AI-powered search is delivering results for those using it, but we’re still just at the start of benefits the technology is truly capable of delivering. What’s more, companies that adopt early have a chance to run far out ahead by transforming themselves through innovation driven by artificial intelligence.
A quick glance at a June McKinsey report titled "How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies” shows huge investments happening by the major technology companies, along with strong achievements by the businesses that have already deployed AI throughout the organization.
Financial services organizations know that failure to effectively monitor trade communications exposes them to a tremendous amount of risk. Whether the risk is driven by the dissemination of sensitive information, inappropriate employee behavior, or a violation of regulatory policies, it’s imperative that firms confidently mitigate these risks so they can protect brand value.This is the reality organizations face and why it’s so important to monitor communications proactively.
How many times have you switched your mobile phone service provider when the service or support was poor? How hard did that service provider work to keep you? It’s likely they didn’t try very hard. They have many customers, so losing one isn’t that big of a deal. But for companies that provide complex products like those in manufacturing, aerospace or oil and gas, a high-quality customer support program is critical. The question is, what does a quality customer support program look like?
The Support Challenge for High Value Products
A couple of scenarios to demonstrate the need for strong customer support and preventive maintenance programs in manufacturing industries.
Remember the Panama Papers? Those were the 11.5 million leaked documents detailing attorney–client information for more than 214,000 offshore companies associated with Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore shell companies. Many of these companies were set up to “hide” money so wealthy individuals could evade taxes. Others seemed part of money laundering schemes.
It’s been just about two years since the documents were leaked to journalist Bastian Obermayer from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Since then, as documents continue to be reviewed, a thriving cottage industry has grown up around reporting the suspicions, investigations, allegations, revelations, and prosecutions stemming from the Panama Papers.
In the rush to keep up with customer demands, organizations are launching digital transformation initiatives without considering the effect these plans will have on employee productivity.
Why would strategies that improve customer experiences have a negative effect on employees? Because more often than not, they contribute to the growing silos of information spread across the organization. The very information that employees need to perform their jobs.
The Digital Workplace Faces Many Challenges
For an organization to be successful, real transformation must happen internally as well as externally. When it doesn’t the challenges employees face can feel insurmountable:
Customers often interact with brands across various media and channels. From the customer’s point of view, they’re interacting with a single brand, but inside the company, all that information is often scattered in different databases making it extremely difficult to create a 360 customer view.
Nowhere is this more important than the financial services industry, where a customer may interact through a series of different channels at any given moment. Then, when they speak with customer service, they expect that the person on the other side of the conversation will have intimate knowledge of their financial dealings.
The corporate intranet remains the lifeblood of any major enterprise. Over the last decade it has emerged as a key location for ideas, documents and collaboration. But for many it can also be a frustrating morass of information that remains difficult to find, forcing people to rely on email or instant messages to trade ideas and documents.
The main problem is that many intranets were developed early in the online revolution and have been slow to evolve. Outside of work, employees are used to intuitive search experiences in their personal lives with tools like Google, Alexa, and Siri, and now they expect the same personalized, highly relevant experience for information access in the enterprise. They seek answers, not a list of results.
Looking for a search solution that could power their e-commerce, Intranet, and CRM experiences, National Instruments wanted to optimize the online shopping experience and foster collaboration and engagement across the workforce.
National Instruments is among the innovators that put search at the core of its systems, including digital commerce, the website, intranets, and CRM.
Search at the Core of UX
Site search needs to offer capabilities that continually improve the relevancy of answers to search queries. It needs to consider language on global websites, and it must be personalized as much as possible to the visitor requesting the information.
Today’s business users don’t search for documents that may have the information they seek buried within, instead they ask their systems for answers. This shift in attitude is a key driver behind the move to cognitive search.
Any large enterprise is packed with disparate sources of data coming from any of a variety of different systems. Cognitive search is about creating connections between this data so that employees can get answers quickly, so they spend more time on core activities, and they make better informed decisions.
From a business perspective, this means creating experiences that match how a user interacts with information.
When you think about customer support, you tend to think about cost savings for the company. But how often do you think about customer experience?
For too many companies, a focus on customer experience ends when the customer is won. The reality is, it’s only the beginning. If the experience you deliver your customers is poor, they will leave you. And it’s easier than ever for an unhappy customer to move to the next company.
If there’s one area of the company where many could improve the customer experience, it’s customer support. So what are the 3 approaches to improving customer support?
