Knowing what to do and what to avoid is the best way to implement a successful strategy at the enterprise level. With so many different priorities, objectives, departments, and key stakeholders, it is challenging to understand the most critical best practices and where they fit into a strategic roadmap.
Conversational AI strategy is not much different. Integrating strategic decision-making with customer interactions ensures that customers' needs are met in the most streamlined way possible.
In this entry, we will discuss how to create a conversational AI strategy that works for your organization while ensuring that your customers are satisfied with your service.
Starting a business strategy requires a clear understanding of organizational goals and the capabilities to execute them effectively. In the case of conversational AI at the enterprise level, having a clear understanding of your business's goals and what that means across multiple levels is the best way to ensure you integrate conversational AI successfully.
What is your business's main goal? What do you need to reach the next stage? Answering these questions should be the starting point for any strategic endeavor. With conversational AI, however, these are even more important, given that, ultimately, you will create customer-facing journeys with this information.
In short, if the top goals are misaligned, customer's perceptions and interactions with your brand can be negatively affected.
Knowing what your target audience is looking for, their pains, needs, purchase triggers, etc., is critical to creating an effective conversational AI strategy. Just as the business goals and needs matter, connecting that information to the end consumer and the type of interaction they need can significantly differ, given their particular needs.
By analyzing your audiences and uncovering their demographic, psychographic, and technographic preferences, you can tailor conversational AI in a helpful and effective way. Failing to do so may frustrate your customers, hurt your brand equity, and ultimately lead to ineffective operations in your enterprise.
Enterprise integration of any tool across multiple departments is essential for successful operations. Conversational AI tools can be helpful for CX, EX, sales, operations, and various departments. However, the greatest value comes from a comprehensive integration plan that considers the needs of all departments to identify the key elements required for successful implementation.
In the case of Mosaicx, this is precisely our expertise. With over 30 years of experience working with enterprises, we pride ourselves on creating the perfect conversational AI experience for enterprises with multiple departments and stakeholders.
A typical scenario enterprises face when choosing a conversational AI platform is figuring out precisely the features and service level each option can provide. While not all enterprises require the same solution, generally speaking, having a platform that is an actual partner with detailed and permanent service helps leaders do their best work.
For stakeholders trying to incorporate conversational AI, multiple priorities and events are happening simultaneously. Having a partner who takes the time to figure that out, adapt it, and continuously support the process may be the difference between success and failure.
On top of that, the market across AI technologies is crowded, which makes it difficult to make an informed decision by having to excel during the due diligence process.
As a rule of thumb, when selecting an enterprise conversational AI platform, it’s important to consider the varying levels of expertise across the industry. While there are many new AI startup companies offering innovative solutions, they often lack the experience required to handle the complexities of large-scale enterprise operations. Look for partners with a track record of delivering results in industries similar to yours, and who can provide robust support to guide your team through deployment and optimization.
Getting the right conversational AI platform in place is the first step to ensuring strategic implementation. In other words, choosing the proper platform is just as important as training your staff to maximize its potential.
While some providers limit themselves to simply providing access to a product, at Mosaicx, we proactively ensure your staff makes the most of it. Conversational AI augments your workforce abilities, but training your employees is an important part of ensuring this happens.
Implementing conversational AI also means a continuous improvement loop is needed to adapt to your enterprise goals and end-customer needs. Permanent evaluation of your current performance, as well as potential improvements based on feedback and key metrics, is the best way to ensure strategic alignment.
Customer-centric conversational AI design is at the core of any successful conversational AI strategy. Ultimately, a great customer experience where they can solve problems independently requires businesses to identify, understand, and create a permanent process that adapts to user needs.
Following the steps outlined, you can deploy a strategic conversational AI strategy that works for your enterprise. On top of the steps above, here are a few additional aspects you should consider on your conversational AI integration journey.
Your competitors will likely deploy conversational AI to support their customers, so finding ways to stand out and win in your market is vital. By running a comprehensive competitor analysis to understand how they approach the process you can identify gaps and opportunities to improve your CX.
The purpose of a high-performing conversational AI platform is to serve your customers, your company, and also help you stand out from the competition.
With a clear understanding of industry trends, best practices, and competitive advantages, you can tailor your approach to ensure it meets your business goals. Sometimes, following best practices is not enough, and going beyond custom norms is the best way to position your enterprise as the leader in conversational AI CX.
Remember that customers and businesses are different. The best way to differentiate your offerings is to connect your KPIs with your customers' needs. A homogeneous approach will rarely meet those goals.
Conversational AI technologies excel at providing multilingual support to serve many different customer segments. Unlike traditional customer support teams that needed specialists who spoke multiple languages or large teams to simply cover customers' language needs, conversational AI can automatically translate your experience into other languages.
That is not to say that you can skip the overview and monitoring process of translation and helpful support. Instead, you can offload simple, repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on higher-value activities like training the conversational AI solution to empower users to solve 70% of their problems themselves.
While each company may have its own set of KPIs, generally, when using conversational AI platforms, many contact centers tend to focus on First Call Resolution (FCR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics.
While these metrics are standards, ultimately, what matters is understanding how a virtual agent who helps customers solve their problems ties into your overall business objectives. It may be a mixed indicator for both your internal team and your end customers, or it can even be a financial goal focused on reducing operational costs.
Be sure to be clear from the start about what exactly you plan to measure, what success for each metric looks like, and how it compares to your current or previous performance.
Conversational AI strategies are at the forefront of tech trends in the contact center industry. However, there are multiple ways to increase efficiency and performance and to combine them with other technologies and trends to further push your business forward.
Keep an eye on what's happening in your industry, what's happening in similar industries, and technological advances that can impact your business. The only way to remain competitive is to anticipate customer needs and adapt before others in your vertical.
Adopting new technologies is a process that takes time, training, and change management and is full of unknown challenges and opportunities. We recommend starting conversational AI implementation with a robust test of the product first. Doing so reduces the risk of going live with end customers before perfecting CX journeys, which can damage your reputation and customer experience.
Mosaicx is the only conversational AI provider that supports phone and text service with end-to-end analytics, industry-leading voice features, and a success coach who maximizes value throughout our relationship.
For over three decades, we have delivered exceptional CX solutions to enterprises, empowering them to achieve unprecedented growth and impact the world.
Ready to transform CX with a strategic implementation of Conversational AI? Chat with one of our solution specialists and see how the right combination of AI, advanced technology, and human expertise can help your organization grow.