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Refocusing on the customer in the age of COVID-19: How to build a successful customer engagement strategy
Read MoreThe coronavirus pandemic has radically transformed daily life. Businesses are struggling with the sudden shift in consumer behavior. Social distancing is the norm, and in many cases, business’s engagement with customers has become entirely digital.
For many, customer engagement—the act of building relationships with a brand, or offering improved service through digital communications—is a new frontier. Some digital native companies have raised dizzying valuations using technology, but customer engagement, and its benefits, are accessible to anyone willing to explore this new frontier.
Understanding the customer engagement triangle
Think of customer engagement as a triangle between the following three components. Each must work together to build a successful customer engagement strategy. Focusing on one to the detriment of another will cause friction between you and your customer.
Figure 1: The Customer Engagement Triangle
- Customer experience: How consumers perceive interactions with your company, brand of service, whether they are digital or …
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How businesses can earn consumers' trust with conversational AI
Read MoreWith the proliferation of messaging platforms and digital voice assistants has come the rise of conversational AI—better known as bots.
These chatbots, virtual assistants, smart speakers, and communication platforms are powered by machine learning and can be used to build trust between brands and consumers. In fact, by the end of 2020, 25 percent of customer support operations will integrate virtual customer assistants (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels –– up from less than two percent in 2017.
The use of virtual and voice assistants continues to rise, with Google’s Assistant deployed across one billion devices, and Amazon reporting sales of 100 million Alexa-enabled devices in 2019. The use of smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, is expected to reach 225 million units in 2020.Apple’s Siri set the stage for widespread consumer adoption since debuting in 2011. Built on artificial intelligence (AI), voice assistants use …
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Conversational chaos: Taming the paradox of choice in the CPaaS world
Read MoreIn the past four years, Opus Research has tracked exponential growth in the number of “Intelligent Assistants,” positioned as chatbots, message bots, and automated virtual agents. We’ve chronicled at least 100 success stories at banks, airlines, phone companies, cosmetics purveyors and online merchants. It is now time to address the challenges confronting executives at companies—perhaps the majority of implementations—that are neither successes or failures; just older, wiser and more experienced. Today, we stand at the dawn of the third decade of a new millennium. A self-selecting group of customer care professionals and contact center operators reap benefits from cloud-based technologies. Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers led by Amazon, Twilio and Vonage and bolstered by Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM offer unprecedented levels of “openness” and flexibility along with consumption-based pricing.
Each platform provider rounds out its offer with a “marketplace for microservices.” …
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