By: Yara Milbes, Head of Marketing – MENA & Pakistan, Infobip
Without a doubt, 2020 has accelerated the move to digital automation across all industries. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the retail and e-Commerce sector where the interactions between brands and consumers have multiplied. With an average annual growth rate of 25% for e-Commerce in the MENA region, the need for businesses to be present where consumers are means they will never miss the opportunity to engage with their customers at any point, and most importantly over their preferred channel.
While brands are constantly looking for ways to stand out in a digitally charged world, they must recognise that a digital customer experience isn’t the only thing that consumers want. Today, more than ever, there’s great value in a seamless, human approach that has a personal touch. The big question remains, how can you give your customers a genuinely digital experience with a human touch?
BE WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE WITH MULTITOUCH, OMNICHANNEL COMMUNICATION
Customers want to connect with businesses on platforms that are familiar, fast, and reliable. By being active on channels where your customers spend their time, you are improving brand visibility, and building long-term customer relationships. Opensooq, one of MENA’s leading e-Commerce platforms, reported an 82% increase in customer satisfaction during the first 6 months of using WhatsApp for business API simply by communicating with their customers over their preferred channel.
With a multitouch Omnichannel communication strategy, brands can ensure not only the personalisation of customer engagement by communicating over multiple chat apps and modern channels such as WhatsApp, voice and even their own mobile app, but can also guarantee that they don’t lose customers at different touch points. All through a single interface.
PROVIDE CONVERSATIONAL EXPERIENCES
Historically, chatbots have been notorious for not offering a personalised customer experience, mainly because of the limited User Interface menus or the inability to support customers when it comes to more complex inquiries. The frustration builds up here when a customer feels they are stuck talking to a machine that is clearly unable to resolve the issue without the option to enter free text outside the existing conversation flow or get passed on to a live agent for further support. But let us not be quick to staple chatbots as the ultimate killer of good customer experience. Here is how you can provide personalised conversational experiences using chatbots:
- Offer behavior-based automation using AI powered chatbots that provide the ability to resolve and answer customer inquiries according to the context of the conversation, and ultimately simulate “human-like” interactions.
By offering your customers an intelligent automated self-service option like Infobip’s Answers, you are not only improving the efficiency of your contact centre agents by offloading FAQs from them, but also providing your customers with fast, “Always-on” customer service outside working hours and over their preferred channel.
- Implement a solution that seamlessly hands over to a live agent when needed. Provide the option to manage quick service requests using AI chatbots, and recognise the need to use human agents to take over detailed and complex customer inquiries.
When you integrate your chatbot solution with a digital contact solution, you guarantee that conversations are routed to the right agent based on the customer’s intent, while ensuring that all the information collected during the conversation is also transferred, and customers are not repeating their inquiries again.
With the variety of options available for customers today, every experience impacts their overall perception of a brand. Providing a unique experience that focuses on relationships with customers to keep them coming back for your business is not an easy equation, but it is not an impossible one either. By implementing a strategy that focuses on customer engagement and personalised communication through customisable tools, brands can boost their customer loyalty and ultimately sustain long term growth of their business.
