Digital Engagement Blog

In this guest blog, Amy Stapleton from Opus Research outlines three ways Intelligent Assistance technologies can work for Marketing.  The post is based on Amy's white paper, Six Perspectives on Intelligent Assistance, which is available at the end of this blog.

Intelligent Assistance Benefits Go Beyond Customer Care

Customer care professionals have been leveraging the benefits of intelligent assistants and similar self-service technologies for many years. On the flip side, most marketing professionals didn’t spend much time thinking about smart self-service solutions in the past. Self-service and marketing wandered down two separate paths. But with the 2016 “Facebook Messenger bot platform announcement” generating excitement around chatbots on messaging platforms, marketing executives are getting into the intelligent assistance game too.

Traditional chat solutions create a CX that’s essentially a phone call with typing instead of talking.  It’s a strictly linear experience tied to a single session that begins and ends on a single device.  That may be a good fit for a customer journey that follows a nice straight line, but that’s not how consumers buy anymore.

Consumers jump between a mesh of digital devices

Today’s digital consumers live their lives differently, and they expect to engage differently. 

Your Customers Are Digital

By 2020, mobile commerce will make up 45 percent of total e-commerce (BI Intelligence) and require a different strategy than today’s online web strategy.  On the service side, Gartner says 35% of all support will take place on a mobile device by the end of next year.

One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is how to win, serve and retain the digital consumer. 

Mobile, digital and IoT are forcing major changes in digital strategy, business models and value chains.

Rules and frameworks that worked five years ago are under direct attack. So how does a business develop a digital strategy playbook?

I just returned from a few days at the Shoptalk conference where 3,000 people came to explore nextgen commerce.  I thought I’d share ten takeaways from ShopTalk that look at how digital is disrupting commerce.  I found trends here that will likely impact all industries.

Since 2013, we have been casting a critical eye on how enterprise engagement solutions solve problems throughout the customer journey. The exponential growth of mobile commerce has amplified both the need for better enterprise engagement solutions and the current lack of true solutions in place across the omnichannel customer journey.

Our latest white paper, Digital Disconnect: How New Consumer Behaviors Disrupt Customer Engagement, revealed some intriguing findings:

You are ready to embark on a journey, but there are many roads you could take. Before you take your first step, you must choose a road that will lead you to your destination. If you believed one road would offer the most pleasant journey to the best destination, is that the road you would choose?

DUH! Of course you’d choose that road. Unless you’re into self-deprivation, right?  

Customer engagement rocks. But only if you get it right. Our recent research on digital consumer behavior suggests that the music on hold when consumers call retailers for assistance might as well be The Rolling Stones classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Missing out on critical moments when your customers, prospects, browsers, or shoppers are visiting you in your digital world—and by that I mean your website, mobile website, and mobile app—is like missing thousands of spectacular shooting stars passing you by as you briefly turn to look the other way. Who would deliberately do that? Well, unfortunately, a lot of incredible stars are passing by right under your nose and on your watch.

It’s not what you’re thinking. This is a tale of customer experience in a time of remarkable change. It begins with showrooming, the despicable term that brick and mortar retailers utter with a sneer much like Jerry Seinfeld’s every time he greeted Newman. I bet you can picture a showroomer right now roaming your store. (Sneer) Showroomer.  

Working online… checking my phone (alerts/texts/emails/updates)… browsing online… browsing on my phone..texting… etc.  Sound familiar? I’m just like the majority of adults engaging in the digital world we live in today.

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