Customer Experience Archives - Page 2 of 2

Why NBFCs Need Voice AI To Create Differentiated Customer Experiences

Posted on May 2, 2022June 20, 2022 by Harshad Bajpai

Today, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) are a major force in financial inclusion by offering credit to underserved retail, small businesses and consumers in India. The industry has seen phenomenal growth in the past few years and is expected to grow by 9.5% in FY22. They play a critical role in the development of core infrastructure, employment generation and in helping the weaker section of the society financially. NBFCs have, in a lot of ways, has been instrumental in filling the gap in credit availability that has existed in India for so many years.

According to PwC, NBFCs have outperformed banks in new credit deployment. The ability to scale faster, customize rigid policies and continuous experimentation with the latest technologies has played an important role in their growth.

NBFCs have a deep understanding of different customer segments which is extremely critical for them to be able to effectively attract, convert and serve customers in a personalized manner.

Since the beginning, NBFCs have leveraged technology to streamline their operations and become more efficient. In the past few years, they’ve also heavily invested in data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for improving the customer journey and enhancing the customer experience – eSignature, eKYC (Know your customer), video chats, IoT-based data collection for connected cards, behavioural analytics and more.

Gaurav Chopra, Founder & CEO at India Lends said, ” The Indian retail borrowing has evolved over the years and in this past year, a paradigm psychological shift has been observed in consumers’ borrowing behaviour. This change resulted in a significant rise in demand for personal credit.”

Growth Opportunities

Even with the increase in the disposable income of consumers and improved access to credit, India is far behind when it comes to the Credit to GDP percentage (refer to the graph below). This clearly illustrates the massive growth opportunity in front of them. Regulatory innovations, government initiatives and convergence of technology in the last ten years are a few of the main reasons for their consistent growth in India.

Reports say that the recent pandemic has further fuelled their growth as more people leverage contact-less and paper-less lending. It has also fast-tracked digital transformation for NBFC companies.

CX Challenges for NBFCs

Despite the robust growth, NBFCs are facing challenges due to different factors, the primary ones being the increasing competition from new Fintech companies and increasing demand for a superior customer experience. In this article, we look at four customer experience challenges NBFCs are facing and their solution:

Identifying the Right Opportunities

NBFCs generate a prospective customer base through different channels, be it through the website, partnerships, or inbound calls. While on the outset all the leads might seem good opportunities, in most cases only a few are valuable. Support agents usually end up wasting their important time by speaking to the wrong leads. This greatly impacts conversions and agent’s productivity.

To solve this problem often brands outsource their lead qualification to a third-party agency. However, this only ends up creating additional challenges. Further, since brands have little to no control over the communication it poses a huge risk to the CX.

Also, checking the prospect’s interest level is not enough. A person might be interested in taking a loan but if he fails to meet even one of the eligibility criteria, he’s disqualified. Usually, this is verified by an agent manually over call and by going through the submitted documents.

Solution

One very effective and scalable way to automate prospective lead qualification is by leveraging voice bots. Before going deep into how they can help, let me talk a bit about voice bots and how they work.

Powered using Voice AI, voice bots can converse with customers in a natural and multi-turn conversational style. The experience is very human-like. Voice bots can allow you to engage with your customers 24*7 in a scalable manner.

Whenever a new prospect enters the CRM, voice bots will make an outbound call to explain about the product, collect important information and check their interest levels. It also answers common questions around the product and suggests other alternatives too. All this information is captured and the prospects are tagged as interested and non-interested. Depending on the interest levels, agents prioritize their engagement with the lead. In case, during the call, a prospect wants to connect with an agent, it can make seamless handovers too. The voice bot can further qualify the prospect by checking their eligibility. This can be done by asking multiple questions to the prospects.

Apart from lead qualification, voice bots ensure that all prospective customers are engaged quickly. Lead response times are critical because the sooner you respond to a lead (if it’s qualified) the higher the chances of conversion.

It also provides brands with important customer insights and other data that can help them understand the performance of different channels.

Creating a good onboarding experience

Most NBFCs struggle with customer retention. They’re failing to build trust among their users and a lot has to do with customer onboarding. While often overlooked, welcoming the customer and explaining important clauses plays a huge role in creating a good first impression. This is especially important in an industry where the number of customer touchpoints is very few.

However, calling each customer and onboarding them is a mundane and resource-intensive process. With limited bandwidth, companies find it impossible to assign agents specifically to onboard customers.

Solution

A scalable way of welcoming and onboarding customers is through voice bots. They can automatically trigger calls to customers and explain the product, answer common questions, and more. Further, if a customer doesn’t pick up the call, the bot can intelligently re-schedule the call. By automating the complete process, voice bots free up agent bandwidth without compromising on customer service quality.

Thus, Voice AI can not only help enhance the onboarding experience for customers but also contribute to major cost savings.

Streamlining Collections

Every NBFC in the lending space is continuously trying different strategies to streamline its collection process and make it more efficient. The primary challenge NBFCs face is in reducing the number of defaulters. To ensure customers make timely repayments, they greatly depend on reminders across different channels and phone calls. In fact, the most common reason for missing a repayment is not receiving any reminders.

Let’s learn how the process of repayments can be further streamlined for scalability and efficiency by leveraging the right technology.

Friendly Reminders for Repayments

While often underutilized, triggering reminders a few days before the repayment greatly helps in reducing the number of defaulters. By reminding them in a timely fashion, customers can ensure that their account has sufficient account balance for payment deduction thereby saving them from the unwanted hassle and late fee charges.

In case the customer wishes to pay instantly, the voice bot can also trigger an SMS notification with a payment link. Further, when a customer is busy, voice bots can make follow-ups as well, reducing the number of defaulters.

Thus, Voice AI plays an important role in improving the debt collection metrics for NBFCs.

24/7 Customer Support

Responding to and resolving customer support requests quickly is everything. Customers today expect resolution irrespective of the day or time or whether it’s a holiday. However, meeting these needs is a huge challenge for NBFCs.

Solution

Voice bots can help NBFCs provide round-the-clock support. So be it tracking claims or answering questions, voice bots can integrate with the internal systems and provide an instant resolution. Providing personalized support, enhances the CX and promotes brand loyalty.

Apart from this, voice bots can also be leveraged in the case of an unexpected spike to free up agent bandwidth.

Over to You

Both the new entrants and NBFC leaders need to consistently deliver great customer experiences and keep innovating by adopting new-age technologies for sustainable growth. Looking at the current state, there’s a huge scope for improvement especially when it comes to traditional NBFC companies.

By leveraging solutions such as Voice AI, NBFCs can not only enhance customer experience but also optimize their operating costs and expand the value provided to customers.

About Skit

Skit is an Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform, helping businesses modernize their contact centers and customer experience by automating and improving voice communications at scale. By enabling preemptive, intelligent problem solving and seamless live interactions, we have automated over 15 million calls for global enterprises across industries. We help our customers streamline their contact center operations, reduce costs, and also enhance customer experience and engagement.

Connect with us if you’re interested in learning more about the platform and how it can modernize and transform your contact center.

Voice AI for E-Commerce: Reimagining the Customer Experience

Posted on May 2, 2022September 14, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The Ecommerce sector is the fastest-growing sector in India and is expected to grow to US$ 200 billion by 2026 from US$ 38.5 billion in 2017 (IBEF). Most of the growth can be attributed to the rise of online shoppers due to increased smartphone and internet usage. In fact, according to a report, the number of active internet connections in September 2020 was 776.45 million.

The pandemic and social distancing have further accelerated the usage of online shopping apps like Amazon, Flipkart and BigBasket. The beauty and wellness category, for example, saw volume growth of more than 130% during the pandemic, according to a report by Unicommerce.

But the increasing growth has posed multiple challenges for the Indian ecommerce companies, including stiff competition and the demand for a frictionless and superior online shopping and customer experience.

CX in Ecommerce

In Ecommerce, CX is a combination of all the experiences across the customer journey, right from when the customer installs the application/visits the website to product returns/refund.

Today, every company is obsessing over creating delightful customer experiences and it’s for all the right reasons. Take the example of the ecommerce giant, Amazon, which has been successful in providing customers with the best experience for multiple years now. It is also a leading company in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in the category of Internet Retail.

With increasing demand and customer needs, technology has a critical role to play in helping companies achieve customer experience goals. Let’s take a look at voice technology and how it’s transforming CX for the ecommerce industry.

Rise in voice technology

Today, voice technology has become an integral part of our lives. We use it right from playing our favourite music track, switching on lights to ordering a product online. Companies have also been very quick in leveraging it to provide a personalized customer experience across the customer funnel.

Ecommerce companies, for example, are using AI-powered voice assistants for everything including triggering personalized product recommendations, creating a shopping list, tracking order status and raising a complaint. It’s as easy as saying “Hey Alexa, add tissue papers to my cart”.

According to a Capgemini Report, “By 2022, for each activity across the ecommerce consumer journey, the consumer uptake of voice is expected to increase by 15 percentage points or more compared to today’s levels.”

Here’s what consumers are performing using voice assistants –

51% of users research products
30% of users track a package
18% of users contact support

Let’s look in-depth at how voice is impacting a typical customer journey and assisting companies in providing personalized customer engagement and faster service.

Increase in Voice Commerce

Imagine having a dedicated salesperson guiding you through a product purchase at the comfort of your home. Sounds too good to be true?

Today, with voice commerce you can do exactly that. You can speak with a voice assistant to buy a product without browsing through the web or opening a shopping application on your phone. Just as you check the weather on your phone using voice commands, you can ask questions, check ratings, product details and more.

While there are multiple advantages, the biggest one for voice commerce is convenience. This helps consumers save time and maximize ease. Juniper Research forecasts that voice commerce will be over USD 80 billion by 2023.

Voice AI for customer engagement and support

The customer journey for any ecommerce customer is very complex and involves multiple touchpoints, more than any industry. For example, on mobile, only 15% of the customers who’ve added products to their cart end up making a purchase. Cart abandonment is not something new to the ecommerce industry and they’ve been employing different strategies to tackle it including triggering emails and push notifications.

To further reduce cart abandonment and tackle other similar challenges, companies are increasingly adopting Voice AI solutions. For example, whenever a user abandons a cart, an outbound call can be automatically triggered to a customer after a certain period to understand the reason for cart abandonment. Depending on their response, ecommerce companies can take appropriate action. For example, if the customer was facing a payment issue, the company can suggest alternative payment methods and so on. This can drastically help in reducing the number of cart abandonment.

Similarly, Voice AI can help with customer reactivation, promote offers/new launches and update customers on product availability and price drops. When it comes to customer support, Voice AI can allow customers to raise complaints instantly, answer frequent queries and collect important feedback interactively.

Future of voice in Ecommerce & opportunities

The rise in the usage of voice-enabled devices in the recent past has clearly shown how comfortable consumers are becoming when it comes to engaging with conversational assistants. According to a report jointly released by Kantar Millward Brown and IBM, “There are already 33 million voice-enabled devices installed globally.”

Apart from few challenges, voice technology is a game-changer for ecommerce companies. Be it voice commerce, customer engagement or support, voice has a huge role to play across the customer journey. When used at the right time and situation, it can create unforgettable experiences for customers.

This is a huge opportunity for ecommerce companies to reimagine their strategies and customer journey across different stages. By doing this, companies can not only enhance CX but also stand out in the competition.

Brands providing a good experience with their conversational bots are driving higher levels of customer engagement (Capgemini Report).

About Skit

Connect with us if you’re interested in learning more about the platform and how it can modernize and transform your contact center.

Behind the Scenes: Leveraging SLU to Enhance Customer Experiences

Posted on May 2, 2022December 27, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Voice-first platforms are here to stay and without doubt, they will play an important role in accelerating the adoption of technology across personal and commercial spheres. Users are growing increasingly comfortable with voice-first platforms as they are much more hassle free when compared to traditional written modes of communication, and this is reflected in consumer behaviour across industries.

Data from OC&C Strategy Consultants shows that voice-shopping is expected to jump to $40 billion by 2022 from $2 billion in 2018, suggesting that voice-first platforms might be the next disruptive force in the retail industry.

Voice-activated virtual assistants like Siri or Cortana have become an integral part of our daily lives and enterprises have started implementing Voice AI platforms for enhancing business processes.

There have been several recent breakthroughs in the field of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and this has enabled the rise of SLU-enabled Voice AI platforms that are capable of holding seamless human-like conversations.

One of the industry sectors that illustrates a supremely successful use case for intelligent virtual assistants is the field of customer service.

“…businesses across industries are also aware of this on-going shift in the technology and customer behavior. In fact, many have already begun their voice journey and are transforming the way how customers interact with their brand.” (Trantor Inc)

With an increasing base of digital consumers worldwide, contact centers have been reeling under the pressure of ensuring good customer service while efficiently handling the immense call load that contact centers face. This has led to the adoption of Voice AI platforms for contact center automation- and advances in SLU have allowed such voice assistants to turn into quality customer service agents.

Here is how SLU-enabled voice AI platforms deliver superior customer experiences:

Increased Ease of Usage

Since the beginning of human history, voice has been the primary mode of communication for people and has been around for much longer than written communication systems. It is no surprise that humans tend to be “voice-activated” naturally and find it much easier to interact with technology through voice commands.

Now, with rapid progress in AI-enabled speech-to-text and text-to-speech services, seamless voice-driven customer experience is a reality. As the ecosystem around voice enabled technology matures, customers are starting to rely more on voice. (PwC)

SLU has helped the development of such voice-first platforms, allowing your customers to easily connect with virtual assistant platforms in your contact center.

Such platforms do not require your customers to trudge through the interminable IVR options, enabling them to easily express their concerns or queries in simple spoken language statements, leaving your customers happy about their experience with your brand.

Understanding the Customer

Spoken Language Understanding has taken voice AI to a new level with the ability to simulate a near-human understanding of speech by such platforms. SLU-enabled platforms don’t merely react to a fixed set of commands but rather use various techniques and algorithms to arrive at the true purpose of the customer in making the call.

Intent Recognition– No matter how customers frame their queries and statements, intent recognition algorithms are able to decipher the customer’s intent at one go using keywords or action words, without requiring multiple clarification from customers.

Named Entity Recognition– These algorithms extract important information from the customer’s speech to recognize important names, places or times that the customer talks about.

All these SLU techniques have enabled voicebots to easily achieve human-like “understanding” capability that allows them to easily converse with the customer, eliminating the machine-like qualities from a conversation.

Innovation in voice technology is reshaping consumer behaviour and brands need to pursue creative approaches to accelerate the adoption of Voice AI to align with customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge

Quick Query Resolution

In a world where each second matters, time is of the essence – for you and your customers. If they spend precious time on hold with your contact center while agents are busy, it can only be expected that customers will get frustrated with their experience and shift their loyalties to other competitors.

SLU enables voice AI platforms, which act as virtual agents, to easily access the required information from databases and respond quickly to customer queries. Intelligent solutions like Skit’s Digital Voice Agent have been shown to result in a 50% reduction in average handling time in contact centers.

A Zendesk Research Survey discovered that 69% of respondents associated good customer service experience with a quick resolution of their issue.

This will result in improved customer satisfaction and increased customer retention rates, translating into increased revenues and goodwill for your enterprise.

Consistent Service Experiences

Every time customers engage with your brand, they develop an opinion about the brand. To ensure that the impression your brand gives to consumers is excellent, consistency is key. No matter when and where your customers approach the contact center, their service experience needs to be consistent.

According to Forbes, 71% customers desire a consistent experience across any channel, but only 29% receive it. About 76% receive conflicting answers to the same questions from different agents which leads to loss of customer confidence.

Advances in SLU have enabled voice AI platforms to maintain a uniform dialog flow across the board in all customer interactions. From a standard welcome greeting to the last goodbye, everything progresses in a pre-planned flow which gives customers a sense of stability and familiarity. Every time they get in touch with your contact center, they know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Customers will come to trust your brand as the reliable option and will increasingly engage with your enterprise and not your less-consistent competitors.

There are, thus, several ways in which SLU has enabled voice bots to deliver superior customer experiences that keep your customers pleased and induce loyalty in them.

Keeping customers happy not only helps enterprises increase customer retention, but also helps reduce customer acquisition costs by increased word of mouth marketing and recommendations from loyal customers.

Topic: Customer Experience