Countless companies in virtually every industry today are looking for streamlined ways to integrate AI into their existing processes and systems. Why? Because AI has the power to streamline your operations, enhance data insights, empower employees, and optimize results.

More than 55% of firms in one study are implementing AI into their business environments in some way. The trouble is, infusing a powerful new technology into your existing ecosystem can be more complex than it seems. There are a lot of moving parts to consider, various risks to overcome, and challenges to address.

As experts in the creation of powerful, customizable tools for infusing AI into business processes, Bulb Technologies is here to help. Here’s your guide to effective AI integration.

How to Integrate AI into Your Business: Step by Step

Implementing any new technology into your organization requires a comprehensive plan. AI is no exception. You’ll need to establish exactly what you want to accomplish with your intelligent tools, which frameworks, and types of AI you want to use and more.

Let’s dive into the step-by-step process.

Step 1: Define Your Project Goals and Use Cases

The first step is defining your goals and objectives. When you choose to integrate AI into your ecosystem, you’re doing it for a purpose. It might be that you want to streamline customer experiences, with intelligent ticket triaging, or self-service bots. Alternatively, you might want to address complex tasks like data analysis with the help of generative AI tools.

The most common applications of AI in business systems include:

• Automating processes: AI tools can help you automate a range of tasks in your organization. They can streamline everything from scheduling your teams based on demand forecast, uploading data to different environments, and summarizing content. They can also automate customer experience tasks, like triaging tickets, emails, and chats.
• Data analysis: One thing AI tools does a lot better than human beings, is process large amounts of data quickly. Our Cempresso Expert Modeler solution even allows you to create tools that can break datasets down into groups and validate data quality.
• Empowering employees: AI isn’t here to replace your team members, but it can augment them. It can help with things like managing common customer service requests, providing step-by-step coaching to team members, or even surfacing data faster during workflows.

Step 2: Start to Invest in AI Skills

With access to solutions like Cempresso AI Agent Studio, your teams can design workflows without extensive coding knowledge or programming skills, using a simple drag-and-drop environment. However, that doesn’t mean that training isn’t valuable.

Training your team members on how to leverage AI effectively, use technology ethically (and in accordance with your compliance guidelines) and avoid risks is crucial. The good news is there are plenty of resources out there you can access for free. For instance, Microsoft has it’s own AI business school service. Of course, it’s also worth creating your own targeted courses.

Once you decide on the AI tools, frameworks, and even LLMs you’re going to implement, gathering documentation you can share with your employees will help to facilitate adoption.

Step 3: Determine the Data Sources You’ll Need to Use

AI in all of its forms relies on data to function effectively. No matter which Large Language Model, or AI framework you’re going to be using, you’ll need to ensure your technology can draw data from the right resources, to train and refine your AI models.

This step requires a little work. You’ll need to start by assessing what kind of data your bots will need to access, based on your use cases. For instance, if you’re designing bots for customer service, you’ll need data from your CRM system, your customer support software, and your business knowledge base. You then need to clean and process your data, to ensure it’s accurate and useful.

Working with data experts during this stage can be useful, particularly when it comes to ensuring the data sources you’re using align with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.

The good news is once you’ve defined the data sources you need, the right AI model builder should allow you to integrate with the resources and tools you want to access instantly. For instance, with Cempresso, you can access a host of easy integrations for all of your existing tech.

Step 4: Select the Right AI Components

Now you have your data, and your use cases in mind, it’s time to think about the core tools you’re going to need to integrate AI into your current systems. First, you’ll need to choose the frameworks or large language models you want to use. Quick tip: with Cempresso AI Agent modeler, you can choose from a range of proprietary and pre-built LLMs, to suit your needs.

You’ll also need to think about which tools you’re going to use to actually design your AI solutions. Obviously, for this stage, we recommend using the Cempresso AI Studio. Our custom-built solution simplifies the creation of agents, chatbots, and chains, with a drag-and-drop interface.

Plus, it comes with pre-built configurable blocks that can adapt to any requirements you might have. You can use this solution to create all kinds of flows, with minimal restrictions. Plus, the system can easily grow, scale, and adapt to suit your changing needs.

Step 5: Allocate Resources

The right technology can make it easier to integrate AI into your ecosystem without a huge amount of initial investment. However, you’ll still need to ensure you’re allocating and using resources effectively. First, you’ll need to decide whether you’re going to create an internal task force for your project, or rely heavily on the support of an AI solution vendor.

The decision will depend on the project’s scope, the complexity of the task, and the level of expertise you need. Next, you’ll need to think about how you’re going to allocate specific resources to your projects, factoring employees, external experts, and budgetary requirements into the mix.

Step 6: Build Your AI Solutions and Flows

The process of actually building your AI solutions and workflows can be either very difficult, or very straightforward, depending on the technology you access. Based on the use cases you’ve identified, start mapping out flows for your AI solutions, thinking carefully about how you can ensure these intelligent solutions can benefit your employees and customers.

Remember, the strategies you use during the building process can vary depending on your existing IT infrastructure. You might prefer to use pre-built blocks and systems if you have limited resources, or you may choose to host and configure everything yourself. Cempresso’s AI Studio allows you to choose between using cloud-based LLMs, and local LLMs, depending on your resources.

Plus, it gives you the backend infrastructure, proxy servers, vector stores, and database solutions you need to start experimenting with AI-powered chains and tools. We recommend starting with a small project, and testing its functionality extensively, before you make any major changes.

 

Step 7: Begin the Integration Process

Now you have your chains and AI flows, you can begin to integrate them into your existing workflows and systems. If you’re using a solution like Cempresso AI studio, this process should be relatively simple, as our technologies can seamlessly integrate with a range of technologies.

The biggest challenge you’ll face here is adapting your processes and workflows to include AI. Look at the processes you’re going to be changing with artificial intelligence, and start creating new standard operating procedures for your teams.

For instance, if you’re introducing new AI bots into your customer service strategy, you might need to create a new process that looks at how self-service solutions will triage customers, and pass them over to agents when human intervention is needed.

Step 8: Testing and Optimization

Finally, once you integrate AI into your systems and processes, it’s important to ensure you’re monitoring the impact it’s having on your employees, customers, and overall performance. Think about the metrics you can monitor to determine whether your solution is driving results.

For an AI service bot, for instance, you might monitor how many issues your employees handle each day, compared to how many requests are managed by AI. You could look at things like average handling times in the contact center, first-call resolution rates, and customer satisfaction.

It’s also worth gathering feedback from end-users of your AI systems. Ask them what they like and dislike about the solution, and which changes they’d like to implement.

Integrate AI into Your Systems with Bulb Technologies

Learning how to integrate AI into your existing systems and processes can seem complex at first. In the past, the process required a significant amount of technical knowledge, and investment. However, at Bulb Technologies, we’ve designed a simpler way to streamline access to intelligent tech.

With Cempresso AI Studio, any company can create intuitive AI flows and chains, with a range of LLMs, and direct integrations to their existing technologies. Our solution can adapt to any business or industry need, and scale with your organization as you grow.

Contact us today to learn more about the Cempresso AI Studio, and how it’s revolutionizing the process of infusing AI into business processes.

 

Generative AI has taken the world by storm. Ever since OpenAI introduced companies to the potential benefits of large language modelling and GenAI assistants, demand for these tools has skyrocketed. In fact, more than 40% of respondents in a McKinsey study said their companies are planning on increasing their AI investment purely as a result of generative AI’s potential.

Already, Gen AI tools have proven to be incredibly effective at improving employee productivity, streamlining business processes, enhancing efficiency, and reducing operating costs. They can even empower companies to deliver better customer experiences.

Unfortunately, while 86% of IT leaders expect generative AI to play a prominent role in their organizations, there are still barriers to adoption. Compatibility issues between generative AI apps and existing technology ecosystems, resource limitations, and implementation complexities are preventing companies from unlocking the full value of generative AI.

Fortunately, certain technology innovators, like Bulb Technologies, are exploring new ways to make generative AI adoption, implementation, and utilization easier than ever.

Streamlining Innovation: The Cempresso AI Agent

Bulb Technologies has long utilized artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies within their comprehensive Cempresso suit, to help enhance customer care and improve employee performance. The new Cempresso AI Agent offering represents an innovative step forward in Bulb Technologies’ strategy for empowering modern teams with intelligent solutions.

Designed to make the deployment of generative AI solutions simpler, and more efficient, while ensuring companies can preserve security, privacy and compliance standards, AI Agent revolutionizes the technology market. This highly customizable solution focuses on a flexibility-first approach.

Unlike conventional strategies for generative AI deployment, which involved integrating everyday systems with specific LLM (Large Language Model) systems, Cempresso AI Agent comes pre-integrated with various different leading LLMs. This approach means Bulb Technologies can offer access to a streamlined, uniform AI interface and experience, regardless of your preference for open-source or proprietary language models.

Companies can select the implementation that best fits their requirements with ease, and side-step common problems with compatibility, or training team members on how to use several interfaces at once. The solution can even rapidly adapt to the needs of big companies and tiny startups alike, scaling and evolving according to the needs of your organization.

What’s more, AI Agent doesn’t just make embracing generative AI tech trends simpler, it also ensures companies can take full advantage of the latest technology, with a robust pre-built feature set, and straightforward user interface. Cempresso AI Agent puts business leaders in control of everything from comprehensive resource management to performance optimization and security assurance.

The Incredible Use Cases of Cempresso AI Agent

Already, companies from a range of environments and industries are discovering the multitude of benefits generative AI can offer. The right solutions improve both customer and employee experience, provide access to deeper business insights, and drive innovation.

Cempresso AI Agent, from Bulb Technologies, supports a wide range of generative AI business use cases, accelerating companies towards various crucial goals for growth and profitability. Some of the examples this innovative solution can support:

1.      Unstructured Data Collection

With Cempresso AI Agent, companies can dive deeper into their available data, extracting useful insights from unstructured data such as product descriptions, instructions, customer reviews, email threads, and more. Where leveraging this data in the past would have been a complex process, using Cempresso AI Agent gives businesses an easy way to gather, examine and derive insights.

With AI Agent, organizations can quickly build powerful workflows for data ingestion and analysis, without complex integration efforts. This paves the way for enhanced decision-making, with the ability to draw data from numerous existing processes and supporting systems.

2.      Text Summarization

Speed is essential in today’s fast-paced corporate world. Studies show that generative AI could give us back around 40% of our working hours, simply by automating and streamlining repetitive tasks. Rather than having to read through complex email correspondence, reports, and documentation just to find essential information, companies can use AI to summarize data into crucial action points.

The Cempresso AI Agent solution can condense long articles and other files into succinct summaries, extract action points from chat communication threads and more. Plus, the easy integration capabilities mean it’s simple and quick to fit the solution into your existing systems and processes.

3.      Creative Response Generation

Building strong relationships with customers, partners, and stakeholders requires highly effective and personalized communication. However, when pressed for time, and struggling with limited access to data, agents can struggle to immediately identify the ideal response. Cempresso AI Agent allows companies to rapidly enhance the communication skills of their teams.

Leveraging huge volumes of relevant data, from various sources such as your CRM database, delivery tracking system or product catalog, the system can suggest the ideal response to any question or query in seconds. Additionally, it can leverage sentiment analysis, contextual signals, and historical interaction analysis capabilities, to drive more meaningful and personalized conversations. This not only increases customer satisfaction and engagement, but boosts employee productivity too.

4.      Next-Best-Action Recommendation

Employees in today’s world need to be agile, ready to adapt to a wide range of events and circumstances, so they can deliver excellent experiences, drive sales, and unlock opportunities. However, determining the next best action in a workflow isn’t always simple. Cempresso AI Agent can harness the power of AI Agent to provide both employees and clients with step-by-step guidance.

The solution can help to map the perfect strategy for each situation, allowing for the creation of more personalized, engaging customer experiences, and efforts that boost customer loyalty. Whether clients are asking for advice or technical support, or need help choosing the ideal product, AI Agent can leverage historical data, real-time information, and business insights to pave the way to success.

5.      Quality assurance

In today’s world one of the most difficult tasks is maintaining quality when everything comes in large volumes. The same applies to correspondence with your customers. Sales teams, customer support representatives, and all other teams create large volumes of written communication with customers. Not to use it to maintain or improve quality of communication would be a waste. But on other side, it is difficult to control 100% of the written communication.

Cempresso AI Agent is able to autonomously check the quality of communication based on different parameters like using the right wording, mentioning all the benefits of the offer, language or even how the customer was calmed down. The best cases can be used for the training of other employees, and the worst could be marked for additional training. Nevertheless, you can control the quality of 100% of written communication with your customers.

Unlock the True Power of Generative AI

Demand for generative AI will only continue to grow as companies recognize the benefits this technology can deliver for customer experience, business productivity, and employee engagement. However, organizations need a simple way to ensure they can implement the latest technology into their existing workflows as seamlessly as possible.

With it’s zero-code approach, the Cempresso AI Agent solution represents the perfect catalyst for generative AI innovation and business growth. This simple but effective tool transforms the way organizations operate and interact with data, ensuring everyone can discover the true benefits of generative AI, without the unnecessary complexity.

Ready to revolutionize your business and step into the generative AI era? Learn how Cempresso AI Agent can transform your company’s operations today. Reach out to our team, visit our website, or contact the Bulb Technologies team for a demo.

 

Figuring out how to meet and exceed customer expectations isn’t as easy as it seems.

All companies know that if they want to compete in today’s marketplace, attract new customers, and retain their existing ones, they need to provide excellent service. However, in recent years, customer expectations have changed and evolved.

Currently, 66% of customers say they expect the companies they work with to understand their needs, and 52% expect every interaction to be personalized. In addition, in a world of digital transformation and same-day shipping, consumers expect every service to be available instantly.

This puts a lot of pressure on companies to develop CX strategies that are fast, efficient, and personalized for each customer. Fortunately, while meeting customer expectations isn’t always easy, it can be done. Below are 8 strategies you can use to ensure you’re aligning your service strategy with your customer expectations.

1.    Get to Know Your Customers

The first step to meeting customer expectations is to understand what your customers want from you. In most cases, many customers value the same things as speed, convenience, and personalization. However, you’ll find that some customers value things like empathy and compassion more than others.

By gathering as much information as you can about your target audience, you can develop a customer service strategy that meets their expectations. Don’t just determine basic demographic information like where your customers live or their age. Find out which communication channels they prefer to use, what their main problems are, and what their goals are.

Using a reporting tool integrated with your contact center is a great way to continuously gather more data about your customers so you can map their service history.

2.    Evaluate Your Competitors

88% of customers say they expect companies to constantly innovate and improve their services. If you stand out from other competing brands, you have a good chance of attracting and retaining customers. But you can only do that if you know what your competitors are offering. Conducting a competitor analysis SWOT can help you do this.

Identify the key competitors in your current market and ask yourself how they address your customers’ needs. Do they offer self-service options while you do not? Can they serve their customers through a variety of different channels, from voice to video?

Knowing what your competitors are doing will also give you clues on how to stand out from the crowd. For example, if none of your competitors offer face-to-face interactions with human agents, consider this strategy.

3.    Prioritize Speed

As mentioned earlier, speed is one of the most important things a customer expects when working with a company these days. With this in mind, you should constantly be looking for ways to make your strategy even more streamlined and efficient. Around 90% of customers today say they consider an “immediate” response from customer service to be important.

While you may not be able to set up a support team that’s available 24/7 to handle inquiries, you can implement automated systems to keep your customers in the loop. For example, you can deploy a chatbot that automatically responds to customer inquiries and gathers information about their concerns before forwarding them to an agent.

You can also use smart tools to help your agents handle calls faster. For example, an all-in-one contact center management dashboard that integrates with your CRM gives your agents access to the information they need to instantly personalize the customer experience. Chat assistants and automated bots that can provide customer profile data to agents can also speed up the service process, as agents spend less time searching for information.

4.    Set Metrics for Success

Impressing and delighting your customers is something you need to work on consistently. You can’t just put policies in place and hope for the best. You need to be able to track and monitor the changing customer service landscape and the success of your teams.

Decide which key support metrics you want to focus on to improve your CX strategy. For example, you might focus on things like first resolution rate, average resolution time, and customer satisfaction scores. Once you have an idea of the metrics you want to monitor, be sure to share them with your staff. Having access to dashboards where team members can track their performance in real-time can help increase engagement and productivity.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on which employees aren’t meeting expectations. By monitoring the right metrics, you can identify where you need to provide additional training and support to your team members.

5.    Connect your Teams

Around 76% of customers say they expect consistent interactions with companies across departments. However, more than half also say they feel that marketing, sales, and service teams never share information. Breaking down corporate silos will help you provide a more connected journey for your customers. So make sure your employees can easily collaborate and share information.

Use automated systems to transfer information between teams and improve the customer experience as customers move from one communication channel to the next. It might even be a good idea to implement internal communication tools for your teams to easily collaborate with other professionals on complex issues.

By linking your Unified Communication System and Contact Centre ecosystem, your employees can easily access additional support without having to constantly refer customers to other employees.

6.    Use the Right Technology

Technology is one of the most valuable tools at your disposal when it comes to improving customer service. With the right tools, you empower your agents. More engaged, better-supported agents lead to happier customers. Think about what tools you can use to improve your employees’ workflow.

An all-in-one ecosystem for tracking messages and requests across channels can help your employees deliver a more connected experience without having to jump back and forth between different applications. Automation tools can reduce the number of repetitive tasks your employees have to complete when handling calls and data entry. That means they have more time to focus on customer service.

You could even consider integrating AI bots and virtual assistants into the agent dashboard for your team members. These tools can offer advice and best-practice guidance, or deliver real-time coaching based on customer sentiment and needs.

7.    Empower your Customers

Today’s customers do not just want companies to make sure their employees are able to serve them effectively. They also want the ability to ask questions and solve problems themselves. Self-service solutions such as chatbots, automated assistants, and FAQs are becoming increasingly popular. By using self-service solutions, you can give your customers the freedom to take control of their service experience whenever they want.

Self-service solutions not only lead to higher customer satisfaction but can also save your business time and money. Self-service solutions can help you deflect frequent and repetitive calls that would otherwise take up the attention of your experts.

Remember, the best self-service tools can help businesses not only with simple issues but also with more complex questions and concerns. The smarter your bots and systems are, the easier it will be for them to provide 24/7 support. Use machine learning, natural language processing, and conversational intelligence to create human-like experiences with automated tools.

8.    Listen to Your Customers

Perhaps the most effective way to ensure you’re meeting your customer’s expectations is to listen to their feedback. Use social and digital listening tools to keep your finger on the pulse of the conversations that revolve around your brand. Find out how your customers feel about your business, and ask yourself if you can identify any trends or patterns in their complaints.

Sending out regular customer satisfaction surveys and asking your customers for reviews and testimonials can help you make sure you know what they really want from you. You can even consider offering your customers rewards and discounts in exchange for their reviews to increase your chances of getting more feedback.

Once you’ve gathered as much information as you can from your customers, use it to make decisions about how to evolve and expand your CX strategy.

Live Up to Customer Expectations

Meeting the expectations of today’s customers can be more difficult than it used to be. Today’s customers expect more from businesses than ever before, and many brands are struggling to keep up. However, if you can ensure that you’re delivering experiences that meet your customers’ expectations, you can achieve phenomenal results.

Contact Bulb Tech today to find out how our comprehensive Cempresso platform can provide you with the resources you need to improve employee and customer experiences.

6 Strategies for CX Success

Good customer experiences are something that virtually every company strives for today.

After all, we know that customers aren’t just looking for great prices or exceptional features when making purchasing decisions, they’re also looking for amazing experiences. In fact, 73% of consumers say CX is a critical factor in purchasing decisions.

While customer experience may be the ultimate battleground for modern businesses, there is no universal definition of what a “good customer experience” should look like.

Virtually every company has its own idea of the perfect customer experience. Some focus on speed, others on the power of empathy, and so on.

So how do you define a good customer experience, and more importantly, how do you craft it?

What is a Good Customer Experience?

According to Gartner, 81% of companies compete with other organizations based solely on their customer service initiatives. To win in this environment, companies must have at least a basic understanding of a “good customer experience” is.

Simply put, a good customer experience isn’t necessarily about providing support faster than the competition or offering a wider choice of communication channels. Rather, it’s about consistently meeting and often exceeding your customers’ expectations.

In other words, a good customer experience is subjective. It depends entirely on what your customers expect most from you. This means that defining what “good CX” should look like in your business starts with one simple thing: you need to get to know your audience.

Gathering insights about your customers’ sentiment, CSAT scores, NPS ratings, etc. will help you define where you should focus your efforts.

How to Deliver Good Customer Experiences

While the exact nature of an excellent experience can vary from company to company, there are some core components that virtually every customer associates with a good experience. If you want to ensure you’re competitive in the CX landscape, your strategy should revolve around these points:

• Convenience
• Speed
• Efficiency
• Proactivity
• Personalization
• Empowerment

Now let’s look at some ways you can integrate each of these components into your CX strategy.

1.    Provide Convenience with Omnichannel Service

Every customer, whether a B2C customer or a B2B customer, wants their interaction with businesses to be convenient. There are a few ways you can eliminate customer service friction with the right CX software, but the easiest way is to meet your customers where they’re and provide support through their preferred channels.

When customers spend most of their time interacting with brands on social media, they don’t want to have to find a phone number and contact a call center to get help; they want to be able to message you on the same channels they use to read news about your company and chat with their friends.

Find out where your customers are most likely to connect with businesses and make sure you’re able to offer support on those platforms. Most importantly, give your customers the ability to move between channels without having to start over.

A true omnichannel customer service strategy allows you to provide a consistent, contextual experience as your customer moves from one platform to the next by ensuring that every agent has access to consistent information about the customer journey.

 

2.    Speed Service with Better Processes

Speed has long been a critical factor in good customer service. Whether your customers are buying a product or trying to solve a problem, they want a quick response. In recent years, the need for speed has only increased thanks to the rise of real-time chat tools, same-day delivery, and other speed-oriented service solutions. That means you need to be faster than ever.

The good news is that there are several ways to increase your speed by streamlining your CX processes. Start by training your employees and giving them the knowledge they need to solve problems quickly. Every employee should fully understand your products and services and have access to the tools they need to find information quickly. Virtual assistants and chatbots are great for giving agents faster access to information. You can also use automation technology to increase speed.

Automating processes like call routing and data entry means customers can get to the right agent faster, and agents can move between calls more quickly without having to complete the process faster.

 

3.    Give Agents the Right Tools to Boost Efficiency

Good customer experiences and good employee experiences are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other. According to one report, companies with the most engaged employees also have 81% higher customer satisfaction.

To keep your employees happy, you need to give them the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. Start by creating a unified workspace where employees can access all the tools and information, they need to serve customers in one convenient environment. That way, they spend less time switching back and forth between different applications. Improve workflow by automatically routing customers to the agents with the right skills to resolve their issues and eliminate repetitive tasks.

It’s also helpful to ensure that your agents can work collaboratively on customer issues. When you connect customer experience tools and software with collaboration apps, your agents can easily share ideas and transfer calls without requiring extra effort from the customer.

4.    Use Insights to Become Proactive

A study by Gartner shows that companies need to become more proactive and less reactive to compete in today’s customer service landscape. Good customer service means responding to customers’ needs as they arise, but great service starts with being ahead of the curve.

While no company can predict the future, you can use analytics, reporting, and business insights to effectively improve the way you respond to customers’ needs. With the right real-time and historical reporting tools, you can track customer service trends to identify your customers’ most common problems and find ways to solve them.

You can also use customer data to recommend products to your customers that meet their needs, provide insights into when subscriptions expire, and more. With the right tools, you can even proactively monitor technology remotely and fix problems automatically.

5.    Leverage AI for Personalization

Today’s customers not only want their experience to be fast and efficient, but they also want it to be tailored to their specific needs. When you tailor customer service to your customer’s needs, you lay the foundation for better relationships, stronger loyalty, and higher retention.

The good news is that you probably already have the tools you need to provide a more customized service. Some 83% of customers say they’re willing to share data with companies if they believe it’ll lead to a better customer experience. Using the data, you collect with your contact center and CRM technologies, you can tailor your services to each customer.

With automated screen pops built into CCaaS tools, companies can even give their agents insights into a customer’s preferences, past purchases, and needs before they even pick up the phone or respond to a chat message. Just be sure to protect the data you’ll use for personalization because data breaches can be devastating to a company’s reputation.

6.    Empower Customers with Self Service

Finally, it should be remembered that today’s consumers don’t necessarily need an agent to handle all their requests for them. Many consumers are perfectly capable of solving their problems themselves, provided they have the right resources at their disposal. With this in mind, it’s worth investing some time in developing the right self-service strategy.

You can start with simple solutions, such as the FAQ pages on your website. Or you can develop chatbots and virtual assistants that are able to recognize human speech and respond to individual customer requests. The best self-service solutions make it easy for customers to solve their own problems without human intervention.

These tools can also make it easier for agents to provide a better level of service when a call is transferred to them. A bot or virtual agent can relay information from previous self-service interactions to an agent, so the customer doesn’t have to explain their problem again. Used properly, these tools can’t only improve customer satisfaction, but also increase business productivity.

Achieve Amazing Customer Experience

The reality is that there is no single definition of a “good customer experience. Different customers place different importance on all the above factors. However, investing in these elements should ensure that you can provide at least the level of support your customers expect.

As you continue to gather data about your audience and monitor the evolving market, you can optimize your CX strategies based on what you learn about your own customers.

Of course, it all starts with access to the right tools. Bulb Tech’s Cempresso suite is an all-in-one customer experience solution that combines all the above to give you a much-needed CX boost. Contact Bulb Tech today to learn more about how we can help you redefine amazing customer experiences.

 

For some time now, companies have been focusing more on the concept of “CX” (Customer Experience). They know that they need to provide a perfect balance of personalization, convenience, and innovation in every interaction if they want to succeed in a competitive market.

While it’s a good strategy for any company to prioritize CX, some brands have overlooked another critical experience concept in their quest to become more customer-obsessed: the employee experience.

If you want to keep your customers happy, you must first start with engaged, empowered employees. Happier team members make better agents, and better agents lead to better customer interactions. In essence, CX and EX (Employee Experience) aren’t separate initiatives – they’re two sides of the same coin.

 

What is Agent Experience?

To generate positive EX, organizations must first define what the agent experience actually is. Fortunately, this isn’t a difficult concept. The term “Agent experience” simply refers to all aspects of how your employees interact with your company.

Companies ensure a positive employee experience by prioritizing the well-being of their employees, enabling them to do their jobs effectively, and avoiding frustration as much as possible.

The factors that influence the employee experience vary from company to company.

For example, if you operate a contact center, you can ensure a positive experience by providing employees with access to quality technology, flexible work schedules, and supervisor support. In most cases, you can provide a better experience by simply listening to your employees.

 

Why is Agent Experience Important?

Happier, more satisfied, and more engaged employees ultimately lead to better results for organizations. Studies show that engaged team members are 21% more productive than their peers and also generate up to 20% more revenue than other team members. And why? Because people prefer to interact with other happy, knowledgeable people.

When we approach a customer service team and are connected to someone who is clearly exhausted, frustrated, and just itching to get their paycheck, we can tell. An employee who has had a good agent experience is more likely to be confident, well-informed, and cordial when interacting with customers.

Improving agent experience isn’t just important for CX. It directly impacts your company’s performance by determining how many employees stay with your brand. Talented employees don’t want to work at companies where they feel undervalued or burned out. In an age where people can work from anywhere, not prioritizing agent experience could mean you quickly lose your best employees to the competition.

 

The Challenge of Delivering Great Agent Experience

On the surface, creating happy agents doesn’t seem like an overly complicated concept. You simply pay attention to the needs of your employees and respond accordingly. In recent years, however, mastering the agent experience has become more difficult.

Changing work strategies such as hybrid and remote work offer new flexibility to today’s service agents, but they also bring other challenges, such as feelings of isolation and disengagement.

In addition, 70% of agents say they regularly feel overwhelmed and burned out due to the increasing demands of customer service. In today’s fast-paced service environment, only about 15% of agents are satisfied with their workload.

To make matters worse, many agents are also dissatisfied with the training and support they receive. Only 30% of agents say they feel they’re sufficiently empowered to do their jobs well. All of this shows that companies need to develop new strategies if they want to improve the agent experience and interactions with customers.

It’s not enough to simply offer employees flexible hours and good benefits. Business leaders must also pay attention to the frustrations their employees face daily.

 

How Bulb Technologies Can Help

Bulb Technologies is a leader in developing software solutions and platforms for businesses focused on digital transformation and customer experience. However, we don’t just focus on “CX”. We believe in the power of “Total Experience,” which means our platform addresses all parts of the customer experience ecosystem – including the agent experience.

We develop tools that support agents and customers at the same time, providing more assistance and guidance to both parties in the conversation. In this way, we enable companies to provide agents with a more valuable experience:

• All-in-one omnichannel tools: Switching between a variety of different apps and tools to serve today’s omnichannel customers is time-consuming and frustrating for agents. These disparate tools not only waste time but also make it difficult to retain contextual information throughout the customer journey. Our all-in-one omnichannel environments give agents access to all the information they need for personalized interactions in one convenient place, without the need for complicated interfaces or app changes.
• Implementing AI: Artificial intelligence can be an extremely powerful tool for agent experience. Our chatbots and virtual assistants act as partners to team members in your organization, helping them get more work done without having to worry about it. Virtual assistants can provide instant, useful access to information to streamline your employees’ workflow. At the same time, chatbots provide a useful way for teams to sort through potential customer service requests, so you can reduce the number of calls your employees handle each day.
• Workflow automation: Agent’s work delivers the best results when they can focus on serving and supporting customers. The last thing they want is to spend their days on boring repetitive tasks. Our workforce automation tools make it easy to eliminate the time-consuming chores that would otherwise take up your agent’s valuable time. We even have low-code and no-code solutions available which allow employees to build their own workflow from scratch. This means every employee has the power to improve their work experience.
• Simple, intuitive technology: The platforms offered by Bulb Technologies are simple, straightforward, and require minimal training to learn. They integrate with the tools your customer service representatives are already using, so they have access to all the resources they need in a single place. Users can customize their ecosystem to meet their specific needs, so every team member has all the tools they need at their fingertips.
• In-depth analytics: Informed employees are more productive and efficient. Integrated analytics and reporting tools in Bulb Technologies’ Cempresso DCS platform give your team members access to valuable insights on all metrics and KPIs relevant to their work. The comprehensive tools we offer can make it easier for employees to figure out what they need to do to continue delighting customers. At the same time, supervisors and managers can use their own analytical insights to track employee performance and engagement.

 

Build the Ultimate Agent Experience with Bulb Technologies

With our Total Experience platform, companies can create a powerful employee and customer experience in a convenient all-in-one environment. Our tools are easy to implement, deploy, and maintain, so business leaders spend less time worrying about technology and more time exploring new growth strategies.

An all-in-one environment gives any organization a unified suite to enhance their experience ecosystem with access to endless customization options and integrations. That means you’re not limited to a one-size-fits-all strategy. Find the Agent Experience solution that works best for your team and customers.

Contact Bulb Tech today to find out how we can help you improve your agent experience and engage your employees.

 

 

Customer service is undergoing a massive transformation, driven by the rising expectations and demands of the changing consumer landscape. According to Salesforce, 80% of customers believe that the experience provided by a brand is as important as its products and services. In addition, 66% of customers expect companies to automatically understand their needs and expectations.

Fortunately, companies are starting to respond to this changing landscape. We’ve seen the average “call center” evolve into a contact center designed to deliver a phenomenal customer experience across all channels.

With the aid of artificial intelligence, new technologies consolidate desktop applications, guide customer service agents through interactions, and provide insight into customer sentiment. Companies are even beginning to automate their CX strategies to help their employees and increase productivity. But even as companies struggle to keep up with the latest changes in the customer service landscape, the pace of evolution is rapid.

If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to know what’s coming.

What Does the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

While it’s impossible to predict exactly what the future will hold for customer service, we can use the trends uncovered in recent years to determine where CX is headed. Examining the evolving landscape and the many changes that have taken place within the service ecosystem over the past year offers us some important insights into what customers expect today.

Here are some of the trends you should prepare for as we head into 2023 and beyond.

1.    Frictionless, Omnichannel Experiences

In recent years, customers have begun to discover the benefits of communicating with companies across multiple channels and platforms. Long gone are the days when customers relied solely on phone calls to connect with brands. Today’s consumers expect you to know where they prefer to have their conversations and to be accessible on every channel.

Perhaps most importantly, as we develop omnichannel experiences for customer service of the future, every interaction should be “frictionless.” In other words: Not only do your customers want the ability to switch between channels when seeking information and support, but they also want to be able to move seamlessly from one platform to the next.

96% of consumers say they expect companies to make it as easy as possible for them to switch between channels. That means your backend environment should make it easy to move context from one channel to the next as the customer conversation evolves.

2.    Streamlined, Simple Interactions

Customer service in the new age must not only be omnichannel but also free of the usual hassles that today’s consumers are tired of. In today’s fast-paced world, customers are less willing to deal with long wait times, stressful self-service experiences, and understaffed customer service. They want you to solve these problems and provide a simple, flexible experience.

Companies need to upgrade their service strategies with tools that enable employees to get more done in less time. This means investing in solutions that automate repetitive tasks so employees can focus more on developing stronger customer relationships. It also means leveraging artificial intelligence for things like intelligent routing and virtual assistants that give employees quick access to relevant information about each customer’s needs.

Speaking of artificial intelligence, as customers look forward to an era of “predictive” and “proactive” service, it will become increasingly important to use intelligent tools that can detect and prevent problems before they occur. Eliminating potential problems before they occur can greatly improve the customer experience while freeing up the staff responsible for delivering excellent customer care.

3.    Augmented Customer Service Reps

As expectations rise and customer needs become more complex, customer service representatives are under greater pressure than ever before. In a world where most customers can find solutions to simple problems through a simple online search, many will only communicate with a customer service representative when they have a more complicated problem to solve.

Customer service representatives are facing increasingly complicated scenarios requiring further training and extended support. Fortunately, there are tools available to help these employees succeed. As mentioned earlier, automation solutions can help eliminate some of the repetitive tasks from an employee’s to-do list, allowing them to focus on the issues that really matter.

At the same time, smart solutions can provide team members with additional support when it comes to managing the increasing volume of support requests they receive each day. Smart chatbots can gather information about a customer before routing them to an agent, and even walk them through troubleshooting specific issues in advance.

4.    More Comprehensive Self-Service

According to Gartner, 70% of customers now use self-service channels at some point in their customer experience journey. However, only 9% of customers can fully complete their interaction with self-service applications alone. The main reason for this is that many old-fashioned bots and self-service tools simply don’t have the power to solve more complex customer problems.

As customers increasingly turn to self-service solutions to quickly resolve issues without human assistance, companies need to invest more time and effort into making these tools as intuitive and efficient as possible. This means they need to invest in solutions powered by AI, machine learning, and natural language processing and include automation.

The right tools should be able to intelligently respond to any customer question, using information from the company’s database and CRM solution. Modern self-service solutions should handle even complicated interactions without having to constantly refer customers to an agent, so customers can resolve issues faster and companies can make the best use of their human resources.

 

5.    Hyper-Personalization is a Must

As the future of customer service becomes increasingly digital, consumers are unwilling to trade personal, human experiences for convenience. They want every interaction tailored to their specific needs. This means companies need to do more to provide each customer with a unique interaction based on their specific needs.

Companies have already begun to focus more on hyper-personalized interactions by giving consumers more choices in how they interact with a brand. Today’s customers can request a video call if they want a representative to walk them through the steps of setting up a new system, or they can request a call back from a representative if a service representative is unavailable.

In the coming years, however, it’ll be critical to take this personalization strategy to the next level. Service workers, both human and digital, must be able to access up-to-date insights about a customer directly from embedded CRM systems and tools within their communications ecosystem. An all-in-one environment that gives employees instant access to relevant information will be critical to ensuring that the service offered is unique to each customer.

 

Transforming the Future of Customer Service

Perhaps one of the most important things that all the upcoming trends in the customer service landscape have in common is that they all point to a future where digital interactions are the norm. Companies clearly need to invest in a digital transformation strategy for their service initiatives if they want to keep pace with their customers’ demands for hyper-personalized, intelligent, and optimized service experiences.

However, simply adding new tools to your ecosystem isn’t enough to create a frictionless digital solution for customer service. Building a plan for true innovation requires a careful strategy and a platform capable of adapting to the ever-changing needs of your business.

Contact Bulb Technologies today to find out how our powerful Total Experience platform can help you empower your workforce, improve customer service, and drive self-service strategies – all at the same time, without breaking your budget.

 

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you probably already know that the customer experience is the key to success.

More than any other factor, the convenience, practicality, and speed of service you can provide your customers will determine whether they become loyal advocates or frustrated naysayers. In a world where consumers have more opportunities to share their negative thoughts about a company than ever before, one bad experience can destroy the reputation of your entire business.

Part of delivering a phenomenal customer experience is engaging your audience through the right channels. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of debate about which channels businesses should actually use. Most companies don’t have the budget or time to make sure their employees are accessible everywhere.

So, do you go for the traditional voice calls or do you invest in the new opportunities that chat offers? Let’s find out.

The Benefits of Calling over Chat

Since the 1960s, the telephone has been the primary service channel for most conversations between brands and consumers. However, that is beginning to change rapidly. Today, 75% of Millennials say they’d rather give up the ability to make a phone call than the ability to text.

Phone support has a number of weaknesses. Not only is it far from a preferred option for most consumers to call, but it’s also not particularly cost-effective. In a business environment, phone support staff can only answer one call at a time and support a single customer. That means you need more staff to handle a larger volume of contacts.

Not to mention that even with a reasonable number of employees, you may suffer from long queues and long wait times at peak times. Another problem is that phone calls aren’t always recorded and documented as well as they should be.

So why do companies still use telephones at all? It’s simple: they still have value. 95% of customers say they still want the opportunity to speak with an employee in person, even if they won’t use that option.

Phone calls also enable:

• Personal, human connections: Phone interactions capture the emotions, tone, and inflection of the speaker. This can help build a personal relationship between an agent and a customer. Also, it can pave the way for better relationships in the long run.
• Better management of complex issues: When faced with a complicated problem, most customers would prefer to call and speak directly with an agent.
• Instant responses: Although customers may have to wait on hold for a call to be answered, they can usually resolve their concerns the same day. On the other hand, it might take longer for agents to resolve chat messages completely.
• Data insights: Many phone systems allow companies to collect valuable data about customers, figuring sentiment from the tone of voice, and capturing other important details. It’s also possible to track information about call handling and quality.

The Benefits of Chat over Calling

Although the importance of making phone calls in the contact center hasn’t completely disappeared, phone calls are certainly less popular than they used to be. In fact, some studies show that businesses that use chat services are 2.8 times more likely to convert customers.

Chat comes in several varieties to suit virtually any business need. Businesses can offer asynchronous chat services during the day so employees can handle multiple questions at once, and then switch to chatbots when customers aren’t available. In particular, “asynchronous” chat has some serious advantages for brands.

Is asynchronous chat the hidden gem?

With asynchronous chat, employees don’t have to answer every question immediately. Instead, they can handle one question at a time, depending on its importance. This means that companies can ensure that the most pressing issues are addressed first. Also, with asynchronous chat, customers don’t have to wait at the end of the phone line for a call to be answered.

Customers can send a message to a team and simply get a response as soon as someone is available. This ensures that individuals can continue with other tasks while waiting for a resolution or response. Perhaps most importantly, asynchronous chat gives companies the ability to respond to the belief that businesses today should be available 24/7.

Even if an employee isn’t available to answer a message right now, a customer can still reach out, voice their concern, and put the issue in your hands. This takes some of the stress off your customer. In some cases, chatbots and AI assistants can help customers resolve their issues without waiting for an available agent.

The key benefits of chat in the contact center include:

• 24/7 Service: Companies can combine asynchronous chat with chatbots and virtual assistants to provide customers with constant answers to their questions. Customers can ask their questions immediately and then get on with their lives without having to wait for a response. They also often get answers a lot faster
• Improved employee experience: Great customer experience starts with a good employee experience. If your employees are overwhelmed and stressed by endless calls, they’re more likely to rush service, damaging the customer relationship. Asynchronous chat reduces stress levels and keeps teams happy.
• Better customer experience: With a normal phone call, a customer must wait on hold for their call to be answered, often without the opportunity to do anything else. With a chat system, they can continue their day with relative ease and simply receive a message when a representative is available. This makes life much more convenient for most customers.
• Reduced repetition: Chat is a great way to consistently log conversations between your customers and your employees. When someone picks up the chat, he doesn’t have to start from scratch and ask the customer about his problems. He can review previous messages and CRM data and gather more details before starting the conversation. This leads to faster resolutions and less repetition.
• Improved productivity: Even if a customer decides to start a customer service exchange with a chatbot, it provides useful information that your employees can pick up later. When an employee takes over the conversation, they have all the information they need to provide an appropriate response. Employees can run troubleshooting tests and find information about an issue before answering the question to get almost instant results.
• Fewer transfers: With a chat system, it’s easy to deliver customer questions and queries directly to the agent with the right skills for the task. An agent can work with another agent on the back end of the system to get answers to a question. This way customers don’t have to be passed from one agent to the next. This streamlines conversations and reduces customer frustration.
• Better rapport:  A chat system can easily store information about previous conversations with a customer in a CRM or database. Consequently, it’s easy to gain behind-the-scenes insight into each of your customers. This means that company employees can have a better experience by tailoring the conversation to the needs of the business.

 

Which is Better: Calling or Chat?

Overall, chat offers today’s customers and teams many more benefits than the average phone call system. It’s more streamlined and effective, helping to improve the customer and employee experience simultaneously. Asynchronous chat helps reduce agent frustration, strengthen customer relationships, and improve productivity.

However, that doesn’t mean calls should be ignored entirely. Rather, the best customer service is usually delivered on an omnichannel basis. While many companies start with chat as a core part of their strategy, they’ll likely still include the option of calling in case the conversation needs to be escalated. Fortunately, Cempresso Digital Customer Service makes it easy to create a workflow that works for any customer base.

Reach out to Bulb Technologies and leverage Cempresso. Cempresso makes it quick and easy to set up powerful asynchronous chat workflows, complete with access to data insights, custom integrations, and powerful AI chatbots. You can even include the option to escalate a chat into a call without losing previously collected data about customers.

 

 

The way companies serve their customers has changed drastically in recent years. As consumers become more digitally focused, old-fashioned call centers are quickly being replaced by engaging omnichannel customer experience environments. CCaaS solutions and customer experience suites offer businesses the ability to engage with their customers through virtually any channel.

The emerging digital revolution has also paved the way for high levels of automation. Companies have found new ways to reduce call volume by allowing customers to solve their own problems with FAQs, chatbots, and virtual assistants. In fact, some 68% of customers say they now prefer to use self-service solutions rather than interact with an agent.

Unfortunately, Gartner found that while more and more customers are beginning their journey into the self-service environment, only about 9% expect to be able to solve their problems entirely on their own. There are countless scenarios where a customer needs to move to a different platform and level of service to resolve a transaction or issue.

This means that companies need to focus not only on creating digital experiences but on a digital customer experience strategy that combines both automation and human contact.

Why Does Digital Customer Experience Need a Human Element?

Seamless digital customer experiences are becoming increasingly popular with consumers who want to solve their own problems quickly using smart tools and interact with businesses across multiple channels. But as popular as self-service channels may be in the CX landscape, they’re rarely enough to solve all customer problems on their own.

While incorporating intelligent bots and tools that can understand and process natural language increases your chances of solving more complex customer issues, there will always be a need for a human element in customer service. Research often shows that agent-assisted digital channels are still among the preferred options for customers.

Live agents are essentially safety nets for customers who are willing to deal with issues that may not be resolved through a self-service strategy. They have additional training and knowledge that some self-service tools cannot provide. They’re also a valuable component of an empathetic and engaging customer experience. One study found that 58% of customers who had the opportunity to interact with a human during the purchasing process were more likely to purchase from the company again.

What’s more, even in a world of automation and artificial intelligence, customers still value real, genuine human relationships. One study found that about 82% of U.S. customers say they want more human interactions with companies in the future.

 

How to Embed Human Interaction into Digital Customer Experience

Creating a seamless digital customer experience means that companies must invest not only in new channels and technologies but also in solutions that connect the worlds of self-service and human services. A hybrid approach that allows customers to get the best of both worlds leads to smoother, more satisfying, and more engaging experiences.

So how can you properly combine the human agent with self-service and the digital landscape?

1.    Implement the Right CX Channels

The first step to creating a truly seamless digital customer experience strategy for your customers is to make sure you’re implementing and leveraging all the right customer experience channels. The best way to start is by observing your competitors and your customers. Find out where customers typically interact with brands like yours. For example, maybe they prefer SMS, social messaging, or video.

Once you know what channels your customers use, you can develop a strategy that combines digital self-service solutions with more agent-based options. For example, with an all-in-one CX platform, you can create a platform where customers can engage with your brand via a chatbot, a virtual agent, or a chatbot that connects them directly to a human agent.

The focus here should be to integrate all the channels you use, agent-based or not. It should be easy to track the customer journey from start to finish.

2.    Use the Right Self-Service Solutions

The second step is to make sure you invest in the right self-service solutions for your CX strategy. It’s no longer enough to simply add a simple chatbot to your website. As consumers’ problems become more complex, they’re looking for virtual agents and automated tools with built-in natural language processing and conversation analytics capabilities.

An intelligent chatbot or self-service tool can guide customers through a wider range of problem-solving techniques by responding intuitively to each question. It can also use data to personalize customer interactions more effectively from the beginning of the buyer journey.

A bonus is that these tools also more effectively collect the valuable data agents need to route them as customers move between different levels of service.

3.    Make Transitioning to an Agent Simple

Once you’ve implemented the right self-service tools across all digital channels, make sure your customers always have the option to easily switch to an agent if they need additional help. This could mean adding a button to a chatbot that allows customers to instantly choose whether they want a call or a video chat with an agent.

The technology you choose for your customer experience strategy should be able to seamlessly determine which agent is best suited to handle a call, with AI routing capabilities. It should also be able to pass relevant information from previous interactions with the customer to the agent, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat their problem or know what solutions they’ve already tried.

Using automated workflows and triggers, organizations can facilitate the direct transfer of data to agents so they can pick up where a previous support solution left off. This makes the entire experience easier for the agent and more seamless for the customer.

4.    Use Analytics To Transform Your Strategy

Developing a customer-obsessed experience strategy means taking into account the ever-changing needs and expectations of your target audience. The only way to do this is to set up a way to monitor and analyze every customer interaction. Your CX tool should have built-in analytics capabilities that allow you to collect real-time and historical data.

The more information you collect, the more you’ll learn about the customer journey map and what you can do to improve it. Analytics can also help you develop more effective tools to support your agents throughout the service lifecycle. Virtual assistants powered by machine learning can make suggestions to agents about how to handle an issue based on past interactions. These same tools can monitor customer sentiment in real-time and tell supervisors when a call is going south.

Using real-time and historical data in your customer service strategy makes it easier to target your campaigns to the real needs and intentions of your audience. It can also show you which channels your customers use most often.

5.    Invest in Proactive Outbound Support

Once you’ve embedded analytics into your CX efforts, the next step will be much easier. The data you collect from historical conversations makes it easier to understand where customers’ problems start and what kind of help, they need most. This paves the way for developing a proactive outbound support strategy.

Research shows that 89% of customers find their favorite brand’s proactive customer service a pleasant surprise. If you want to delight your audience, identifying the source of problems and finding ways to proactively resolve them is a great way to do it.

You can even use automation and RPA tools to create automated solutions that let you actively report and fix issues while employees are working on other tasks. This gives you the opportunity to create a true end-to-end customer experience strategy.

Create The Ultimate Digital Experience

A great digital customer experience doesn’t just mean investing in the latest self-service or digital interaction tools. It also means knowing how to align your human talent with your digital strategies. With the tips above, you can ensure your customers get the best balance of straightforward self-service solutions and empathetic human support.

Learn more about how Bulb Tech’s end-to-end technology can help you create the ultimate digital experience strategy today.

 

Automation trends have many benefits

Right automation trends will not only increase the efficiency of your workforce, but can also help address the challenges of global labor shortages, improve the customer experience, and even save money for the right brands.  

Digital transformation has become a buzzword in every industry in recent years. As consumers become more demanding, regulations more complex, and workflows more detailed, businesses are increasingly turning to technology to increase efficiency and productivity.  

For companies planning their investment strategy for 2023, several revolutionary technologies are available, but few are as impactful as automation. Once considered a convenient option for minimizing repetitive tasks, automation has become an absolute requirement for many business leaders.  

 

The Evolution of Automation for 2023 

When the concept of automation was first introduced into the corporate and business landscape, it was met with great confusion. Many organizations viewed technology as an industry-specific requirement for specific sectors such as engineering and manufacturing. Others were worried about the potential impact of automation on the human workforce.  

 However, as more automation solutions have begun to emerge, we are discovering just how valuable technology can be. Today: 

 

• More than half of executives plan to increase their investments in automation in the coming years, and 73% expect significant revenue growth due to their new tools.  
• 73% of IT executives say their employees save between 10 and 50% of the time they would spend on manual tasks thanks to the implementation of automation capabilities.  
• 78% of business executives believe that automating tasks within the organization increases productivity and efficiency across the entire organization.  
• 85% of business executives believe that automating parts of their employees’ workflows allows them to focus on more strategic goals and accelerate business success.  

 

The Automation Trends to Watch in 2023 

Although all aspects of automation are experiencing significant growth in today’s enterprise landscape, there are some areas where we are seeing particularly strong interest. Here are some of the key automation trends to consider as you build your 2023 agenda. 

1. Customer Self Service Will Continue to Evolve  

According to Gartner, about 70% of customers currently use self-service channels to solve their issues. However, many companies are struggling to help customers complete the entire interaction without human assistance. Only 9% of service journeys are fully self-service. 

Customers are increasingly relying on automated tools to completely avoid conversations with the service agent or support provider. This means that tools must be able to provide intelligent, personalized, and guided support for even the most complicated challenges. In 2023, companies will begin to implement smarter forms of self-service for their target audiences. 

This will involve extending chatbot and virtual assistant capabilities with new AI innovations such as NLP, context, and intent analysis. More powerful conversational AI tools will be able to guide consumers through the self-service experience quickly and efficiently, reducing the number of calls the customer service team must handle. 

2. Automation will Empower Employees 

Today’s businesses must consider the benefits of this technology for both improving the customer experience and employee engagement. Concepts like “Total Experience” are becoming increasingly important for differentiating companies. Especially at a time when the “Great Resignation” has led to a massive shortage of skilled customer service employees cross-industries.  

Automation can help empower and support employees in many ways. First, self-service solutions reduce the number of calls employees deal with daily, freeing them up for other value-added tasks. Second, automated bots and solutions can guide employees through processes more quickly and conveniently.  

A virtual assistant for an agent can automatically leverage information about a customer in the contact center dashboard as soon as an agent answers a call, so they can immediately provide a personalized experience. The same tool can facilitate data searches about products and services and log call details at the end of a call. In this way, companies can significantly reduce the amount of work each employee has to do after a call. 

3. Intelligent Automation will Become the New Norm 

Automation has many faces in today’s technology landscape. Many traditional tools are designed to streamline simple processes using basic workflows and triggers. However, automation and artificial intelligence are becoming more interwoven, enabling a wider range of potential benefits. Intelligent automation combines concepts like machine learning and natural language processing with automation for a wide range of use cases.  

For example, an intelligent automation system could gather information about customers, determine which employees are best suited to handle which accounts, and automatically route calls based on that determination. These same tools could even be used to automatically resolve customer issues by setting processes in motion without human-employee involvement.  

Intelligent automation eliminates the need for employees to constantly monitor their automated workflows. It enables more end-to-end improvements in robotic process automation, workflow efficiency, and performance. 

4. Automated Solutions Will Allow for More Customization 

In the past, the concept of creating an automated solution for every business requirement from scratch would have been considered daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. This is especially true when we combine automation with artificial intelligence. Building intelligent workflows would have required deep programming and coding skills from industry experts.  

However, intelligent automation and customer service platforms are eliminating this complexity. No-code and low-code capabilities allow companies to turn different team members into “citizen developers” in their ecosystem and implement automation where they see fit. These customizable platforms enable rapid innovation and process automation without significant initial investment from modern brands.  

As low-code and no-code platforms become more prevalent, companies will have more freedom to create the exact workflows they need to improve the performance of their teams. More importantly, individual team members will play a greater role in deciding the future of automation strategy. 

5. Automated Solutions will Streamline Data Strategies 

One of the main benefits of automated solutions is that they enable companies to quickly complete time-consuming and complex tasks in the business environment. For example, an automated system can gather data from a variety of different environments faster and more accurately and consolidate it into an only source of truth than any human employee can.  

As businesses become more data-driven, the use of automated tools to capture information about processes, people and customers will become more common. In 2023, brands are likely to invest heavily in automated tools that enable them to capture data more accurately while adhering to their industry’s compliance policies and regulations.  

Automated tools will collect data from conversations with customers and ensure that employees from different areas of the business have access to the information they need to complete service and support tasks. Intelligent automation could even provide the team with deeper insights in the form of sentiment and intent analysis. 

6. Automation will Empower Proactivity 

As customer expectations evolve, customers now expect their companies to be able to provide solutions to their problems before they even occur. The pace of service is becoming more “proactive,” and Gartner believes that by 2025, proactive service solutions will surpass the reactive strategies used by most brands today.  

Unfortunately, delivering a proactive level of service is extremely difficult without the right technology. Companies cannot automatically predict what will happen with a product or service without access to the right insights and data. Automated tools that can collect and analyze information quickly can help with this change  

Automation allows organizations to proactively monitor various systems. Additionally, it ensures that alerts or notifications are routed to the right people when action is needed. Automated tools can even leverage historical data to provide team members with predictions that help them make decisions. 

Get Ready for the Next Wave of Automation 

Automation is one of the most valuable solutions for any business seeking digital transformation and increasing productivity across the enterprise. As automation solutions become more efficient and intelligent, they are likely to play a significant role in tomorrow’s technology strategies.  

Investing in some of the automation trends above could help your business stand out from the competition, unlock new opportunities, and save money on day-to-day processes. Contact Bulb Tech today to find out how we can help you get your automation agenda on track for 2023. 

 

Use our tips to get a game-changing CX Software

Let’s face it, CX is the most important factor every business should focus on today. If your customer experience isn’t perfect, it doesn’t matter how great your service is or how affordable your products may be – your customers won’t convert. Worse, they’ll choose your competitors.

Today, 73% of customers say CX is the most important criterion when deciding whether to interact with and buy from a brand. What’s more, the majority of customers are even willing to pay more for a good experience.

Fortunately, CX software solutions exist to help companies keep up with the ever-evolving expectations of their target audience. The only problem is that finding the right tool is easier said than done. If you’re planning to upgrade your CX software in 2023, here are some of the features you shouldn’t be without.

 

The 5 Must-Have Features for CX Software

When selecting a CX software platform, each company must consider a number of critical features. Which options are right for you will depend on the nature of your business and your specific goals. For example, some organizations have a higher need for security, privacy, and compliance features than most, while others place more emphasis on tools for hybrid and remote work. These are some of the features that will be critical for any business:

 

1.    Omnichannel Communications

Today’s customer journeys are complex, multi-layered, and span a number of different channels. A customer may want to start an interaction with your company through a self-service bot or app, and then move on to a conversation with an agent on the phone.

You need to make sure your CX solution allows you to communicate with your customers through the channels they use most often. But it’s also important that these channels are connected on the backend so you can track the context and details of a conversation from one environment to the next.

96% of consumers expect companies to make it as easy as possible for them to move between channels. So if you’re giving your customers the option to choose between text, video, and phone, make sure it’s all connected. Speaking of connected solutions: Try to make sure your CX platform makes it easy for your customers to move from a self-service environment to a conversation with an agent. The right tools should automatically pass contextual information to your agents when they pick up the phone or answer a chat message.

2.    Self-Service Solutions

Customers are becoming more and more self-sufficient. Increasingly, they prefer to search for an answer to a problem themselves rather than contacting an agent. In fact, 68% of customers say they prefer to use self-service channels for simple questions.

Finding a CX solution that allows you to support your customers throughout their self-service experience is critical to meeting the needs of today’s digital customers. However, it’s important to think beyond the simple FAQ-style bot. As customers’ problems become more complex, they’re relying on bots to help them address a wider range of issues.

Implementing AI tools with true conversational intelligence, natural language processing, and automated algorithms will help you deliver a next-generation self-service experience and outshine the competition. This can also reduce the volume of calls your agents are struggling with! The smarter your self-services are, the more they take the pressure off your staff. They can also gather important information about customer behavior and trends.

3.    Workflow Automation

Automation is quickly becoming a must-have in the CX landscape, especially as labor shortages and the Great Resignation make it increasingly difficult to find talented professionals for any team. Additionally, automation doesn’t replace your staff, it helps eliminate repetitive tasks that would take up too much of your staff’s time so they can focus on the things that really matter.

A CX solution with built-in workflow automation capabilities allows you to design fantastic workflows for any need, whether you’re submitting customer data to a CRM or organizing your team’s schedule. Automation can help you route your customers to the right person every time based on smart insights and triggers while empowering your employees to get more done.

You can even take your automation strategy to the next level by using a low-code platform that lets you create your own automation. This ensures that your employees can actively improve their workflows with simple, practical tools that don’t require developer skills.

 

4.    Flexible Integrations and Configuration

A CX platform is typically one component of an advanced customer experience and service strategy for any organization. If you want to ensure your team members can work seamlessly on a single pane of glass, you need to make sure your CX platform integrates with the tools they already use, such as collaboration apps, help desks, and CRM software.

A flexible platform that can adapt to your team’s technology needs gives you more room to add new functionality with connected apps as needed. While you’re looking for integration opportunities, you should also consider how easy your CX system is to configure and manage. You shouldn’t have to hire a developer every time you want to make a change.

Look for a convenient, easy-to-use environment that your administrators can access from anywhere with an Internet connection. You might even be able to connect your CX tools directly to your AI analytics, recording, and contact center software.

 

5.    Powerful Reports and Analytics

Finally, keep in mind that we live in a world where customer expectations are constantly changing and evolving. The only way to stay ahead of the curve and your competitors is to gather as much information as you can about your target audience, your people, and any other metrics that are relevant to you.

A good CX platform should give you valuable insights into each step of the customer journey, where there are friction points, and what you can do to improve satisfaction. At the same time, it should help you keep your finger on the pulse of your employees’ experiences, no matter where your team is located. If you’re able to monitor and address employee frustrations, you can ensure that your team members are able to perform at their best.

If possible, look for analytics and reporting tools that integrate with AI to give you insights into trends that you mightn’t be able to see on your own. These solutions can even send real-time information to agents in the form of dashboards to help them improve their performance at that moment. Customizable reports that let you drill down into key metrics are also useful.

 

Choose the Right CX Platform

Ultimately, finding the right CX platform for your team is likely to be a personal process for any organization. You need to think carefully about your CX goals, your digital transformation strategy, and how you plan to serve your customers in the future.

However, if you focus on finding the five features above for your CX solution, you can greatly improve your chances of future-proofing your customer experience strategy. The Cempresso DCS platform includes all of the features on this list – plus a few more – as a comprehensive platform for the end-to-end total experience.

Learn today how you can transform your CX strategy with Bulb Technologies.

 

 

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