Customer Experience and Digital Innovation within businesses in Australia

2017 has seen the continuous growth of businesses moving away from product focused environment and towards a customer-centric model. 

Digital Innovation now plays an integral role towards customer experience. 64% of Australian consumers indicated that it is very or extremely important for organisations to respond to their feedback to ensure they maintain loyal customers.

Customer experience meets Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Consumers are now demanding speed, convenience, accuracy, and accommodation that highly advanced technologies can offer. This is also where AI has made a noticeable impact.

Datacom’s intelligent assistant ‘Alex’

The Australian government is taking the lead with IP Australia’s usage of ‘Alex’ to improve its digital engagement strategy. 

Brainchild of Datacom, ‘Alex’ is able to provide direct answers to questions from customers, as well as learn from customer queries both on IP Australia’s website and Facebook page. Having supported more than 50,000 customer interactions, it helped to maintain IP Australia’s customer service satisfaction ratings at approximately 84%. 

The agency has also witnessed a stark contrast to 2013’s statistics that showed only 12% of their 800,000 customer interactions used digital channels per year compared to the current 99.6%. This has further shown the reach digitalisation has created, and thereafter the impact that it can create. 

Both Datacom and IP Australia have worked together to determine the conversation strategy, website and web chat integration, as well as the core content that makes up the replies from ‘Alex’ to ensure the engagement it has with IP Australia’s consumers. Analysts expect the impact to result in more than US$9 trillion worth of profits with this collaboration. 
With ‘Alex’, Datacom will be able to materialise the sublimation of bots, supervisors and agents to better serve customers. One will be able to “do more with less” as digital interactions increase. In addition, bots will also be able to make use of data science to gain knowledge that can affect the lives of consumers in new and refreshing ways.

Chatbots

Chatbots are increasingly becoming less of an assistant but more of an advisor, moving away from purely transaction-based customer relationships.

ANZ Bank for example, have deployed the technology of Chatbot to allow consumers to ask questions about their accounts, initiate transactions, and even receive basic financial advice. Experimentations with Chatbots are set to continue in their attempt to further discover other benefits that can arise with the combination of automated services and human interaction.

Organisations on the other hand, will also need to evaluate how much of their services can be automated without driving their customers away due to incompetency such as malfunctioning and inaccuracies that can arise from a Chatbot. 

Chatbots are predicted to develop further by 2018 which can include functions that will be able to detect the mood of a caller through the intonation of their voice. If these Chatbots sense increasing frustration, they can then route the call to a human agent for further follow-up. Ultimately, organisations that engage Chatbots will need to find the optimum mix between automated responses and the need for human agents.

‘All’ data and cognitive analytics

Cognitive analytics provide organisations the opportunity for customer experience insights to move beyond ‘big’ data to ‘all’ data, delivering more comprehensive customer information than ever before. However, organisations need to bear privacy guidelines in mind as research has shown that 87% of consumers in Australia surveyed believe that it is very important that organisations can be trusted with customer data.

Ipiphany™

The effective use of data analytics will determine who survives in this new era of digital enlightenment. Touchpoint Group’s Ipiphany™ is one that is confident in performing. The organisation has gathered that the ability to analyse customer feedback in greater depth can reduce handling costs by up to 40% while improving customer advocacy at the same time. While analysing all data, Ipiphany™ is also able to delve into industry specific pain points at a more detailed level. 

Additionally, company data can be analysed in granular detail to pick out problems an organisation hasn’t realised, which may (or may have already) dramatically affect customer experience. With 74% of decision makers who use global data and analytics as part of their planning, Ipiphany is one such product that can be relevant to maintain this trend.

Essentially, Ipiphany™ uses cognitive analytics to analyse and learn from both structured and unstructured customer data, combining text analytics, machine learning and natural language processing to comprehensively analyse big data. By learning and thinking like a human brain, Ipiphany™ can identify themes and patterns across every piece of structured and unstructured data – and the more it processes, the more it learns.

Cognitive analytics can thus change a customer’s experience in an unimaginable way. 

The concept of customer experience involves the whole process a customer has across all touchpoints of your brand, including all contact within the digital sphere: data, targeting, and UX. While UX is not customer experience, it serves as a support to build and improve better customer experience. With their technological know-how, UX specialists are able to complement a business’s product and services to meet the demands of customers and hence, improving their overall customer experience. 

Cross-team collaboration between UX and customer experience will also improve a user’s journey through a seamless experiences thereby sustaining a user’s loyalty. As such, talent within UX and tech developers will only continue to increase in demand as they continue to drive great impact.  

What is Progressive Recruitment doing?

We understand the importance of ensuring that our clients receive top quality service and favourable experiences. At Progressive, we have a number of consultants who specialise in CX, UX and UI to ensure we deliver candidates that fit our clients’ digital needs.

From an internal perspective, we have implemented a Net Promoter Score Survey to further understand the needs of our customers and ensure that they are well taken care of. With customer experience being the top priority of businesses today, so is Progressive Recruitment. 

If you are interested in understanding the dynamics of the talent pool within customer experience, do contact the Australia team at [email protected] or follow us directly on LinkedIn for more industry related updates.

Sources: ZDnet, Huffington Post, Tech Seen, Corinium Connected Thinking, The Australian, NZ Advisor, Enterprise Innovation