The Modern Consumer: 4 Things You Need to Know

Priyanka Tiwari of Interactions shares four key considerations when thinking about how your organisation serves modern customers.

We talk a lot about the future of customer care and modernising your customer care strategy. But what exactly does this mean? How can you tell if your customer care strategy is ready for the future?

When building your customer care strategy, here are four important things to understand about modern consumers — who they are and what appeals to them.

1. Customer Expectations Are Rising

Customers today expect to have what they want, when they want it. Consequently, it’s more important than ever for companies to give their customers the ability to engage with them any time and anywhere.

This means not only offering customer care on multiple channels, but also being able to communicate through those channels quickly and effortlessly.

According to a survey by PWC and SAP, only 50% of customers feel they get a consistent and superior multichannel experience. Similarly, according to a BCG 2016 survey, 76% of customers experience challenges when trying to switch between channels.

Not only is this frustrating for your customer, it also impacts your brand’s ability to remain competitive in the digital age. So, be sure you’re making yourself available to customers on the channel of their choice where and when they need it.

2. Persistence Across Channels Is Critical

From multichannel, to cross-channel, to omnichannel, it’s important to understand how each of them function. We’ve broken them down for you:

• Multichannel – customer care is offered on more than one channel, e.g. voice, SMS and chat
• Cross-channel – allows customers to navigate through various channels to complete a transaction
• Omnichannel – allows seamless conversation among all channels.

While multichannel customer care is mostly expected at this point, companies who wish to keep a competitive advantage should implement an omnichannel solution.

Omnichannel is unlike other solutions because of its ability to maintain persistence across channels through multiple interactions.

3. Omnichannel Is No Longer Optional

Omnichannel is quickly becoming more than just a buzzword. With all of the excitement surrounding it, it can be hard to differentiate what is truly omnichannel and what’s being over-hyped.

What’s important to understand, though, is that consumers are increasingly expecting the brands they interact with to be able to maintain persistence and context across channels.

For an IVA to be truly omnichannel, it must possess the following traits:

• Real-time interactions
• Context and persistence
• Personalisation
• Predictive analytics e.g. consumer behaviour, proactive offers
• Sentiment analysis (through voice)

4. The Human Touch Is Still Important

Overall, while technology is crucial to your customer care strategy, don’t forget to add a human touch. When human intelligence is combined with AI, the results are superior accuracy and effortless customer care.

Priyanka Tiwari

Human intelligence not only accelerates the process of understanding by teaching the technology in real time, but it can also assist with transactions while improving AI models to mimic human understanding.

When developing your modern customer care strategy, these can be very useful steps to follow, as long as you have some sort of understanding of customers’ wants and needs, and have defined your goals.

Author: Robyn Coppell