The Middle East and North Africa, as a whole, have embraced the concept of digitization enthusiastically. According to one estimate, artificial intelligence investments may constitute 19 percent of the MENA retail sector’s contribution to GDP by 2030. A great deal of this AI activity is driven by the GCC countries, pushing forward with their national economic visons. Many governments, including those of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have improved the customer experience, with some public bodies utilizing chatbots to replace customer-facing human agents.
Digital businesses must automate to enhance employee experience and delight where they can, to enhance customer experience. A recent AMA (ask me anything) session, which included industry experts from giants such as Shopify, PayPal, and Parcelhub, revealed the essentials of customer delight to Freshworks.
The following are five such essentials.
Whenever, wherever: accommodate your customers
Our survey found that two in three consumers frequently interact with brands across three or more channels and expect a consistent experience across those channels. Regional businesses must respond accordingly. Companies must be available whenever and wherever customers are.
As a result, an online presence has often been treated as Band-Aids, especially given 2020’s Covid-induced trek to the cloud. One of the most notable victims was retail businesses afflicted with empty stores and idle employees. Attempts to resolve these issues were understandably hasty, but now enterprises need to develop models that will endure. If customers have suboptimal experiences, they will likely switch to brands offering responsive, omnichannel platforms and tailored offerings that address their needs.
Experiment
In a survey of 107 million support interactions, Freshworks discovered that speed is the most crucial factor for customers today. Respect your customer’s time, and they will reward you for it. Artificial intelligence, chatbots, and other human-effort-saving technologies can reinvent the customer experience.
These tools are now available through scalable software-as-a-service, providing digital-experience providers with the ability to test them against key performance indicators such as latency and workflow complexity – both of which can impact the time it takes a consumer to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
As the de facto standard in IT procurement, SaaS platforms provide ease of use, agility, flexibility, and resource efficiency. Although SaaS products may not have been designed with crisis management in mind, they simplify adaptation for IT teams. Their opportunities are ideal for scalability and experimentation with potentially powerful customer experiences.Speak and act as one
When your brand engages with a consumer, you should be aware of their expectations and determine whether your current digital workflow can fulfill them. By working together, all business functions, from marketing and sales to warehouses and IT, may close the experience gap by understanding customer expectations and acting as a unified system to meet and exceed them.
Furthermore, everyone should speak with a single voice and exhibit the same initiative. The enterprise must act consistently and uniformly when it treats each customer as an individual.Let data be your guide
When it comes to customer experience, companies must listen to the “C” to enhance the “X.” This calls for capturing customer feedback at any touchpoint where satisfaction can be measured or inferred.
While the exact data captured will differ by business and industry, combining interaction data with market trends, forecasts, infrastructure, and session telemetry will be extremely valuable. Various industries have developed benchmarks and standards that cover the unique touchpoints of their customers.
Data analysis should focus on forming a clear picture of the customer experience. Your organization can provide all the “X” it desires, but only the “C” provides a useful report card.Arm yourself with superior tech
Data is useful. It is nothing more than ones and zeros that consume space and cost you money without the appropriate technology solutions. Business organizations in the region will need to reevaluate their analytics capabilities in the year. However, they will also have to examine how automation, artificial intelligence, bots, and other technologies might fit in their CX-oriented enterprise.
Back-office efficiencies that appear to have no relevance to CX can benefit it by freeing up resources. To provide rich, self-service solutions, the relationship between your people, data, and technology stack will be critical. When managed properly, the organization offers rapid responses to improve customer experiences (CX). It frees human agents to perform higher-value tasks, thus optimizing the employee experience (EX), a vital element of any successful business strategy for the 2020s and beyond.
A digital economy is a conveyor belt of experiences, in which consumers are drawn to those places where customer experience is exceptional. The customer experience may be compared to elastic bands. The strongest will keep the customer coming back for more, whereas the weakest will snap, and the customer will be lost forever.
Freshworks’ survey demonstrates that customer expectations (at 63 percent) and churn (at 58 percent) are rising. Thus, regional businesses need to adapt and improve customer experience (CX). Even though many things have changed, one objective remains the same: to be known for being a business that consistently receives remarks such as, “Nice to see you again,” rather than “Wait a minute, where are you going?