Good service is proactive: A new standard for customer experience

There is an interesting article entitled
“Good service is proactive: A new standard for customer experience” published in Bizcommunity: https://www.bizcommunity.com/article/good-service-is-proactive-a-new-standard-for-customer-experience-626931a

The author, Bruce von Maltitz, states: “For many organisations, customer experience (CX) is still reactive – a customer has a query, a ticket is logged, and an agent responds. Even when this process is efficient, it’s increasingly out of step with what customers now expect.”

He further says “At its heart, good service is about delivering on five simple things: speed and convenience, knowledgeable help, a consistent experience, a human touch when needed, and the option for self-service. When these fundamentals are consistently in place, true customer loyalty follows”

I fully agree with the above. Sadly many companies are stuck at reactive service. They make the customer wait until they are ready to reply. It could be an hour, a day or 21 days or never. Very few offer 24 hours service probably due to the cost of 24 hours service representatives.

Our AI customer service chatbot/agent ticks all the boxes Bruce talks about:
1) Speed and convenience: Our AI is available 24 hours per day and replies in 15 seconds.
2) Knowledgeable help: AI is trained on your business with as much knowledge as you have and gets better each day via machine learning. Invariably it is more knowledgeable than the average agent and fluent in multiple languages.
3) Consistent experience: Unlike a human AI is always professional, patient and polite. It never gets hungry, angry or runs out of patience.
4) Human touch. While it’s not human, it portrays a polite, professional demeanor. It will also send a message to a human where it cannot solve the problem. Contrast this with asking the call centre agent to escalate your issue to the CEO or an agent reading from a script!
5) Self service: Yes AI allows you to help yourself, via a chat on the company website or a WhatsApp chat and soon via voice.

The sixth point is an AI customer service agent is far more cost effective than a human agent, even for the smallest of companies.