6 trends in digital customer interactions

Voicebots are increasingly being used by government agencies and companies. Only logical, because they can communicate with your customer 24/7, and when you combine them with human support, you get the best of both worlds. Of course, that doesn't mean that the chatbot you may have already invested a lot of time and money into is passé. They can actually reinforce each other.

In this article I will tell you how we ended up in the era of (voice)bots, what the difference is between a voicebot and a chatbot and how you as a company can ultimately benefit from this.

Developments surrounding digital customer interactions are moving at lightning speed. More and more organizations are using technology to speak to their customers in a personal way. In this article we share the 5 latest trends in digital customer interactions.

From 'I want to sell something' to 'I want to value something'

1. Increase customer loyalty with digital transformations

The pandemic has completely changed the way consumers shop, work and live and consumers are more digital than ever. The digital transformation has logically accelerated. According to research agency Gartner, more than 2023% of all customer service will be delivered via digital self-service channels by 60, compared to 23% in 2019. More and more organizations are therefore making their processes flexible, automated and agile in order to continue to retain current customers.

2. The customer of today is not the customer of later

Your customer today is not the same customer with the same needs as in 5 years. Both consumers and employees have increasingly higher demands and expectations when it comes to the digitalization of your organization. The digital customer interaction you have with your customer must be fast, easy and personal. Therefore, force yourself to closely monitor developments and see what fits within your organization and goals. What's close by?

3. Digital self-service is a fact

Our smartphones are increasingly being used to replace physical stores. Organizations must tailor their interactions with their customers accordingly. After all, you want to continue talking to your customer. What you still regularly encounter are forms that are sent by e-mail to a (new) customer. The customer receives this in his inbox and must print the form, complete it and then take a photo and then email it back as an image. This can and should be more customer-friendly. It would be more logical if you could do this via useful tooling and channels. This is an advantage for your customer, but it also means that the right information enters the processing flow of your organization more quickly.

4. Every customer journey fully personalized

Implementing hyper-personalization means that you can really recognize, understand and help your customer. Add something there that helps your customer. You continuously look at how you can add value and engage in personal customer interaction. To achieve this, organizations invest in technologies that allow them to use their customer data in a smarter and more targeted manner. For marketing, this means individually targeted messages (that are appropriate in terms of relevance, channel and time); for service, this means taking more into account the context (time, nature of the problem) and preferences (such as channel). In sales, this can lead to personalized products – something that is still in its infancy.

5. Chatbots that really understand you

The chatbots of the future are full-fledged personal assistants that can deal with and understand emotions. The shift is from NLP (Natural Language Processing) bots to NLU (Natural Language Understanding) bots. Soon you will no longer know whether you are talking to a human or a chatbot. Current chat technology already makes it possible for them to provide complete support for fully digital ordering of specific products or services. A logical next step is to be able to help solve problems, where the chatbot tries to form an image of the context and responds to the customer's emotions for even better customer interaction. But note: to be able to do this, people quickly think of an AI bot. This requires a lot of data and a long learning curve. You can now gain experience with conversational chatbots.

6. From 'I want to sell something' to 'I want to value something'

Take a good look at your data and use your big data to add value to your customers; an increasingly important trend that ensures a long-term relationship with your customers. A concrete example: using various data models you can see that a customer's subscription consumption is too low compared to what he pays every month. As an organization you can proactively offer a more suitable subscription. So it is not about primarily selling, but about continuously providing the right advice. Creating added value for your customers so that they stay with you. Ask yourself, do you want to be an advisor or do you want to be a salesperson?

* The translations on this website are provided by G-Translate from Dutch