Nearly 80% of companies have, or intend to implement, conversational customer engagement technologies – the ability to communicate interactively with customers from one digital channel to another while retaining context.
The companies believe this will improve customer experience, according to a new collaborative study from IDC and Sinch.
Of those, more than half will do so using a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) to deliver the efficient, hyper-personalised contextual experiences customers want most.
The research is outlined in a new white paper, ‘Leveraging Conversations to Drive Innovation and Differentiation in the Enterprise’, authored by IDC’s Courtney Munroe, a research VP for worldwide telecommunications research.
The global survey of customer experience decision-makers at 350 enterprises was conducted to provide insights on the status of conversational customer engagement and to assess its impact on business outcomes.
As enterprises emerge from dealing with the impact of COVID-19, re-architecting their IT infrastructure to leverage digital platforms will be a major priority, with customer experience a top driver of these investments. Multichannel communications have empowered companies to connect with their customers on the channel of their choice, such as SMS, voice, email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram. Conversational Customer Engagement allows them to keep the conversation going between channels, without losing context.
Among the white paper’s highlights:
• A full 100% of the respondents in this study currently leverage digital customer engagement across multiple channels, and 79% of respondents have initiated or plan to implement conversational customer engagement. The majority (52%) will leverage CPaaS platforms to do so.
• While most companies employ multiple channels and a majority are leveraging conversations, only 22% of companies use more than three channels for conversational engagement.• Customer service activities – such as customer care and support and customer satisfaction surveys — are the top use cases, followed by operations activities and transactions tied to financial payments.
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