Offering customers with excellent experience has become one of the top priorities for businesses worldwide in 2024. As part of facilitating this, you should understand your customers’ needs, and behavior to ensure that your organization provides the best experience through your communication channels, website, and product/services. This is when optimizing the customer experience with the right strategies and tools enters the scene.
This blog will walk you through what customer experience optimization is, the challenges associated with it, and how WIZ Talkbot can benefit your business by offering a seamless experience to your customers.
What is Customer Experience Optimization (CXO), and Why is It Important?
85% of brands believe they offer personalized customer experience to their consumers. But in reality, only 60% of consumers agree to it, as per a study published by Twillo. This shows a gap between what brands perceive and what consumers experience. Therefore, it is integral for brands to optimize customer experience by understanding their customers in depth. This can be done by adopting a data-driven approach and delving into consumers’ needs, preferences, feedback, and more. Customer experience optimization (CXO) is one such technique that focuses on gaining an in-depth understanding of customers and enhancing customer journeys by adopting an omnichannel approach.
The strategies for customer experience optimization can differ based on your industry and business. Regardless, there are three main factors to consider as part of customer experience optimization in every organization, as per Zendesk, and they are related to website, communication, and product/service. Additionally, you must measure if the strategies adopted perform as desired. To do that, you need to set KPIs, and some KPIs that can help analyze and further optimize customer experience are:
- 1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- 2. Customer Retention Rate
- 3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- 4. First Call Resolution
- 5. Call Abandonment Rate
- 6. Average Handle Time (AHT)
- 7. Customer Churn Rate
One key component missing in this puzzle is having the right tools to help your business achieve these KPIs and implement your CX strategies.
In short, by following strategies, setting up KPIs, and adopting relevant solutions like WIZ Talkbot, businesses can optimize customer experience and reap benefits such as building positive relationships with customers, enhancing brand loyalty, improving customer retention, increasing revenue gained, improving product purchase rate, and many more.
What are the Challenges that Impact Customer Experience?
Customer service is a key factor that accounts for improving customer experience. Although there are different channels, 80% of consumers consider phone interactions as their preferred customer service channel, as per a study by Calabrio. However, there are various challenges that hinder seamless interactions and lead to poor customer experience. They include:
Extended hold times
The average hold time for speaking with customer service agents is 12 to 13 minutes. However, most people are only ready to wait up to six minutes on hold before hanging up. This increases the call abandonment rate and impacts customer experience (CX).
Low first-call resolution rates
When there is a lack of expertise or unavailability of relevant data, it becomes difficult for human agents to resolve issues during the first interaction. This results in frustration and even increases the churn rate.
Unpredictable call volumes
Many prefer inbound phone calls because they offer immediate and direct connection with your brand. However, when there is a surge in call volume, it becomes difficult for human agents to handle calls on time and provide the customers with the best experience.
Limited staff availability
Most call centers face a staff turnover of 42%, limiting the number of staff available to handle calls and increasing the stress and burnout levels of other agents.
Difficulty in understanding customers accurately
When there are no technological measures, it becomes challenging to understand each customer and provide them with personalized solutions. Having a complete manual call center setup aggravates this issue.
Therefore, it is time for businesses to understand and overcome these challenges as part of optimizing customer experience. One of the best ways to do so is by relying on the power of generative AI and integrating solutions like WIZ Talkbot.
How does WIZ Talkbot Help Optimize Customer Experience?
WIZ Talkbot is a generative AI-powered voicebot that comes with advanced conversational AI capabilities such as:
- 1. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for transcribing client call recordings to text
- 2. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to help with intent recognition
- 3. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) with a high accuracy rate for recognizing names, organizations, locations, provinces, car plate names, and others
- 4. Text-to-speech (TTS) with custom dictionary and pronunciation
- 5. 24*7 customer service
Armed with these capabilities, WIZ Talkbot can provide a call success rate of 83% while helping to reduce costs by 34%. Besides, WIZ Talkbots are distinct from traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as they offer smart guidance by automating call routing based on topics and departments by conducting research in the knowledge base to find answers to resolve customers’ problems and clarify their confusion. By doing so, WIZ Talkbots aid in optimizing and enhancing the customer experience.
How WIZ Talkbot handles challenges based on different complexity levels
WIZ Talkbot is packaged in such a way that it can handle the different challenges that impact customer experience, such as limited staff, unpredictable call volume, extended call hold time, and more. With WIZ Talkbot, your business can have a helping hand in resolving these issues while providing the best-in-class service to your customers. As this solution comes with insights and analytics on customer interactions, it aids businesses in optimizing their customer experience by opting for a data-backed approach.
As part of understanding customers better and optimizing their customer experience, WIZ Inbound solutions divide customer queries based on their complexity into three different tiers. They are:
- 1. Tier one – Easy to resolve issues with standard responses and would only require a single-channel
- 2. Tier two – Issues that are moderately complex and might require multiple channels for issue resolution
- 3. Tier three – Highly complex issues and would require human interaction
Since WIZ Talkbot has different elements for solving concerns based on these tiers, it enhances customer experience as it brings in efficiency in handling customer’s problems while resolving them in a short duration.
Benefits of Integrating WIZ Talkbot
While optimizing customer experience, WIZ Talkbot can facilitate benefits such as:
- 1. Reduced handling time – WIZ Talkbot reduces hold time by 65% and helps improve customer satisfaction levels.2. Improve call success rate – WIZ Talkbot can offer 83% call success rate without transferring calls to human agents. This lowers customer churn rates and enhances customer experience.
- 3. Provide a better understanding of customers – WIZ Inbound solutions come with intelligent dashboards that can facilitate CX leaders with an in-depth understanding of customer trends and insights. The dashboard can collect, transcribe, and analyze thousands of customer interactions and automatically highlight key customer insights. This will help in performing customer journey mapping and further enhancing customer experience.
Other than these benefits, your business can reap other benefits such as –
- 1. Reduce the number of human agents required by 50 to 70% with inbound bots
- 2. Facilitate human-like experience as 95% of customers who interact with WIZ Talkbots don’t recognize that they are serviced by a bot
- 3. Ease of integration with any calling platforms like Cisco, Salesforce, Talkdesk.etc.
- 4. Compliance with security measures such as password protection and personal data encryption
How WIZ Talkbot Reduced Average Handle Time (AHT) by 65%: A Case Study
The call center of a leading financial institution in Southeast Asia had limited human agents to handle calls. This increased their Average Handle Time (AHT) to 20 seconds during peak times. This also raised the average call wait time, thereby increasing the rate of abandoned call rates and impacting customer experience drastically.
However, upon integrating WIZ Talkbot into their customer service stack, the customer queries were distributed based on different tiers of complexity. The bot would handle tier-one inquiries with an AHT of 0 seconds. The tier two and three inquiries, which include moderate to highly complex issues, would be managed by human agents and Talkbot powered by AI agent assistants to improve productivity. This brought the AHT to 16 seconds. With this AI-human collaboration through three different tiers, the AHT went down to 7 seconds, bringing a 65% reduction in Average Handling Time (AHT).
Final Thoughts
Thus, in a nutshell, adopting an AI-driven solution like WIZ Talkbot can be beneficial in optimizing customer experience and gaining the desired results based on your organization’s goals at the right time. Interested in learning more about WIZ Talkbot? Talk to one of our experts today!
