What’s in this article:
- One of the key ways to improve your customer effort score is to embrace artificial intelligence technology fully
AI allows you to make it clear to your audience what their next steps should be — and enables them to take them with ease
When you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of any business is to enable the customer to reach their goals with relative ease.
(Relative, that is, to their ability to achieve these goals on their own.)
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
Of course, this is why tools exist in the first place: To make our jobs easier — whatever the job may be.
But your job isn’t just to provide a helpful product or service.
You’re also responsible for enabling your customers to use your products or services — and engage with your branded experience — with minimal effort.
(After all, if they have to put a ton of effort into all this, they might as well just attack the problem on their own, right?)
That said, it’s no surprise that customer effort score (CES) has come back into the spotlight.
According to Salesforce’s 2020 State of Service Report:
- 60% of businesses have shifted their focus onto CES (up from 44% in 2018).
- CES now ranks among the top five most important KPIs across all industries.
- High-performing teams rank CES as the second-most important KPI, behind only customer satisfaction rate.
As we’ll discuss in this article, one of the key ways to improve your customer effort score is to fully embrace artificial intelligence technology.
3 Crucial Ways Artificial Intelligence Technology Can Improve Your Customer Effort Score
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly here to stay in the marketing world.
(If anything, it’s becoming even more prevalent — and necessary — as time goes on.)
While the focus is often on the many ways AI can help brands supercharge their customer experience, there’s a much simpler benefit to embracing such technology:
It just makes things easier for the customer.
Here’s how.
AI Helps Provide Comfortable and Safe Branded Experiences
In recent years, trust has become a major factor for consumers when deciding to do business with a specific company.
For your customers, it’s just one more thing to think about before making a purchase. Put another way, the modern consumer has to put effort into deciding whether or not they can trust a brand with their hard-earned cash.
The more thought they have to put into this decision, the more anxious and hesitant they’ll be to engage any further. This, of course, won’t bode well for your ability to convert them in the future.
So, in addition to actually being a brand your customers can trust, you also need to make clear that your brand can be trusted from the get-go.
AI can help you instil this sense of trust in two ways.
For one thing, artificial intelligence can be used to supercharge your Voice of the Customer initiatives. Here, you’ll be using AI-powered tools to collect candid comments, quotes, and feedback from your target audience. In turn, you can use this information to create more relevant and empathetic customer-facing copy both on- and offline.
Again, the goal here is to make it easy for prospective customers to trust your brand from the start of your relationship. Using VoC strategies in your marketing content is an effective way to show your audience that you understand who they are and the problems they face — and know exactly what to do to help them.
Similarly, AI can be used for real-time sentiment analysis, allowing your team to be more empathetic and attentive during one-on-one engagements.
For example, Humana’s AI-based software analyzes the speech patterns and word usage of customers reaching out for service or support. In turn, brand reps can modify their approach to each customer engagement before connecting with them — allowing them to start the engagement off on the right foot.
Such a proactive approach will go a long way in making those in need of assistance feel comfortable reaching out — and confident in your team’s ability to help them.
(In contrast, a more reactive approach may make the customer feel unwelcome or assume that your team is unprepared to deal with the situation at hand.)
With the right AI-powered tools, you’ll easily be able to instil a sense of trust within your customers. The easier it is for them to trust you, the more likely they’ll continue their journey with your brand.
AI Enhances Self-Service Options and Enables Self-Direction
The importance of providing self-service options is well-established by today’s standards.
In terms of improving your brand’s customer effort score, the main benefit is clear:
Self-service allows your customers to accomplish tasks and reach their goals without any hands-on assistance from your team.
On the surface, this might seem a bit contradictory.
But hear us out:
Yes, the nature of self-service means the customer will be putting in a certain amount of effort.
But these efforts will be much more productive — and will pay off in dividends immediately and over time.
(In contrast, relying solely on your team for assistance means the customer will have to put effort into getting this help in the first place, let alone taking the necessary steps to solve the problem. We’ll come back to this later.)
The point is that your customers want self-service options. Your job, then, is to make it easy for your customers to use them.
Artificial intelligence technology plays a huge role in making this happen.
For starters, AI-powered search features can allow audience members to quickly find the content, information, or products they’re looking for on your site. From query autocompletion to more targeted results, artificial intelligence helps searchers get where they want to go with minimal effort.
Automated chatbot technology can also put your site visitors on the right track with ease.
In contrast to the more formal means of communication (e.g., web forms, etc.) chatbots allow the user to take a more laid back, conversational approach when engaging with your brand.
(Again, this means less effort spent figuring out how to get the info they need, and more focus on actually using the information productively.)
AI tech can also help your team analyze your customer journey on both a macro and micro level. In turn, you can make changes to your CX that better enable your audience to act autonomously and make progress without needing your team to step in.
More than just streamlining your customer experience, the use of AI can enable your customers to progress even further than they’d initially hoped.
For example, after providing baseline answers to customer inquiries, chatbots can then prompt users to take additional action by:
- Asking follow-up questions
- Delivering related content
- Providing upsell or cross-sell offers
Dynamic content provides a similar benefit, delivering the exact information or prompt a given customer need right when they need it.
AI allows you to make it clear to your audience what their next steps should be — and enables them to take them with ease. This, to be sure, is what improving your customer effort score is all about.
AI Streamlines and Enhances the Omnichannel Customer Journey
Streamlining your customer journey is a key part of increasing your customer effort score.
In addition to helping optimize your self-service options, AI also allows you to proactively engage with your customers at critical points in their journey with your brand.
Here, we’re going beyond simply giving the customer what they need when they ask for it, and to actually give them what they need before they even know they need it. That way, they won’t even need to put effort into thinking about what they need — and can just dive right into their next engagement.
We’ve already touched on a few ways AI can help here, such as delivering dynamic content and personalized offers via chatbot and similar tools.
But, it’s also important to consider the ways AI can supercharge your omnichannel outreach efforts, as well.
IoT technology, for one, can engage customers using multiple channels and/or devices depending on specific circumstances. Geofencing and beaconing, for example, can drive both on- and offline sales using push notifications or SMS messaging.
Smart devices and voice marketing tools can allow you to deliver updates, replenishment reminders, and other timely messages to your customers.
Again, the path is laid clear for the customer — they just need to take the next step.
AI also enables your customers to hop from one channel to the next without needing to backtrack or reorient themselves. This is perhaps most impactful when engaging with your brand for service and support purposes.
An example scenario:
A customer asks your chatbot a question and is given some basic information to help them get started. After a short, automated conversation, the customer finds they still need more assistance. The AI-powered chatbot then opens a helpdesk ticket, delivering the information it’s collected thus far to your support team. From there, your staff can quickly jump in to help you solve the problem at hand — either directly within the live chat form or another preferred (or more appropriate) channel.
Finally, AI can help you build off these and other customer engagements on various channels, for various purposes. Whether it’s continuing to deliver value on a preferred channel, or using information gleaned on one channel to nudge the customer to more branded experiences, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for the individual to make progress in their journey toward success.
Artificial Intelligence: The Key to Improving Customer Effort Score
The entire point of adopting artificial intelligence technology is to make things easier — both for your team and your customers.
Couple this with the fact that customer effort score is becoming one of the key performance indicators across the board, and the message is clear:
If you haven’t adopted AI-powered tools into your tech stack by now, you may already be behind your competitors.
Luckily, Optimove’s artificial intelligence tools can help you get started right away. Check us out to learn how we can help you streamline and supercharge your customer journey — and improve your customer effort score in the process.