Thoughts on the Frost and Sullivan Customer Experience Event – Part 1
As part of UKCloud’s commitment to customer service, I’m currently attending the Frost and Sullivan Customer Experience event in Dublin. I’ve had the pleasure of being a thought leader for the second year running, driving the agenda and facilitating several sessions. Creating an amazing customer experience is a core part of our business and is something we’re extremely proud of. This event is a great chance for us to learn from other customer-centric organisations such as PayPal, Google and bpost. As part of the event, I want to share some thoughts on what industry leaders are discussing this year, and some of the trends impacting customer service departments across the globe, as well as my own views on what this means for us at UKCloud.
Wednesday’s sessions have been extremely focussed on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation to not only help drive a better customer experience, but also enable scale. Interestingly, the industry has stopped talking about AI in terms of chatbots and front-line support but instead has moved on to how this technology can help internal staff through knowledge sharing, automating back office processes and improving customer experience. In previous years there has been a focus on the use of bots to replace staff, but the reality is customers need people to help them and the human element of support is not going away anytime soon. In fact, most organisations acknowledge that support staff are becoming much more critical in being able to help address key challenges like:
– Hyper-personalisation of customer service
– An improved focus on complex queries
– Faster resolution of issues
– Creating an effortless experience for customers using and interacting with customer service teams
The reality is that these things can only happen in conjunction with automation and AI. Examples of virtual GP services, like those powered by our cloud platform, show how automating and utilising technology can help consumers by shortening waiting times, making services easier to use and reducing the effort and stress on both the consumer and the healthcare provider. Automation and AI can also help customer services respond right first time, by giving improved data insights and feeds into core tools, which enables interactions to be logged, analysed and ultimately leads to customer services teams improving the customer journey.
Here at UKCloud we’re already working heavily to automate and utilise AI to improve customer experience on our multi-cloud platform. We utilise technologies like Moogsoft to help prevent issues in the first place and automation tools such as Jenkins to enable us to build automated pipelines that speed up customer interactions and ultimately facilitate client self-service.
One area we’re looking to further improve is our omnichannel communication strategy. Our new status page has now gone live offering SMS and email updates, but we continue to look at the possibility of offering additional solutions. This, alongside new technologies, enables us to gather improved feedback from customers, inform our own staff and gamify knowledge sharing. This allows for a richer experience and improves how we service our valuable customers. Imagine a world where we could use AI to match our customers to a member of our support team based on a selection of data points to ensure they are routed to the right person first time… That world is not very far away.
Want to read more? Part 2 is available here.