Have Yourself a Merry CX-mas with Conversational AI and CX Automation

With Christmas just around the corner, people everywhere are infused with the holiday spirit, excited to spend time with their loved ones, gearing up for the endless party invites, and, of course, scrambling around to get the best gifts for their family and friends. People are flocking to retailers to hunt for the gifts that stand out in the crowd, with Adobe predicting US online holiday sales to hit $209.7 billion. In fact, according to the latest McKinsey Consumer Pulse Survey, more than half of those surveyed say they are eager or excited for the shopping season, up from around one-third last year.

The big question is whether the country’s retail industry is prepared to handle the seasonal increases in customer care demands. Long call wait times and delayed responses to customer queries or purchase assistance can result in a subpar customer experience (CX). In the long run, bad CX leads to decreasing customer loyalty or, in the worst situation, the complete churn of a customer.

That’s where Conversational AI can help save the day, enabling brands to plug their service gaps and deliver a memorable, personalized experience to their customers. Customer support teams often struggle to keep up with the never-ending stream of customer queries manually, especially during the holiday season. Also, overstaffing during these surge seasons is neither a practical nor a long-term fix. However, Dynamic AI agents, powered by Conversational AI, can effectively address the strain brought on by an increase in consumer inquiries. This puts them in a better position to prioritize consumer demands and lessen the stress of the season. Brands can connect with more customers at scale thanks to such Dynamic AI agents, who can also handle many customers’ inquiries quickly and provide more personalized service. Additionally, they scale and prepare for the seasonal rise the quickest of all. Here’s how brands can utilize Dynamic AI agents to their advantage:

Analysing past data

By handling routine and repetitive queries, Dynamic AI agents can assist in reallocating customer support resources. As a result of this, customer service representatives can concentrate on issues that call for more complexity. The first step is crucial: compile data from prior years and examine it to find any trends or potential improvement areas. In order to identify any repeating patterns in the customer’s journey through the brand’s website, brands should also extract previous year’s data on website traffic  and compare it with data from the entire year.

Additionally, brands can utilize this information to pinpoint any seasonal capacity requirements. The stage of gathering information lays the groundwork for the approach that responds to the unique requirements of the brand. Businesses should strive for faster deployment times, constant high-quality solutions, and increased accuracy.

Identify drop-off points

Additionally, it’s critical to pinpoint any areas where customers frequently drop-off. Knowing where customers leave the site—whether it’s the home page, the payment page, or anywhere in between—may help marketers determine the areas where a Dynamic AI agent can be most useful. For instance, marketers can make sure that a live chat is available at the checkout stage to address any last-minute questions and prevent cart abandonment if there is consumer attrition there.

Making interactions highly intuitive 

To deliver extremely intuitive and personalized interaction, businesses must become adept at seeing trends in consumer behavior. Their AI agents can use sentiment analysis indicators to detect consumer dissatisfaction or anger and highlight it for a human customer service representative. For instance, they can infer whether a consumer is satisfied with the services provided, which gives the Dynamic AI agent a chance to upsell services. However, they can also use sentiment analytics to recognise when a customer isn’t happy. The Dynamic AI agent can immediately escalate the chat to the human agent in such circumstances.

Engaging customers with hyper-personalized campaigns 

A Dynamic AI agent is capable of keeping customers constantly engaged through proactive and personalized notifications and reminders. These push alerts can be on ongoing seasonal discounts, product recommendations, or simply a reminder about the availability of their wish-listed items. Through such notifications, they can also assist customers in making purchase decisions. For instance, the AI agent can recommend shoes, handbags, and accessories to match a dress that a consumer has added to their cart. Therefore, AI agents are not only instrumental in handling customer care concerns; they may also support a company’s sales and revenue generation.

Facilitating an omnichannel presence 

Omnichannel communication is highly crucial today for brands to deliver seamless experiences to their customers. With communication moving from fragmented multichannel engagements to an integrated omnichannel strategy, brands should be able to communicate with consumers on any channel of their preference or even shift channels in the middle of conversations. And they can do so with the help of Dynamic AI agents. For instance, a chat that began on Instagram can now flow naturally into a WhatsApp conversation and culminate with a live-agent call, providing consistency and ease to customers. A single CX platform that collects all customer data and context from all channels is needed to achieve such a fluid conversational experience.

Above all else, nothing cheers up a customer’s spirit more than an experience that adds to their holiday spirit. This is easily accomplished in physical stores through displays and design. However, the holiday spirit can also be created online. That would just require brands to customize their Dynamic AI agents by updating the script to say Christmas-themed phrases like “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” or by utilizing seasonally appropriate emojis such as the Christmas tree, Santa, reindeer, snowflake, and even s’mores and gingerbread men cookies.

Christmas 2022 symbolizes the end of a trying time and the long-overdue reunion of many family members. And Dynamic AI agents can certainly help businesses meet the increased demand and offer customers a smooth and highly customized buying experience, adding to the overall spirit of the holiday season.