Editorial
The Gist
- Unified customer experience. Combining positive employee experiences with AI-driven customer journeys boosts loyalty and satisfaction.
- Generative AI's role. Utilizing AI enhances personalization, making every customer interaction more relevant and engaging.
- Silos dismantled. Breaking down organizational silos is key to consistent, quality experiences across all customer touchpoints.
Customer journeys can be complex, and delivering great experiences throughout every interaction at scale can be equally challenging. Customers expect personalized experiences throughout all digital interactions and touchpoints with a company. Digital patience is at an all-time low; people don’t want you to waste their time!
The stakes are even higher when just one negative experience can turn a customer away from a brand in just a few clicks. Achieving a unified customer experience is crucial in meeting these expectations and maintaining customer loyalty.
How can companies provide consistent, quality customer service (CX) that creates loyal customers? It starts by combining positive employee experiences with seamless, personalized customer journeys to create unified experiences — all while leveraging generative AI to enhance them.
Unified Customer Experience: Focus on the Customer
End users want a cohesive digital experience, where they feel like they’re interacting with one company, not multiple people or isolated channels. In fact, 79% of customers believe interactions across organizational departments should be consistent.
To feel connected, unified customer experience across a company’s various channels should be uniform with its branding, messaging and services. However, this is challenged by inconsistencies that arise from business silos peppered throughout an organization. Rollouts of new channels, such as chatbots that are originally intended to keep up with customer expectations, have instead resulted in information gaps. This can also generate a myopic view of the customer journey.
The key to breaking down silos and creating the consistent experience that users demand is keeping a holistic view of the customer journey. This enables organizations to be able to analyze customer behavior not just at each touchpoint, but also how those touchpoints flow together (or don’t). And with this information, organizations can prescribe customized interactions based on the overall insights.
This level of personalization can be done at greater scale by leveraging the contextual information gathered from interactions throughout the customer journey. Doing this will enhance the CX so that when using generative AI, customers will get relevant answers to their questions, going beyond the traditional search results. This removes friction from the overall experience and moves customers further along their service journey.
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Related Article: Is Your Customer Journey Map Inside Out?
Positive Employee Experiences Matter
Another key aspect of the unified experience equation that may not be as obvious is delivering positive employee experiences. Research has shown that there is a strong link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
However, just as organizational silos serve as roadblocks to smooth customer journeys, these also hamper employees by preventing them from finding the information they need to do their jobs effectively. According to an IDC report, workers were spending roughly 2.5 hours per day searching for information — about 30% of their workday.
Creating a culture of collaboration is just as important to this process of building a general, regularly-updated body of organizational knowledge. By encouraging workers to share information with each other, organizations can improve their transparency, increase the connection between people and the storage of knowledge, and boost retention of institutional knowledge — all of which contribute to the effectiveness of providing unified customer experience.
Related Article: How Generative AI in Customer Experience Is Reshaping the Landscape
Generative AI in the Customer Experience Landscape
Generative AI is already revolutionizing the customer experience and will soon become table stakes as customer attention spans grow shorter and expectations become higher.
With generative AI, organizations become even better at providing highly personalized and unified customer journeys and empower employee experiences through more streamlined workflows. When great customer experience and employee experiences are aligned with the help of AI, it creates an elevated, unified customer experience that people demand.
2023 was the year of AI hype, but 2024 will be the year of AI operationalization. As AI technology improves to bridge concerns over privacy, security, and accuracy, organizations can no longer afford to hesitate as their competitors rapidly implement AI solutions that are becoming integral to better experiences.
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