The advancement of customer experience technology has significantly improved communication channels between customers and organizations. At the same time, consumer communication habits have changed; some are adopting new communication methods, while others continue to use traditional strategies.
We remember the old days when this evolution began with tailored in-store interactions. Employees greeted customers by name and assessed their configurations when specific products were needed. As consumers began to spend more time on the internet, retailers took notice and moved their businesses online. They enjoyed a broader market, but collecting feedback became very difficult. Fast-growing companies heavily prioritized customer feedback.
Now, online feedback is collected in many ways, including surveys. But there's a problem: Customers are more inundated with email than ever before, and attention spans are limited. As a result, we've seen survey fatigue take shape, with declining response rates and fewer comments to investigate.
So, where do we turn?
We analyze trends in digital conversations from chat platforms. Communication methods have changed to where humans want to share stories and feel heard. But chatting with humans is quite expensive for organizations, and AI chat typically leads to more cryptic, transactional interactions. AI chat can only manage so much, so many end up refining their queries to be as simple as possible.
Organizations are losing out on insightful details in favor of solving issues faster with AI. But, there is a balance. Customer communication is not just about solving the problem; it's about showing customers that someone genuinely cares about solving it.
By inviting customers to share their stories along with the customer journey, AI can be fine-tuned to either handle or route to the correct human. This approach leads to strong efficiency gains and has humans solving more complex problems vs. repetitive tasks.
Despite all the ways humans are connecting socially through voice notes, dynamic texting, and video, almost all customer service interactions are stuck in plain text and reduced to text-based summaries.
Customer experience technology can enhance workplace empathy by fostering more comprehensive customer interactions, empowering customers to share their stories easily while making the narratives actionable for employees. It's one thing to show trends based on what customers are saying. It's another to take unstructured data and turn it into something that extends beyond customer experience.
The future of customer experience technology lies in multimodality: allowing customers to provide complete context up front and share their stories naturally through their preferred medium and in their own words.
Why is this important? By guiding customers to provide the largest context up front, they don't have to guess what companies need from them. Making it easy to share invites them to share more, which can lead to richer media, deeper context, and an overall better experience for both consumers and agents.
AI's role extends beyond trend identification to structuring data for actionable insights, ensuring that every data point is backed by real customer stories. With AI's help, employees can see not just what customers are saying but how they're saying it and the potential impact on the organization. This leads to fewer data silos, more cross-departmental collaboration, faster resolutions, and more decisive action.
Harnessing Voice-of-Customer with Robust CX Technology
Voice-of-customer feedback is valuable. If implemented thoughtfully, the benefits can be spread across cross-functional areas.
Why is this? It's time-intensive and difficult to identify key themes to share and ensure those themes are accurate. It's harder to make those themes come alive where people care.
How do you tie it back to departments Just like consumers who want personalization, so do employees. To truly empower product teams, marketers, and employees, you need to go beyond understanding and refining customer interactions. You need to decide which customer insights are most relevant for specific departments.
The companies that excel at this take it to another level: they refine data points, analyze them from multiple angles, and share them systematically across departments to maximize their value.
Today's CX technology bridges the gap between customers, employees, and decision-makers by creating a unified understanding of how products and services impact lives. For product teams, this means gaining insights into real-world applications, challenges, and opportunities for innovation. For marketers, it means crafting campaigns that resonate with the intended audience.
Historically, there has been a challenging divide between customer support and marketing teams. Support teams are generally focused on insights derived from problem-solving that inform product and operations decisions, but marketing teams seek retention and upselling opportunities. They are realizing support is sitting on a gold mine of data and want to tap into it for insights on how to create better customer journeys and brand loyalty.
We're seeing a shift where marketers, like consumers, are increasingly drawn to customer-generated content. This presents an opportunity to use every customer interaction for meaningful storytelling. These stories can shape marketing strategies in multiple ways, from informing influencer messaging to inspiring new ad campaigns to finding and emphasizing the key benefits that drive repeat purchases.
As AI-to-AI communication becomes more prevalent, extracting genuine human insights and stories will become increasingly valuable. By systematically gathering and sharing customer stories with marketing teams, we create opportunities for authentic inspiration. This practice helps bridge the gap between support and marketing teams, creating alignment across the full customer journey rather than siloed approaches where marketing focuses on acquisition before handing off to support. The future lies in these teams working collaboratively to deliver a cohesive customer experience.
Organizations that understand their customer bases keep a competitive edge. Companies investing in technology that provides both comprehensive and precise customer insights can make decisions with unprecedented clarity, in stark contrast to traditional approaches of surveys, market research, and high-stakes decisions made with limited visibility.
Forward-thinking companies are prioritizing investments that move beyond basic sentiment analysis of chat transcripts or consolidated data sources. Innovative approaches to customer data collection create dual advantages: enhanced customer experience and optimized employee operations.
In the era of smart products, customers expect smarter customer communications. With growing audiences, often on a global scale, organizations are racing to develop processes and synchronize a vast amount of data to maintain their edge.
Organizations looking to the future know that a loyal customer base is as good as gold, and to build a loyal customer base, you must first understand them. Luckily, with the help of AI, customer experience technology isn't just building a roadmap but a bridge. And it's reinventing the way we understand and communicate with customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Fran Brzyski is CEO and co-founder of Hark, a provider of video and audio-driven customer feedback solutions.