Where customer support fits within the experience economy
Creating customer support experiences that go above and beyond is a great way for brands to stand out from the crowd. Not only does this provide an outstanding experience for an individual customer, but it gives brands a captivating story to share.
Look at footwear giant Zappos. When a customer was late returning a pair of shoes because of a death in their family, the Zappos support team took care of the return shipping themselves and arranged for a courier to pick up the shoes at no extra cost. The company even sent a bouquet, along with a note offering their condolences.
Customer support is one of the most important touch points that consumers have with your brand. And a positive interaction with your support team helps build customer loyalty: A survey revealed that 80% of Americans are more likely to be loyal to a brand after a good support experience.
Learn how to empower your agents with the right customer service skills for success.
How to deliver joyful customer support experiences with automation
With incredible advances in conversational AI technology, forward-thinking support teams are using automation to up their experience game. Here’s how automating your customer service can help you deliver faster, better CX.
1. Round-the-clock support
While you can’t expect agents to work around the clock, a virtual agent allows you to provide customers with 24/7 support. This means customers can get the answers they need, whenever they want them. As well as providing instant support, this helps reduce buyer friction. Plus, you can serve different time zones without scaling your support team.
2. Faster responses
For questions that need to be escalated to a human agent, process automation means your bot can collect details up front and route tickets to the right department. This intelligent triage gives agents the context they need to resolve issues quickly, cutting average handle time. And faster responses means happier customers. Plus, it's easier than ever to get started with generative AI, which uses LLMs to build a knowledge base bot in minutes.
3. Personalized interactions
The best automation providers use a headless approach, allowing them to seamlessly integrate into your existing tech stack. This means your automation platform can pull customer data (such as name, location, IP address, and more) from your CRM. Brands can use this information to suggest new products based on past preferences, or reach out in a customer’s preferred language — to really personalize each conversation.
What’s more is that the potential for delivering more personal interactions via automation is rapidly expanding. With the dawn of generative AI, the tech behind ChatGPT, your bot can seamlessly mimic your brand tone of voice, regional dialects and more.
4. Multilingual support
75% of customers are more likely to be loyal to companies that offer support in their native language. But many brands don’t have the resources to hire agents in every market they serve. With the help of a bot, they won’t have to: at Ultimate, our powerful automation platform supports 109 languages at native-level fluency. We’ve developed the most accurate multilingual AI on the market — so unlike some automation providers, our platform doesn’t rely on clunky translation layers.
Discover how Storytel offers 24/7, automated support in 13+ languages.
With increasing numbers of brands investing in CX, the experience economy is growing rapidly. And advances in AI technology mean companies can take their customer support to the next level. This allows leading brands to deliver experiences that keep them a step ahead of the competition.