Swritten by Samuel Wahlgren, Regional Manager Stockholm, Quicksearch
Just over a week ago it was time for the Customer Loyalty Conference at Rival in Stockholm. The conference is a good opportunity to gather inspiration about how different companies work with loyalty and customer experiences, as well as what trends exist in the market. These are questions that are perhaps more relevant than ever before. As early as 2020, customer experience is predicted to take over first place as the biggest brand differentiator instead of price. New at the conference this year was that there were two tracks, one for B2C and one for B2B, where this blog post mainly captures new trends that were discussed around B2C.
Good customer experiences beat the stock market
One of the largest institutes for customer satisfaction in the USA, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, also runs a fund where they only have companies with high customer satisfaction. They have managed to show that their fund has beaten the stock market over a long period of time. They have demonstrated that satisfied customers, for example, produce effects such as; More positive word of mouth, fewer complaints, lower service costs, more cross-selling, lower staff turnover and higher employee satisfaction. It therefore pays for companies to take care of their customers.
The challenge of identifying the customers
A central issue when measuring the customer experience and within CRM is the ability to identify customers. This question is especially common in channels such as social media or in retail where companies have difficulty knowing who is passing in and out of the physical stores or who is making the purchases.
If we start with the example of social media, it is not always easy to identify people who communicate with the company. A common solution is to use generic web links to send out short surveys directly in social media, for example in a chat. In the vast majority of cases, this method involves answers without much insight who who have responded to the survey. To some extent, you can dress up the link with information, but we still don't know who the person who answered is. In retail, the solution is usually to set up tablets or the like to collect customer feedback directly in the store. The reliability of the results is often poor and we also have no idea who answered what.
The second method is to make it a customer service matter, that is to say that you only ask those you can identify. That way, we can get it unified with other measurements we do in, for example, customer service, and we know who the customer who answers is. Unfortunately, we lose a large part of the selection because we are neither able nor allowed to identify all customers. In the retail trade, there is a similar solution where customer clubs are used to identify customers when purchasing. Thus, we can capture what these customers think, but again, it is often only a fraction of all purchases.
A somewhat unconventional but titillating solution to this problem was provided by the innovation agency Ignation. They started their campaign by claiming that we can certainly identify all customers. For example, with the help of facial recognition, we would be able to identify people in stores through quick searches on the Internet. This leads us unsought into the next topic.
Bots/AI
Bots have been around for a long time, but with AI (artificial intelligence) and new technology, the possibilities are endless. According to Gartner, 85% of the interactions between companies and customers in 2020 will take place without a human being involved from the company's side. Undeniably, AI and bots will most likely be very important to companies' customer experiences in the future. Already today, companies such as Lufthansa have bots that can manage information, conversations and rebookings for customers via a chat. This is something we will see more of in the future.
For Quicksearch, bots and AI are of great interest. As technology develops, new ways of collecting attitudinal data also emerge. Text analysis is a product that is starting to mature, and today we see suppliers that have text analysis tools that learn language and tonality over time. Text analytics has long been considered the next big thing in our industry. Maybe bots are a way to replace surveys in the future and then extract customer attitudes directly when they happen.
The customer experience is therefore more important than ever. New technology helps us become faster, more proactive and adapt our services and offers based on what customers like and want. The global AI market is estimated to grow from SEK 420 million in 2014 to SEK 40 million in 2020, according to the research company Research and Markets.
We at Quicksearch follow developments with great interest as we develop our own products.
