AI is set to become one of the biggest change drivers in the world of customer experience (CX). However technology alone cannot improve CX – it has to be underpinned by company culture.
This emerged during a Future of CX Executive Breakfast hosted by Verint, the customer engagement company, in partnership with ITWeb this week.
CX experts noted that customer expectations were changing fast, and many local organisations were not keeping pace with these changes.
Keynote speaker Julia Ahlfeldt, a certified customer experience professional and consultant, said: “Consumers live in a perpetual state of abundance of choice and communications.”
She said that in the 1970s, consumers saw an average of 500 to 1 600 advertisements a day; whereas they now see up to 10 000 advertisements a day, along with an overwhelming inflow of communications and information across various channels.
“For the modern consumer, reality is congested, noisy and relentless,” she said.
An AI-empowered consumer is our next frontier.
Julia Ahlfeldt, CX consultant.
Ahlfeldt said this paved the way for AI to become a consumer tool to help them sift through information. “AI like ChatGPT has the potential to change CX. The reason it has been so incredibly appealing to consumers is that it solved a problem, helping them cut through the noise and make informed decisions,” she said.
“The number one reason consumers go online is to find information, and tools like ChatGPT help. An AI-empowered consumer is our next frontier. They will be super informed, super empowered and will demand so much more from the brands they engage with. We could even see consumer bots engaging with brand bots.”
Ahlfeldt said that while AI would play an important role in improving CX for organisations, technology was only a part of the solution. Organisational culture, people and processes had to become more customer-led, she noted. “Organisations need to prepare to embrace the technology, break down silos, and become more agile and adaptive,” she said.
Engagement capacity gap
Douglas McNeilage, regional director at Verint South Africa, said many organisations are experiencing an engagement capacity gap between the customer’s elevated CX expectations and the organisation’s available resources, knowledge and time to meet these expectations.
McNeilage said local organisations are focusing on improving CX through the use of quality and performance management tools, messaging and social channels, chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants.
He outlined how Verint, a leader in customer engagement technology, enables improved customer engagement, workforce management, experience management and knowledge management to improve CX and drive ROI.
“The Verint One Workforce approach through the Verint Cloud Platform caters to orchestration and knowledge management for real-time employee support that enables employees to respond quickly to change and deliver a high quality CX, which can in turn drive sales,” he said. “It increases efficiency and effectiveness, and allows organisations to derive insights that help them make informed decisions. The Verint One Workforce approach on the Verint Platform seamlessly orchestrates one source of truth, and gives employees the information they need to service customers in the right way at the right time.”
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
In a panel discussion, McNeilage, Jordan Seke, CRM officer and CX specialist at Wits University, and Yugeshree Frylinck (CXPA), customer experience officer and managing consultant at The CX Group, debated what South Africa organisations ‘could do better’ in the CX arena.
Panellists and attendees held up local banks as an example of poor CX, with customer information in silos and customers forced to repeat their queries and submit personal information repeatedly to different departments.
Seke said: “Banks are a recurring frustration. But many South African organisations seem to think they are entitled to give customers poor service.” He noted that CX should not be a function within a department, but should instead be an organisation-wide focus. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast. CX isn’t a function – it needs to be a culture, and all employees need to be part of the CX vision.”
Frylinck added: “It is a mistake to think the same old approach to CX will keep working in a changing environment. Organisations cannot wrap the customer around the technology – it needs to be the other way around. They need to understand their customers and their expectations, and add value for them.”
She noted that while most local organisations were trying to improve CX there were challenges, such as data residing in silos. In addition, customer expectations might vary by demographic. “We all want value for money and friendly service, but things like friendliness and ease of use mean different things to different people,” she said.
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