“Last year, people and businesses around the world exchanged over 10 billion messages each month -on Facebook Messenger alone,” Warren Levitan, co-Founder & CEO of omnichannel conversation platform Smooch, writes on TNW. Multiple platforms for online live chat and website-integrated instant messaging now feature AI-powered virtual assistants that use data to quickly address common customer issues (”Where’s my order?” ranks high) and redirect more complicated questions to human customer service agents. Not only has the number of conversations between customers and businesses increased, but so has the speed of conversation and the proliferation of consumer-oriented data. Essential to every touchpoint in this evolving customer journey are two major gamechangers: customer experience and data. With customer expectations already high in terms of overall brand experience, the emerging paradigm of omnichannel and online shopping has come with even more specific customer expectations, tied to everything from website chat experiences to product satisfaction to shipping times. Today, one of the fastest growing and least tapped data sources are the millions of digital conversations happening between customers and brands.
Through AI data analysis, brands can gain critical insights into customer behaviour. In 2020, 75 percent of consumers tried a new shopping behaviour and intend to continue that behaviour in the longer term, whether that’s a new shopping method, onmichannel fulfilment options like click-and-collect, or even a complete brand switch. Unlike the previous steady increase of online sales with certain demographics, namely millennials and Gen Z, the pandemic accelerated this trend to all age and income groups. The COVID-19 pandemic has acted like jet fuel on the transformation of online shopping and services, accelerating the shift to e-commerce by five years : ecommerce accounted for 16.1% of total retail sales in Q2, up from 11.8% in the first quarter of 2020. For CX strategists, sales and customer service professionals and even product creators, the most effective way to understand consumers and meet their needs is to take a deep dive into a goldmine of customer data. Insights-oriented AI data analysis stands out as a digital solution that has the potential to paint a vivid picture of a company’s customers, along with what they think about a brand, its products, its services and its image in their eyes. Businesses need to adopt digital solutions to keep customers satisfied and continue growing their businesses.” With the unprecedented rise of online shopping during the Covid-19 pandemic, the related increase in this natural conversational data is every brands’ dream.Īs business-to-customer interaction gets increasingly conversational, the value of customer engagement through conversation will only go up, predicts Subrah Iyar, CEO and cofounder of Moxtra and former CEO, chairman and cofounder of WebEx in a recent Forbes article on 2021 CX trends : “Regardless of a shift back towards pre-pandemic life, the convenience and flexibility of a digital customer experience is here to stay. Every conversation that a customer has with a company, from casual in-store queries to online chats, is packed with information about what that customer wants, how they think, how they feel about the brand, and more-all in their own unfiltered words.