digital-first environment, but rather respond to evolving expectations in the hybrid world.
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Identify New Customer Expectations
The pandemic has taught everyone that making decisions based on notions from a year ago or even last month, is a bad idea. Month-old data was considered fresh in 2019, however that no longer holds true.
CX and marketing teams must listen constantly to uncover new customer expectations – Are they ready for face-to-face interactions yet? Do they want phone support or online chat? Do they want a break from email campaigns? And so on.
In this digital renaissance, delighting customers necessitates an agile strategy to acquiring real-time insights. It necessitates inviting customers to submit feedback wherever they are—on the internet, in their inbox, on their mobile phone.
CX teams should be prepared to listen at the right touchpoint and when expectations shift, they should be prepared to alter their strategy based on what the consumers are saying.
CX teams should also go one step further – once they collect consumer feedback, they must analyse it and share it with stakeholders so that they can respond promptly while the information is still relevant.
If they don’t keep up with their evolving expectations of their customers, their brand might as well be stuck in the year 2019.
AI-Assisted Sentiment Analysis
A flood of data might result from real-time information from an increasing number of touch points. Tools should evolve in order to successfully manage and implement such a large volume of data.
AI and machine-learning technology has progressed to the point where it can collect all incoming feedback, assess the responses, and synthesize consumer sentiment in a fraction of the time and money it previously took— often without having to rely on highly skilled third parties.
AI can filter through all the comments, identify what’s useful, and find critical insights that brands need to learn from, thanks to its ability to handle vast amounts of data. These revelations can then be utilized to propose activities and test solutions to the problem, resulting in speedier action. AI will improve at resolving difficulties for customers as new insights are acquired through customer interactions.
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CX teams that strategically use AI understand the importance of both structured and unstructured data. Structured data is easy to measure, but unstructured data is the “why” behind customer sentiment and can be challenging to measure.
CX teams can now access into difficult-to-measure customer data including contact centre discussions, social media activity, and more thanks to AI. This provides organizations with a much richer, in-depth view of their customers, allowing them to take the appropriate steps to improve customer experience.
Building a Digital Community
CX teams need to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible, which requires creating a space where customers can speak with individuals they know and trust.
When businesses create digital forums and communities, they are creating a window into actual customer sentiment about the brand. Such communities can take on a life of their own, allowing businesses to watch and listen from the side-lines as customers open up about the topics that matter most to them.
With remote everything, building virtual communities also allows access to people that businesses might not have been able to reach in a physical space. Members of digital communities frequently invite others who share their interests to join in the conversation.
Businesses that did not take a community-building approach during the pandemic are missing out on an opportunity to create a single central location where real-time expectations and sentiments can be found.
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