Ian Jacobs: You can see where brands are starting to try and meet that customer need. This is data from 2019, pre-crisis. But we saw that brands were expecting their digital support volumes to increase dramatically enough that they would offset the decrease in telephone volume.
What you see here is that almost two-thirds of brands think their telephone volumes will drop. But two thirds of those brands also expect that the overall number of interactions they have with customers is going to go up. Why? Because consumers are expecting information to be available anytime and anywhere they need it – digital experiences are the best way to make that happen.
There have been a lot of digital channels, particularly asynchronous messaging platforms, third-party messaging platforms, and also things like SMS and digital self-service, where we've seen a land rush, to very quickly implement some kind of conversational AI or intelligent virtual assistant. Many of those were designed for crisis communication. If you were an airline or train company, or even a cruise ship, maybe you’d get lots of questions about sterilization procedures and so on. And they weren't necessarily broad. But once brands have invested in that technology, they will have the opportunity to expand those experiences.
Let’s talk about why, before the crisis, brands had a maturity model in mind for self-service, and how the crisis has only amplified the need to move up this maturity model, its four stages being:
Stage 1: Bettering Service with Self-Service: The first stage is using self-service to enable better service – this is what everyone normally expects out of self-service. Just answering the top 10-15 FAQ questions with some kind of conversational AI, a knowledge base, and the search function will allow customers to solve many of their problems on their own.
Stage 2: Influencing Revenue: But if you look at the three different factors that Arun highlighted for how you're going to not only survive, but actually thrive, one of the ways to do that is to drive customer loyalty by protecting revenue. And to do that, you need to think about influencing revenue. I think of customer service as a tool to influence purchasing decisions by answering questions – not after the purchase, but pre-purchase. I also think of it as proactively engaging and reaching out to customers, when you think that they are going to have a problem with purchasing.
Stage 3: Using Customer Data in Product Improvement: This is the phase that I don't think many brands have gotten to yet. As we start to move up the maturity model, we need to think about customer engagement rather than customer service, wherein we're thinking of the customers as a constituency within our enterprise: ideating around new products or new services, having the data from these customer interactions indicate where there might be friction points in product usage, and then feeding that data into the parts of the organization that can actually fix those problems – it becomes a full loop within the enterprise.
Step 4: Lasting Customer Success: And finally, you get to the state of lasting customer success, where you’re thinking about onboarding, for example – teaching a customer how to use a product or service properly. So now you've got this idea of self-service in the pre-purchase phase, in the usage phase and in the post-purchase phase.
As I said, this crisis has only amplified our need to create this loop. Because again, if you think back to Arun’s three factors of how to actually thrive, you've got the loyalty piece, the revenue piece, the optimization piece – which touches on both optimizing the purchase process and optimizing the usage of a product to alleviate the need for support further down the line. And then, when there is need for support, you can bring in self-service.
The operational flexibility piece is something that we're going to talk about later.