The question becomes, how do brands prepare for the future of business conversations, to ensure they stay ahead of the curve and stand out from the competition?

Kustomer went out and surveyed over 3,000 global consumers to understand what changes are occurring in the customer experience landscape.

The Stickiness of Modern Messaging

 Modern messaging channels are successful for consumers and businesses alike. According to a study conducted by The University of California at Irvine, people check their mobile devices once every 43 seconds — totaling 600 times over the typical eight-hour workday. Younger generations have been conditioned to look at those little red notifications as soon as they pop up.

While consumers report checking their emails most frequently, chronic inbox fatigue can oftentimes hinder business conversations. By 2025 it is predicted that 376.4 billion emails will be sent daily, worldwide. That is up by nearly 23% over five years. When measuring average handle time, and ensuring that your brand conversations make it through the noise, email may not always be the smartest choice.

As the data below shows, consumers are much more likely to respond to business messages via text than they are via email, multiple times per day.

Both checking of notifications and responding to messages on social channels is also significantly higher for Gen Z consumers than any other age range, with 52% reporting they check their social notifications multiple times a day, vs only 20% of consumers 65+. Conversely, less than half of Gen Z consumers say they check their email multiple times a day, compared to 72% of consumers 65+.

What a Great Customer Experience Looks Like

As generational preferences continue to shift towards more modern, digital and instantaneous communication channels, it’s important to ensure that you aren’t just showing up on a channel, but actually building long-lasting customer relationships. Here’s what the data tells us businesses should be prioritizing, and how to achieve exceptional CX at scale.

Convenience Is Paramount

Eighty-nine percent of consumers think contacting customer service should be easier and more convenient, and 87% of consumers appreciate immediate resolution to their problems, only any channel they prefer. The question becomes, how can you deliver on this need for speed? Support teams are often bogged down with manual, routine tasks that consume agents’ time and effort, and result in long response and resolution times that frustrate customers. Currently 50% of customer service agents’ time is spent searching for information and performing repetitive, manual tasks. This is no longer sustainable.

Businesses need to tap into technology tools and AI to eliminate the menial, repetitive, and time consuming tasks, with intelligent automations that can detect intent, collect relevant information, automate agent interactions, and route conversations. Intelligent chatbots are now able to deliver contextual and personalized information that feels human, and can seamlessly hand off to agents when necessary. With the right technology, agents can focus on building relationships with customers and fixing complex issues in a timely manner.

Create Connections

While speed is always appreciated in customer service interactions, modern day consumers want to build a connection with your brand. For simple questions and low level inquiries, self-service may be ideal — especially for younger consumers who have grown up with Google in the palm of their hands. But in a digital-first environment, customer service teams may be the sole, human face of your brand.

In fact, 83% of consumers expect customer service reps to reflect the brand’s ethos and values, and 82% appreciate when businesses communicate with them in a friendly, conversational manner. They no longer want to feel like a number in a queue, or a transaction on a spreadsheet. They want to be a part of a brand’s community, and establish a true connection with the business.

Continue the Conversation

Many customer experience platforms on the market today are ticket-based, meaning they identify the customer as an attribute of an inbound or outbound message and build the communication around that ticket. These systems prioritize the metric of a “done ticket” over a customer relationship. It is abundantly clear that customers no longer find this acceptable.

Eighty percent of consumers expect customer service agents to know about their orders and history, without communicating it to them, and 69% of consumers appreciate being able to switch customer service channels without losing context. This number only grows when we look at younger consumers.

And consumers don’t want the conversation to end once a ticket is closed. Eighty-one percent of consumers report that they appreciate proactive support, and 73% of consumers appreciate followup after their problem is solved.

Businesses must leverage a modern day customer service CRM, that focuses on the customer at the center of each interaction. A single and full view of the customer, and an integrated data system, gives you the complete context of that customer’s history so that you can take the right next action, at scale.

Want to learn more about the modern age of CX messaging? Access the full research report here.

Guest blog post written by Andrea Paul Salerno, Director of Content and Research at Kustomer. To learn more about the Modern Age of Messaging, go to kustomer.com

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

The post The Future of Customer Communication Is Messaging. Here’s What the Data Says. appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Messaging Customer Care: Real-World Deployments, Real Results

The goal of this blog post is to clearly identify the business value of implementing messaging customer care alongside traditional care channels such as phone, email, and live-chat. In my role as Head of Product, I have the privilege of meeting customer service and customer experience leaders on a weekly basis. Over the last several years of my career, I have racked up several hundred such conversations.

These conversations are a part of my role that I love and value immensely because they help me understand our customers’ priorities. While every organization has its own way of articulating their customer service priorities, they generally fall into three main buckets: improving customer experience, controlling customer service costs, and improving agent satisfaction. Agent productivity impacts all three of these commonly held priorities.

Improving agent productivity means conversations are being resolved faster which is a key component of customer satisfaction. It also impacts agent satisfaction because higher productivity is achieved by eliminating repetitive, mundane or wasteful actions that agents are required to do for issue resolution. Finally, and most significantly, agent productivity is directly tied to cost control since its presence enables organizations to handle higher volumes of customer service requests.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how messaging customer care provides superior CX for consumers. What’s often overlooked is that customer care over messaging channels is also significantly cheaper compared to other, more traditional channels including voice and textual channels such as email and live chat. This is largely because messaging enables agents to dramatically increase productivity.

Voice vs. Messaging

To understand how much more productive, we analyzed a representative sample of our customer base. We found that agents on our platform are able to resolve between 5.7 to 14.5 conversations per hour. This resolution rate is about 25-65% higher than that of voice teams. The median messaging customer care team resolves 7.2 conversations per hour. This is about 42% higher than the benchmark of 4.2-5.2 resolutions per hour for a voice agent. This does not include conversations that did not require a response (e.g., conversations resolved by bots and automation, or a “Thank you” from a customer after a conversation was already marked resolved by an agent). Also excluded are additional conversations conducted by agents that were never resolved.

This disparity in productivity is driven by a messaging agent’s ability to handle many more simultaneous conversations than a voice agent is able to. Agents on our platform often have more than 10 conversations being actively handled at once without jeopardizing the quality of service.

Email vs. Messaging

Messaging provides an even higher productivity gain over email. Email, like messaging, is an asynchronous channel. This means that conversations don’t have to happen in real time and can span minutes, hours, or even days. However, from a consumer’s point of view, email is a highly dissatisfying channel, associated with high response times (often a day, sometimes several days) and high friction.

Emails tend to need more words compared to messaging which wastes agents’ time without adding much value to the actual problem resolution for the consumer. This communication style often requires a lot of back and forth, which feels natural in a messaging-style conversation, but can get frustrating in a more “offline” format. Email issue resolution costs for enterprises that we’ve talked to tend to be in the range of $6-7 per resolution. Compare this to the $2-2.5 cost per resolution for an average messaging team on our platform and it translates into a 60-65% productivity gain over email agent teams.

Chat vs. Messaging

Live chat has been around for a long time and is a well-established service channel in many organizations. On the surface messaging and chat look similar enough that enterprises tend to assume that they also have similar costs. However, this is not the case due to a key difference between messaging and chat: asynchronous versus synchronous interactions. Chats often suffer from a high abandonment rate whereas a messaging conversation can never be abandoned. This is the source of messaging’s productivity advantage over chat. Messaging conversations never get abandoned as there are no session timeouts.

Timed out chats often lead to either channel hopping or new chat sessions (e.g., if a user gets timed out because they were browsing a different webpage and didn’t see an agent’s reply). For each abandoned chat that drives a new session or a phone call, the time spent by the first chat agent is wasted productivity.

Messaging also allows more simultaneous conversations than live chat’s typical 3-5 range. We estimate that eliminating involuntary abandons and enabling higher simultaneous conversations can add up to 15-30% higher productivity over live chat. Abandonment rate being the key variable for the extent of these savings.

Whether comparing messaging customer care to voice, email or live-chat, it is safe to say the messaging provides a superior customer experience. Perhaps most importantly, it drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

Messaging provides a superior customer experience and drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

What is your experience? Have you looked at what a messaging operation could save your organization?

Interested in finding out more about this topic or Sparkcentral? Sparkcentral is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Marina del Rey, September 10-12, 2018. CR Summit Marina del Rey will feature keynotes from Chick-fil-A, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Upwork. Sparkcentral will be delivering a Customer Shop Talk session titled “Digital Messaging Customer Care at Scale”. 

For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

The post Messaging Customer Care Business Case appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Many brands ask us about the differences between using live chat versus digital messaging (ie. Messenger, WeChat, in-app/in-web messaging, etc.) for customer support. That’s right, chat and messaging are NOT the same. Although chat was loved by brands in the past, we believe its final days, as it currently exists, are near. To explain why it’s important to first clearly distinguish how the two are different.

Take a look at the examples below to see the difference between a messaging interaction versus that of a chat interaction.

 The example above is one of messaging.

In this interaction, I had reached out to one of my favorite brands, Nordstrom, to get some help finding a jacket.  Here is what was great about using messaging for customer support:

– This conversation was asynchronous, meaning the agent and I could communicate without being available at the same time.

– It was extremely convenient – I received a push notification on my phone’s home screen when the agent responded (rather than staring at my phone waiting for a response).

– It was contextual, so if I ever forgot which jacket I was looking at, I could just open up the app and go directly to the link the agent had sent me. Also, if I ever reached out again, the agent would know exactly what that previous interaction looked like.

– It felt personal and human. I was able to share just how genuinely excited I was by simply adding emoji to the message. With messaging, agents and customers can share and express emotions via emoji and gifs.

My experience with chat was very different…

In the chat interaction above, I needed help from customer support regarding a slightly more complex issue than my first example. This conversation was also much more frustrating for me due to the limitations in chat. Let’s break those down:

– The conversation was synchronous (as are all chat interactions), so I had to be actively available to receive the agent’s response and vice versa.

– It was session-based – so once I closed out of the chat, the entire conversation thread was lost. I was essentially held hostage in the chat and if I were to leave, I’d have to start all over again (which, of course, happened).

– Since chat lacks context, I had to re-explain my problem to a new agent when I reached back out for more help.

– When I had trouble explaining my issues and wanted to share a screenshot of my problem, I was deflected to email (since chat is text-based).

– There was no use of emojis or gifs and the entire interaction felt impersonal and lacked the human element.

Messaging costs less than chat

If the examples above don’t convince you that messaging is a preferable way to interact with a company, let’s look at the numbers. According to a research study by Mckinsey, a single chat interaction costs a company between 3 to 5 dollars per interaction. A messaging communication is less than $1, which is up to 1/5th the cost.

Not only are messaging interactions less expensive for brands than live chat interactions, but with the proper technology in place, agents can handle as many as ten messaging conversations at one time. That’s 5x what most contact centers report for concurrent conversation handling on chat.

People prefer messaging

Regardless of the cost savings, here’s a pretty powerful fact: 9 out of 10 customers actually prefer to message a business. Why? Because messaging is a HUGE part of our daily lives. Here’s another fact: 1.4 billion people around the world send over 50 billion messages each day to communicate with one another. In addition, WhatsApp and Messenger have around 1 billion monthly active users each and WeChat around 900 million. Messaging as a conversation and interaction interface has fundamentally shifted how we communicate with one another, and it is about to shift how people communicate with your company.

To learn more about how messaging helps improve customer satisfaction, enhances employee engagement, and drives real financial results, download the latest (and totally free) Aberdeen report: Customer Messaging: Happy Customers, Productive Employees & Better Financials.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or Sparkcentral? Sparkcentral is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website.

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Click here to catch up on Part 1 – Customer Expectations, Part 2 – Channels, and Part 3 – Operations.

The fourth installment of this series focuses on thoughts on technology.

• AI will begin to automate tasks for the agent and the customer – however AI will take longer to mature than previously thought, due to data infrastructure not mature enough to fully leverage.
• Companies will begin to shift from handling transaction to personalizing service.
• Digital will continue to experience strong growth, powered by mobile usage.
• Messaging channels will continue to grow social volumes.
• More conversations around the “social ethics” of AI deployment.
• Continued push on technology – moving infrastructure to the cloud.
• Deep/machine learning will play a role in 2018 for brands to meet customers where they are. I think brands are starting to get on board with the concept of machine learning and using data to predict behavior. But deep learning can extend beyond things like chatbots. If a brand can predict what a customer might be looking for, it can tailor content to the customer that allows the customer to self-service, send push notifications, etc.
• Thinking about AI secondarily to the types of use cases and outcomes desired that require it.
• Companies will have to address AI and ML in their strategies for customer acquisition and engagement. 2017 may be seen as a year of hype as lots of new vendors emerge on the scene. Expect consolidation and actual AI/ML deployments to increase in 2018.
• Interest in – and deployment of – customer journey analytics tools will increase, as companies try to identify and solve problems upstream before they occur.
• Strategic enterprise automation (front to back office) will help businesses begin to improve the customer experience, while optimizing back office operations, leading to stronger sales and a better bottom line. Examples include automated machine learning/AI, self help, chatbots/avatars, to RPA and beyond.
• People continue to overestimate innovation in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
• We will see the first practical examples of AI in the areas of contact center routing, compliance and quality, with practical use cases.
• Some brands are testing AI for knowledge management (ie. agent support tool powered by AI vs. a traditional knowledge management tool). A lower risk approach to testing AI vs. directly with clients.
• Over the next 3 to 5 years, I believe that the majority of inquiries that come into the contact center will no longer be voice or email, but some form of messaging. SMS is only one form of messaging: it encompasses a broad swath of methods including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Kik, WhatsApp, and more. Many people are following WeChat, which is now one of the largest standalone messaging apps with over 963 million monthly active users. Part of the reason it has been so successful is that you can do more than just send messages. Apple is moving down the path with the announcement of its Business Chat messaging solution which is an extension of iMessage and will include some ApplePay capabilities. The convergence of these technologies will be what ultimately tips the scale to shift consumers and businesses away from phone and email to messaging.
• Maturity issue with emerging virtual assistance technologies (chatbots, AI capabilities, etc.), continues to lag – requirements for specific user case studies at an all-time high.
• Buzz and hype are high, but adoption is low. Brands realize they need more data in order to leverage these technologies to be accurate.
• I’m not convinced that brands have the capacity/talent/full understanding of what precisely goes into machine learning and true AI (beyond chatbots). I think we’re going to see a wave of failed adoption on that front.
• Technology – Proliferate of technology out there – from measuring CX, to ‘omnichannel’, to speech analytics.

Stay tuned next week for the final installment in the series Part 5 – Use Case Studies/Data and Security/Risk. 

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