By Nitin Agarwal, Co-Founder and CTO, Locobuzz
The world is becoming smarter, and so are today’s businesses. It is well established that the new-age technology can bring transformation in business operations only if it is prudently leveraged and executed.
Let us take the example of one of the leading real estate firms that took a dip because of the unprecedented wave of COVID-19. While offline businesses were struggling, any brand needed to sustain the scale of online queries to retain the interest of customers. The power of CX tech not only managed customer engagement through regressive activities but also generated leads that were translated into purchase deals later.
According to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” report, about 80% of people now consider the overall consumer experience equally as crucial as a business’s products or services. With digital technology, the businesses may now build stronger relationships with their customer.
For business to understand better their customers, let us talk about how technology plays a vital role in the entire process:
Sourcing the data
In the process of setting up an omnichannel customer experience strategy, brands need to collect data not only from their own touchpoints but also from partner-owned, customer-owned and external touchpoints across the digital, physical and social mediums. The primary goal is to adopt CX proactively to achieve customer loyalty and long-term growth. While the software should be placed to collect customer feedback through various methods ranging from web and SMS surveys to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and live chat modules, all these feedback channels should track back to the same centralized system, giving a meaningful overview to the brand whenever needed.
In the digital era, the data on online platforms is profoundly precious to the brands to deep dive into customers’ minds. When said online or on social media, people might restrict their thoughts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, but it has more than one universe that one can think. The companies procure the data from across the channels such as social media pages, public social data such as tweets, comments on YouTube Page, reviews on Amazon, likes, shares on Facebook, impressions on Instagram, messages, blogs, discussion forums, etc. The data is generally available in the public domain or permitted by third-party platforms (clients). Having access to raw data gives a chance to understand the audience and create a brand strategy in a better manner.
Social Listening & Unified CX is the proven way to automatically collect and index all customer conversational data from social channels, messaging conversations with brands, feedback, reviews, complaint websites, discussion forums, news and blogs. The information collected is not limited to just text but also includes images, videos, location tags, etc.
Data enrichment using “Transformers” series NLP models
The domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is constantly setting new standards for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simply said, NLP is the use of software to manage voice or text in a way similar to that of a human. The transformers will improve their ability to understand and provide for the consumers. Some of the examples are a chatbot, Q&A service, sentiment analysis framework, topic recognition data visualization, and others. They enable more human-like interactions between machines and customers making it quicker and easier for the brands to be more precise with their strategies. The companies leverage Deep learning models for amplified and strengthened data and sentiment analysis.
A hybrid model combining neural networks and statistical models performs better for auto-suggested texts and smart reply text functions. Advanced image detection and classification can be used for Image/logo/object detection. This model can help businesses determine the connection between widely separated sequential pieces from each written or spoken sentence. Brands can accurately identify the customers’ problems, garner valuable information on customers’ perspectives on their products or services and generate leads by analysing customer sentiments and deliver quick solutions.
Named Entity Recognition & text analysis
A natural language processing technique called named entity recognition can automatically scan complete articles, extract some key textual entities, and group those things into predetermined categories. It can be companies, brand names, date & time, name of the events, etc. The practice of categorizing or grouping text data into categories is known as text classification. The companies leverage ML and NLP to perform this function. It structures the siloed data into specified categories that can simplify the findings for the brand.
Emotion Recognition
With emotion recognition, the brand classifies or identifies customer sentiment under various emotion categories and subcategories. The text is divided into groups that correspond to the various human emotions. One of the examples is a slew of hashtags on social media pages that goes viral in fractions of seconds. Another way to detect emotion is emojis. For any brand, it is crucial to capture these sentiments to detect the potential crisis, red flags/threats, negative connotations, foul language, and slurs. With technology, the brands can understand the core sentiments of that one comment/post/review that can be in favour or against it.
This data can automatically be collected and then analysed to improve consumer confidence in the labelling.
Wrapping up
As the renowned economist, researcher, and author Michael E. Porter, said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” in the above-mentioned anecdote, the brand knew what not to do and exactly what to do. In a nutshell, it optimally leveraged CX technology to chart out a successful brand strategy to win the game of customers.
For better strategies, customer retention, and to grab a larger market share, the optimal use of CX technology is a must. A deep insight into a customer is core to charting out any strategy. It helps brands foresee the customers’ demands and needs. The optimal opportunities will emerge only if the brands take a deep dive into the handbook of the customers’ perceptions, sentiments, and requirements.
The competitive edge of the industry has upped the game for brands. In the changing dynamics of the digital customer experience, companies are focusing on establishing their own digital command centers and leveraging CX Techs, which gives them a competitive edge to listen to voice of the customers and derive actionable insights. This also enables them to gather brand intelligence, competitive benchmarking, event or campaign tracking, online response management, real-time conversation, and alerts across the digital touchpoints. All of these not only enhance the customer experience but also helps the brands to bring the customer centricity from policies into practice.