Chatbots, AI & the New Customer Journey: Latest Findings from LogMeIn

What does digital transformation mean to the customer experience?

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Published: September 21, 2018

Rebekah Carter

We all know that customer experience is the most important consideration for modern businesses. In fact, 89% of companies are soon expected to compete almost entirely on customer experience (CX). The question is, are companies really meeting customer expectations as well as they think they are? According to LogMeIn, an innovator in communication and collaboration solutions, the answer is a resounding “No.”

LogMeIn recently conducted a study into customer experience and how businesses are supporting the modern consumer journey. The LogMeIn AI Customer Experience study looked at the responses of more than 5,000 people, including both business leaders, and consumers around the world. The research showed that over a third of today’s consumers aren’t impressed with the experiences that they get from companies. Yet, despite this, 80% of businesses believed that their customers would give them a positive review for experience.

Clearly, there’s a severe disconnect between the experiences customers expect, and the ones they’re getting. It appears that modern organisations are setting the bar too low for what they consider to be “good” service.

Today’s Customers Experiences Just Aren’t Cutting It

Just because businesses know how valuable customer experience is to their organisation, doesn’t necessarily mean that those companies know how to deliver the service their consumers are looking for. In fact, research shows that even the best-performing industries in CX (hospitality, travel, and retail) only managed about a 58% good experience rating from consumers. Telecoms ranked in the lowest section of the study, with only 41% of consumers saying they had a good interaction with a comms company.

So, how are these less-than-favourable conversations taking place? The LogMeIn study suggests that email and telephone are still the most common options, despite the rise of things like chatbots and virtual assistants. Unfortunately, these channels aren’t the most efficient, as consumers reported an average resolution time of about 11 hours.

Not only are standard communication channels slow, but they’re also somewhat ineffective. Only 49% of consumers said that their problems were solved on the first interaction using email or telephone calls. Some business owners believe that the reason for this inefficiency is the fact that their agents are struggling with the sheer volume of customer requests they must deal with each day.

Could AI and Chatbots Be the Cure?

AIIn a world where older forms of interaction simply aren’t working, it makes sense that companies would want to turn towards more innovative solutions. Artificial intelligence and chatbots could be a useful way for today’s organisations to transform the customer experience with more access to information, quicker resolution times, and greater context. However, it’s going to take some planning for companies to make sure that their disruptive new technology makes the right impact.

The good news is that many consumers do feel positive about the idea of adding AI to the buyer journey. Around 62% of European customers agree that brands should be leveraging more of this technology to reduce the amount of time it takes to handle customer inquiries. However, LogMeIn’s study also showed that Europeans can be slower to warm up to new technologies than their global counterparts too. Only four in 10 consumer respondents believe that AI can genuinely change customer experience for the better.

Businesses also believe that chat and AI technology could support better customer experiences by helping agents to be more effective and productive. At this point, customer service agents are using an average of 3 systems at any given time to support their customer, and they’re also spending about half of their time trying to understand the basic information they need to service consumers too. Chatbots can operate behind the scenes to gather useful information in real-time and inform agents of critical contextual details about who they’re talking to, and the potential problems that person is having.

Time to Invest in Innovative Customer Experiences

As companies continue to worry that their traditional solutions for consumer engagement simply aren’t meeting with customer expectations, 61% of business respondents said that they will begin to allocate more budget into enhancements for their business, specifically focusing on customer engagement. What’s more, 53% of companies said they are looking to invest in artificial intelligence.

While many businesses leaders throughout Europe are beginning to see how valuable AI can be, the good news is that the LogMeIn study results don’t indicate that agents need be worried about their jobs. Ultimately, 65% of companies said that even if their chatbots could reduce the number of inquiries agents had to handle, they would train those agents to handle other tasks.

Ultimately, the LogMeIn study seems to show that intelligent solutions like chatbots and AI aren’t necessarily a way for robots to take over the contact centre world. Instead, these services could help companies to bridge the divide between customer expectations and the services that they provide. Although there are some hesitations in Europe around AI and what chatbots can reasonably offer, many consumers and businesses alike agree that these solutions have the power to transform customer service for the better.

In the past, customers had to deal with the fact that if they wanted to contact a customer service centre, they’d have to deal with a time-consuming and often frustrating experience. However, the rise of new technology means that many consumers aren’t willing to settle anymore. If companies can leverage the advancements that are currently coming into the business environment, they can complete their digital transformation (DX) and can finally deliver the level of experience that their customers genuinely crave.

 

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