Editorial
The Gist
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Prioritize customer needs. A customer-centric approach can help you use customer expectations to guide your CX decisions.
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Create a service strategy framework. Use AI-powered customer support to develop an effective framework for your strategy.
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Implement the ten pillars for success. The ten pillars of a good CS strategy can boost your company’s overall performance.
When jumping into artificial intelligence, many organizations inventory what they’re doing now and look for opportunities to automate. This fixed-pie thinking can be limiting out of the gate. Let's take a look at leveraging your AI-powered customer support strategy.
Those with the best service prioritize customer needs and expectations and use them to guide decisions. Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, is often cited for putting it this way: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.”
Some low-cost airlines, for example, are ignoring this advice and eliminating phone support, assuming chatbots and other channels will suffice. There’s been a predictable backlash from customers who feel forced into using these capabilities.
Bolster Services With AI-Powered Customer Support
Other organizations are giving customers a choice in how they are served. They are deploying powerful AI-powered customer support to bolster and complement services and upgrading employee skills for higher-value services. As a result, they can see efficiency and customer loyalty move in a positive direction.
So, given all that AI can do, how do you best integrate it into your organization’s direction? How do you ensure that it’s meeting customers’ needs and building your brand? An important part of the answer is to develop and use a service strategy framework. In customer service, this is often referred to as a customer access strategy or just a service strategy.
An effective customer access strategy includes 10 key components, which we’ll break down below.
Related Article: Should You Add These Customer Service AI Roles to Your Team?
The 10 Pillars of a Good Customer Access Strategy
1. Customer segments are the specific segments you’ve identified to differentiate customer needs.
2. Types of interactions include customer service or technical support, for two.
3. Access channels are important for communication. Examples of these include phone, video, text, chat, self-service, in-person interactions and others.
4. Hours of operation and how they vary for different interactions should be made clear.
5. Accessibility refers to your objectives regarding how quickly customers will reach agents and relevant systems and resources.
6. Routing considers how each customer will reach the team or systems.
7. People and technology resources required refers to the employees and systems that come into play for each type of interaction.
8. Information required refers to the information on customers, products and services that will be needed.
9. Analysis and improvement defines how the insight captured will be used to improve products and services.
10. Guidelines for deploying new services is where you’ll summarize how to bring new services into the mix.
Your customer access strategy may be well-developed — or it may need a lot of work. I encourage you and your organization to begin to think about these components together.
Related Article: AI Customer Experience Ushers in a New Era of Engagement
Leveraging Your AI-Powered Customer Support Strategy
There are two ways you will want to leverage your strategy. One is to consider how AI could positively impact ANY of the 10 components.
To demonstrate this, let’s take the first component: customer segments. Machine learning algorithms that power personalized recommendations from Amazon or Netflix are now available to any organization, but perhaps more personalized service is a better fit for you and your customers. Given how fast AI is developing, my recommendation is to have a small team regularly think through each component and how AI can help.
A second way to leverage your strategy is by preparing your impact solutions to implement ALL components. For example, an insurance company known for great service has deployed a chatbot to assist customers on their app and website. Before the rollout, they thought through the impact on all 10 strategy components. They asked questions like “Which customers might need the chatbot’s help?” Or “What questions would they have? When would the involvement of a human service agent make sense?”
As a result, the company trained their chatbot more effectively, prepared their teams and updated their planning processes. Thus, implementation has been smooth and effective.
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It’s also important to leverage your strategy to uncover untapped AI-powered customer support value. Let’s use another example to demonstrate this.
Perhaps an internet provider intent on tracking customer satisfaction employed sentiment analysis tools that analyze text and speech conversations, social media posts and other sources of input. By going through their strategy, they realized these tools can also provide insight to many areas of their operation — this includes their training teams being focusing on issues that matter most to customers.
Using all that we’ve covered, your strategic customer plan — that considers all 10 components — can help you see the big picture AND the specifics that help you unlock the power of AI-powered customer support.
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