Guest Speaker:
Overview
In this episode, we will explore the intersection of customer experience and automation innovations. We will discuss how businesses can leverage technology to create seamless interactions that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Key Points to Cover:
- Understanding Customer Experience (CX): Define what customer experience means in today's digital landscape and its importance for businesses.
- The Role of Automation: Discuss various automation tools and technologies that can streamline customer interactions, such as chatbots, CRM systems, and AI-driven analytics.
- Case Studies: Highlight successful examples of companies that have effectively integrated automation into their customer experience strategies.
- Challenges and Solutions: Address common challenges businesses face when implementing automation and how to overcome them to maintain a personal touch.
- Future Trends: Explore emerging trends in customer experience and automation, including personalization, predictive analytics, and omnichannel strategies.
Listen On
Transcripts
Welcome to Tech lyceum. I'm your host, Neerja, and in today's episode, we are thrilled to have Michael Pearo, the CX consulting director, as we dive into the topic of crafting seamless interactions, customer experience and automation innovations. Let me introduce Michael to you. He has an impressive career that includes 30 years of experience in digital transformation. Michael works closely with clients to strategize and execute engaging and intuitive customer experiences. He leverages his extensive expertise in B to B and B to C areas. So, let's bring him on then. Hi there, Michael. I've been told you like to go by Mike. So, I hope it's okay that I call you that right off the bat. How are you doing, Mike?
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 0:54
I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me
I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me
Speaker – Neerja – 0:57
Great. So, let's get started. Let's begin our conversation on the fascinating world of customer experience and automation innovations, we're going to see how businesses can leverage technology to create seamless interactions that not only enhance customer satisfaction but also foster loyalty, right and towards that. Mike, my first question to you is,
Q: What does customer experience that CX mean in today's digital landscape, and why is it critical for businesses?
Great. So, let's get started. Let's begin our conversation on the fascinating world of customer experience and automation innovations, we're going to see how businesses can leverage technology to create seamless interactions that not only enhance customer satisfaction but also foster loyalty, right and towards that. Mike, my first question to you is,
Q: What does customer experience that CX mean in today's digital landscape, and why is it critical for businesses?
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 01:25
So, customer experience is the overall perception of a brand based on the interactions a user has across various touch points. It's only successful when it leads to positive emotions and building brand loyalty in today's digital landscape, you have seconds to make a positive impression and only minutes to deliver on that impression. So CX has become critical, since consumers have very high expectations for service and engagement, a positive customer experience can lead to increased loyalty. It can lead to repeat business, positive word of mouth and most important, better engagement. The main ingredients for CX are understanding user needs, personalization, the right technology and the right human skill set so that customers can achieve their business growth. If you observe customer experiences move beyond measuring customer satisfaction. We're not doing scoring these days, delivering CX demands investment, but it also delivers ROI, the dollar value of CX is becoming more concrete every day, so customers have very clear expectations, and to meet that, businesses develop capabilities to solve various customer challenges. Upgradations will be an ongoing process for it businesses. So, an example of this is reflected in the work we did with one of our customers in the automotive space. Their dealer network was suffering from poor customer experience. This was due to a combination of things, legacy systems, fragmented landscape of data and the inability of the dealers to be able to meet these customers' needs quickly.
By building a solution that tied these disparate systems together, we were able to give our customers dealers the information they needed in one place, and they were able to deliver it in a timely manner. By addressing those user needs, we were able to shift the customer experience to the positive.
So, customer experience is the overall perception of a brand based on the interactions a user has across various touch points. It's only successful when it leads to positive emotions and building brand loyalty in today's digital landscape, you have seconds to make a positive impression and only minutes to deliver on that impression. So CX has become critical, since consumers have very high expectations for service and engagement, a positive customer experience can lead to increased loyalty. It can lead to repeat business, positive word of mouth and most important, better engagement. The main ingredients for CX are understanding user needs, personalization, the right technology and the right human skill set so that customers can achieve their business growth. If you observe customer experiences move beyond measuring customer satisfaction. We're not doing scoring these days, delivering CX demands investment, but it also delivers ROI, the dollar value of CX is becoming more concrete every day, so customers have very clear expectations, and to meet that, businesses develop capabilities to solve various customer challenges. Upgradations will be an ongoing process for it businesses. So, an example of this is reflected in the work we did with one of our customers in the automotive space. Their dealer network was suffering from poor customer experience. This was due to a combination of things, legacy systems, fragmented landscape of data and the inability of the dealers to be able to meet these customers' needs quickly.
By building a solution that tied these disparate systems together, we were able to give our customers dealers the information they needed in one place, and they were able to deliver it in a timely manner. By addressing those user needs, we were able to shift the customer experience to the positive.
Speaker – Neerja – 03:25
Yeah.
Q: How can automation tools improve customer interactions? Mike.
Yeah.
Q: How can automation tools improve customer interactions? Mike.
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 03:31
All right, that's a good question. Automation tools such as bots, RPA, which is robotic process automation, CRN systems and AI driven analytics can really significantly streamline customer interactions in the CX terms, we refer to this as friction, and by this we mean anything that slows down or impedes the customer's journey. By reducing friction, we reduce customer challenges, and we improve their experience.
For example, conversational AI can provide instant responses to customer inquiries, which can reduce wait times and improve end user customer satisfaction. One of our customers in the high tech vertical great software as a leading innovator, their developers needed to be able to create test and debug solutions quickly. To help their teams manage large volumes of code and bug reports and related data. we built an AI agent that learned how developers worked and was able to deliver answers in formats that were most easily consumed by each individual developer by personalizing that interaction and automating these manual and time-consuming efforts, we are helping our customer stay innovative and thereby stay multi competitive.
All right, that's a good question. Automation tools such as bots, RPA, which is robotic process automation, CRN systems and AI driven analytics can really significantly streamline customer interactions in the CX terms, we refer to this as friction, and by this we mean anything that slows down or impedes the customer's journey. By reducing friction, we reduce customer challenges, and we improve their experience.
For example, conversational AI can provide instant responses to customer inquiries, which can reduce wait times and improve end user customer satisfaction. One of our customers in the high tech vertical great software as a leading innovator, their developers needed to be able to create test and debug solutions quickly. To help their teams manage large volumes of code and bug reports and related data. we built an AI agent that learned how developers worked and was able to deliver answers in formats that were most easily consumed by each individual developer by personalizing that interaction and automating these manual and time-consuming efforts, we are helping our customer stay innovative and thereby stay multi competitive.
Speaker – Neerja – 04:53
Yeah, absolutely, you mentioned that automation, these automation tools, reduce challenges for the customer. But I'm sure they bring up their own challenges when it comes to the business side of things.
Q: So, could you touch upon some of the common challenges businesses face when they implement automation and how they can overcome them?
Yeah, absolutely, you mentioned that automation, these automation tools, reduce challenges for the customer. But I'm sure they bring up their own challenges when it comes to the business side of things.
Q: So, could you touch upon some of the common challenges businesses face when they implement automation and how they can overcome them?
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 05:12
Yeah, I would say one of the biggest challenges that we hear is this fear that they're going to lose personal touch in customer interactions, and that's an understandable concern. To overcome this, businesses can implement hybrid models, for example, where automation handles the routine enquiries, sort of the day-to-day bread and butter process work, while human agents manage the more complex or edge cases. That way, you're using your human interactions to do the things that really require that human touch.
One of our customers, a manufacturer of transit electrical vehicles, had a portal that they were receiving negative feedback regarding, primarily their user's ability to get timely reports. There are a number of IOT systems on these machines, and they need a lot of data to understand how things are working. The process to get these reports was very manual, and it required significant customer internal resources to generate these users' requested reports. So, we worked with our customers and their end users to define and create an automated reporting tool. This tool significantly reduced the human interaction time, both for the customer and customer’s customers, thereby reducing that friction I was talking about and getting reports into the hands of the end users much quicker.
Another example of how we reduced friction and delivered a better experience was an engagement with a customer who manufactures and sells computers and peripherals like printers, delivering exceptional customer support as well as field services were critical in differentiating our customer from their competition, and building and maintaining that customer loyalty our customer needed to provide mission critical application support. 24/7 all across the globe, our customers were experiencing challenges such as frequent downtime, stability issues, partly due to technical debt and a lot of customization work on the systems they were using.
By employing a UX centric approach, we were able to streamline the communication process all through the chain. We simplified and automated many of the tasks that were previously done manually, which in turn reduced process variance, because things were now automated and there was a predictable pattern and a flow right, we simplified that workload and improve the reporting and planning. All told, we were able to improve our customers' Customer Service agents' experience as well as their performance, which in turn delivered a better and more efficient and engaging experience for their customers.
Yeah, I would say one of the biggest challenges that we hear is this fear that they're going to lose personal touch in customer interactions, and that's an understandable concern. To overcome this, businesses can implement hybrid models, for example, where automation handles the routine enquiries, sort of the day-to-day bread and butter process work, while human agents manage the more complex or edge cases. That way, you're using your human interactions to do the things that really require that human touch.
One of our customers, a manufacturer of transit electrical vehicles, had a portal that they were receiving negative feedback regarding, primarily their user's ability to get timely reports. There are a number of IOT systems on these machines, and they need a lot of data to understand how things are working. The process to get these reports was very manual, and it required significant customer internal resources to generate these users' requested reports. So, we worked with our customers and their end users to define and create an automated reporting tool. This tool significantly reduced the human interaction time, both for the customer and customer’s customers, thereby reducing that friction I was talking about and getting reports into the hands of the end users much quicker.
Another example of how we reduced friction and delivered a better experience was an engagement with a customer who manufactures and sells computers and peripherals like printers, delivering exceptional customer support as well as field services were critical in differentiating our customer from their competition, and building and maintaining that customer loyalty our customer needed to provide mission critical application support. 24/7 all across the globe, our customers were experiencing challenges such as frequent downtime, stability issues, partly due to technical debt and a lot of customization work on the systems they were using.
By employing a UX centric approach, we were able to streamline the communication process all through the chain. We simplified and automated many of the tasks that were previously done manually, which in turn reduced process variance, because things were now automated and there was a predictable pattern and a flow right, we simplified that workload and improve the reporting and planning. All told, we were able to improve our customers' Customer Service agents' experience as well as their performance, which in turn delivered a better and more efficient and engaging experience for their customers.
Speaker – Neerja - 07:59
Thanks, Mike, for those examples, I have one final question for you, and while the nature of your job is very much to solve for the present, I'm sure you're also calculating for the future.
Q: So, what are some of the trends in the future that businesses should be aware of in the customer experience and automation field?
Thanks, Mike, for those examples, I have one final question for you, and while the nature of your job is very much to solve for the present, I'm sure you're also calculating for the future.
Q: So, what are some of the trends in the future that businesses should be aware of in the customer experience and automation field?
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 08:21
Sure, absolutely. Another good question. The latest trends that we have been observing are agentic AI and what they're calling the impatience economy. So let me start with agentic AI, first. In the evolving landscape of technology, AI is transitioning from being a mere tool to functioning as the independent agent capable of making critical decisions across various scenarios. This shift towards agentic AI powers autonomous systems. As these systems become increasingly self-sufficient, robust governance through and of these AI platforms is going to be vital for ensuring responsible and ethical use of AI technologies.
An example of how we are engaging with agentic AI. Tell a story about a customer that we've had, a long-term customer who's been a major player in the pharmaceutical space. From development, research, safety monitoring, our customers deal with large volumes of data. We've been working with our customers across their organization to build repeatable agentic AI solutions. Think of these as you know, case specific agents, and these agents are designed to execute different functions and fulfill different use cases. Over time, these agents are going to learn from their user agents with the knowledge they gain from these interactions, these agents can be more predictive, they can be more personalized, and they can provide a wider range of capabilities over time. So, in an era where consumer expectations are being shaped by liking fast digital experiences, speed and convenience are going to be of paramount importance. So, this is the second trend that we're seeing this impatience economy Today, buyers seek quicker, smarter solutions, and they're willing to take risks to achieve their goals, for example, trying a new service or taking an unconventional route to solve their problems. So, there's a couple of different ways to look at this impatient economy, and how is that going to impact a business or an organization going forward. From a CMOS perspective, understanding the impatience economy means recognizing that marketing programs and marketing strategies must evolve to meet the demand for instant gratification. For example, brands and E comm have set the standard with their one click purchasing and same day delivery options, which have really reshaped customer expectations. CMOs are going to have to leverage analytics to personalize marketing efforts in real time to ensure that customers receive relevant offers and the information when and how they need it.
In the case of the CTO, the inpatient economy is going to require the adoption of advanced technologies that enhance operational efficiency. Implementing AI driven chat bots, for example, for customer service can significantly reduce response times, while cloud computing allows those solutions to be scalable, so that they can adapt to fluctuating and changing consumer demands.
For a CEO, looking at the impatience economy, the importance and the impact there lies in really making strategic decisions that prioritize agility and innovation. Companies must be willing to pivot quickly in response to market changes. A prime example is how many businesses shifted to e com very rapidly during the pandemic outbreak, really, that demonstrated the need for a robust digital infrastructure so that companies can make those kinds of quick pivots. CEOs should foster a culture of experimentation, encouraging teams to test new ideas rapidly, prototype quickly, learn from their failures, make adaptations and stay ahead of their competition.
Sure, absolutely. Another good question. The latest trends that we have been observing are agentic AI and what they're calling the impatience economy. So let me start with agentic AI, first. In the evolving landscape of technology, AI is transitioning from being a mere tool to functioning as the independent agent capable of making critical decisions across various scenarios. This shift towards agentic AI powers autonomous systems. As these systems become increasingly self-sufficient, robust governance through and of these AI platforms is going to be vital for ensuring responsible and ethical use of AI technologies.
An example of how we are engaging with agentic AI. Tell a story about a customer that we've had, a long-term customer who's been a major player in the pharmaceutical space. From development, research, safety monitoring, our customers deal with large volumes of data. We've been working with our customers across their organization to build repeatable agentic AI solutions. Think of these as you know, case specific agents, and these agents are designed to execute different functions and fulfill different use cases. Over time, these agents are going to learn from their user agents with the knowledge they gain from these interactions, these agents can be more predictive, they can be more personalized, and they can provide a wider range of capabilities over time. So, in an era where consumer expectations are being shaped by liking fast digital experiences, speed and convenience are going to be of paramount importance. So, this is the second trend that we're seeing this impatience economy Today, buyers seek quicker, smarter solutions, and they're willing to take risks to achieve their goals, for example, trying a new service or taking an unconventional route to solve their problems. So, there's a couple of different ways to look at this impatient economy, and how is that going to impact a business or an organization going forward. From a CMOS perspective, understanding the impatience economy means recognizing that marketing programs and marketing strategies must evolve to meet the demand for instant gratification. For example, brands and E comm have set the standard with their one click purchasing and same day delivery options, which have really reshaped customer expectations. CMOs are going to have to leverage analytics to personalize marketing efforts in real time to ensure that customers receive relevant offers and the information when and how they need it.
In the case of the CTO, the inpatient economy is going to require the adoption of advanced technologies that enhance operational efficiency. Implementing AI driven chat bots, for example, for customer service can significantly reduce response times, while cloud computing allows those solutions to be scalable, so that they can adapt to fluctuating and changing consumer demands.
For a CEO, looking at the impatience economy, the importance and the impact there lies in really making strategic decisions that prioritize agility and innovation. Companies must be willing to pivot quickly in response to market changes. A prime example is how many businesses shifted to e com very rapidly during the pandemic outbreak, really, that demonstrated the need for a robust digital infrastructure so that companies can make those kinds of quick pivots. CEOs should foster a culture of experimentation, encouraging teams to test new ideas rapidly, prototype quickly, learn from their failures, make adaptations and stay ahead of their competition.
Speaker – Neerja – 12:28
Thank you, Mike for taking us through this as we wrap things up on the podcast.
Q: Is there one takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Thank you, Mike for taking us through this as we wrap things up on the podcast.
Q: Is there one takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 12:38
Yes, I would say that my big takeaway is, regardless of what type of technology, it's critical to always remember at the end of the day there's a person sitting at the other end of that screen or at the other end of that mobile device.
Technology is great, and it can do a lot of really wonderful things, but I think the key to being really successful is to understand the end users. Take time to sit and put yourself in their place, do some user research and really understand who you are solving this problem for? And you'll have a much happier customer at the end of the day.
Yes, I would say that my big takeaway is, regardless of what type of technology, it's critical to always remember at the end of the day there's a person sitting at the other end of that screen or at the other end of that mobile device.
Technology is great, and it can do a lot of really wonderful things, but I think the key to being really successful is to understand the end users. Take time to sit and put yourself in their place, do some user research and really understand who you are solving this problem for? And you'll have a much happier customer at the end of the day.
Speaker – Neerja – 13:10
Yeah. Well, thank you. That's something to think about. Thanks, Mike, for joining us today and giving us your expert opinions on this subject. It was great speaking with you.
Yeah. Well, thank you. That's something to think about. Thanks, Mike, for joining us today and giving us your expert opinions on this subject. It was great speaking with you.
Speaker – Michael (Mike) - 13:19
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Speaker – Neerja – 13:21
And if anyone listening in wants to find out more about Birlasoft Customer Experience services, feel free to write to us on digital@birlasoft.com
Catch you on the next one. Bye, bye.
And if anyone listening in wants to find out more about Birlasoft Customer Experience services, feel free to write to us on digital@birlasoft.com
Catch you on the next one. Bye, bye.
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