Tag: customer experience

Beyond Automation: How Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbots Enhance Customer Engagement | Blog

In today’s digital-first world, customer expectations have evolved rapidly…

Modern customers now expect fast, accurate, and personalized interactions from the brands they engage with. Furthermore, meeting these heightened expectations has become a challenge for businesses, driving the adoption of advanced technologies to enhance customer engagement.

At the forefront of these technologies is Conversational AI (CAI), an increasingly transformative solution reshaping how companies interact with their customers.

In this blog, we will explore how CAI technology is revolutionizing engagement across the entire customer journey, and how businesses should integrate CAI into their tech stack for providing an efficient, scalable, and personalized engagement to the modern customer.

The evolution of CAI:

CAI has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI revolution over the past decade. Early solutions were rule-based, functioning on pre-programmed scripts that limited their ability to adapt to diverse inquiries or provide truly personalized service.

Today’s AI-powered bots can use sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to understand context, intent, and sentiment, enabling more natural and engaging interactions across the plethora of channels that exist i.e. voice, chat, email, and social media.

Now with the addition of generative AI (gen AI) and the ability to effectively leverage customer data, CAI bots have grown more adept at handling complex queries, offering dynamic and customized responses, often with limited human intervention.

Supercharging the customer journey: A CAI-powered approach:

One of the most impactful aspects of CAI is in its true versatility i.e. its ability to assist customers at every stage of their journey, from initial engagement through to post-purchase support. From the moment potential customers discover a brand, CAI bots can engage with them in real time 24/7, as explained below.

  1. Lead generation

Generating high-quality leads is one of the most crucial tasks for sales and marketing teams. CAI can enhance lead generation efforts by engaging potential customers on websites or social media channels in real time. Through outbound campaigns, they can gather essential data and seamlessly hand off qualified leads to sales teams

  1. Product discovery

Instead of browsing through static menus or endless product categories, users can rely on conversational search to find what they’re looking for faster. CAI systems, especially when integrated with enterprise applications like customer relationship management (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs), can analyze user preferences, behavior, and past interactions across various channels

  1. Purchase support

CAI can provide insights on bundle deals, warranty options, and related products, helping customers make informed purchase decisions. If a customer hesitates at checkout, the chatbot can step in with timely offers or discounts to encourage completion of the purchase. Furthermore, these chatbots seamlessly integrate with payment gateways like PayPal and Apple Pay, allowing secure transactions directly within the chat interface, adhering to industry-standard security protocols

  1. Post-purchase assistance

CAI can conveniently help customers with order confirmation, receipt generation, and next steps such as shipping details. It enables brands to check in with customers, asking about their experience and offering tips for maximizing product use. The chatbot can also assist customers with returns, refunds, and exchanges making the process hassle-free

  1. Customer retention

CAI can schedule follow-up interactions with customers after they’ve left, sending personalized emails or messages highlighting new features, improvements, or exclusive return offers. Automating win-back efforts ensures the brand maintains a connection and demonstrates a commitment to addressing any previous issues.

To illustrate the comprehensive support CAI provides, the following exhibit showcases how a potential customer navigates a fictional e-commerce website, TechTrends, that has embraced CAI across the customer journey.

Screenshot 2024 11 08 121007

Best practices for implementing CAI solutions:


While CAI presents significant opportunities for businesses, successful implementation requires thoughtful planning and execution. The following best practices are recommended to successfully implement and harness the capabilities of CAI.

  • Start small with careful planning: Before implementing any CAI solution, it’s essential to define clear objectives, as well as identifying small pilots that can deliver a quick return on investment (ROI). This approach allows organizations to test the CAI solution, gather feedback, and gradually expand into more complex areas as they gain confidence with the technology
  • Customer-centric conversational flow: Conversational flows should be designed mindfully, ensuring they are intuitive and user-friendly. This includes incorporating fallback mechanisms, such as human handover options, to provide seamless transitions when the chatbot encounters complex queries or customer frustration
  • Establish a robust data infrastructure and integrations: Enterprises should ensure all customer data sources, including CRM, past chat logs, and behavioral data, are unified and regularly updated as usage scales. There also must be a focus on building application programming interface (APIs) and middleware that allows context transfers across channels for omnichannel deployments
  • Utilize modular architecture for scalability: Modular, microservices-based architectures allow for easy upgrades, testing, and scaling, making it possible to refine and scale specific parts of the CAI solution without affecting the entire system
  • Prioritize AI transparency and governance: Besides complying with regulations, it is vital to implement AI explainability, especially in regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, to help agents and customers understand the basis of AI recommendations
  • Embrace change: Transitioning to CAI also requires a cultural shift, emphasizing that it is a tool to assist, not replace, human roles. Providing training and fostering an open mindset will help customer facing teams to effectively leverage CAI

Conclusion:

CAI’s capabilities can transform what was once a series of disjointed transactions into a fluid, intuitive, and highly personalized customer journey.

This streamlined approach saves time for the customer, increases conversion rates for the business, and ultimately creates a more satisfying and efficient experience.

Looking ahead, the future of CAI is poised for remarkable advancements. CAI bots will evolve into agentic systems, becoming autonomous digital colleagues, capable of higher-order planning and independent decision-making.

Through the combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning, these systems will be able to process large amounts of data, recognize complex patterns, and learn from their actions and experiences in real-time environments.

The bottom line for enterprise leaders remains the same, conversational AI’s real impact is not just in introducing it in a siloed fashion, but embedding it deeply across the customer journey, into the core of business processes, where it can be of deliverable measurable value.

If you have any questions, would like to delve deeper into the Experience, Sustainability & Trust market, or would like to reach out to discuss these topics in more depth, please contact Simran Agrawal ([email protected]) and Anubhav Das ([email protected])

 

 

The Year in Review for CXM: Market Developments and the Outlook for 2025 | Webinar

On-demand webinar

The Year in Review for CXM: Market Developments and the Outlook for 2025

After experiencing significant growth post-pandemic, the customer experience management (CXM) market hit turbulence in 2024. Enterprises are now more cautious about their spending, pushing service providers to do more with less. At the same time, generative AI (gen AI)-led use cases are moving into production, which is revolutionizing how contact center leaders are thinking about their future operating models.

Watch this webinar to hear our CXM experts examine how the CXM market has evolved throughout 2024, and share what can be expected for 2025.

What questions did the webinar answer?

  • How does the CXM service provider landscape across regions look in 2024
  • How was the year for the broader CXM market, and which themes have materialized?
  • What should we expect from the CXM market in 2025?

Who should attend?

  • CEOs, CCOs, CIOs, CTOs
  • BPO strategy/global heads
  • Heads of CXM outsourcing
  • CXM strategy heads
  • Heads of customer service
  • Heads of CXM service delivery
  • Senior sales and marketing executives
Baweja Divya
Practice Director
Biswas_Chandan_Chhandak
Practice Director
Rickard David 3
Partner

Bringing the Vision of Unified Customer Experience (CX) to Fruition: Shining a Spotlight on Sprinklr | Blog

After previously zooming the lens in on how Salesforce has helped global enterprises to provide a holistic customer experience approach through its integrated set of offerings, this time we focus on another CX tech vendor, Sprinklr, that offers a unique category of enterprise software, which it terms as “Unified Customer Experience Management”.

Unified Customer Experience Management (Unified-CXM) empowers all customer-facing teams in an enterprise, from support, to sales and marketing, in order to then collaborate effectively, communicate across digital channels, and leverage an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to deliver consistent and cohesive customer experiences at scale. In this blog, we shine a spotlight on Sprinklr and its evolution. Reach out to discuss this topic in depth.

Today’s consumers interact with brands across a range of touchpoints. Naturally, the modern customer journey is a complex and multi-faceted one, often involving a combination of channels and modalities.

Enterprises want a comprehensive view of these interactions—from marketing, through sales, to post-sales support—to maintain effective customer engagement across the lifecycle.

However, most enterprises still rely on legacy customer relationship management (CRM) systems that are not tightly integrated with customer facing tools and applications, which becomes a hindrance to delivering real-time personalized engagement. This leads to customer dissatisfaction and a loss of trust in many cases.

Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM platform is designed to address these challenges by helping enterprises eliminate silos, access and analyse unstructured digital data and leverage AI to generate a unified view of each customer’s journey. This approach allows customer facing teams to better assist customers, share knowledge, and collaborate, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience.

Sprinklr’s platform is comprised of four product suites—Service, Marketing, Insights, and Social—which when brought together support enterprises in better managing the end-to-end customer journey.

These suites operate on a single, unified AI-powered platform, enabling enterprises to streamline customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. Each product suite offers distinct capabilities, which will be examined in more detail below.

Picture1 2

(Image courtesy: Sprinklr)

Sprinklr’s product suite:

With the rise of digital channels such as Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, among others; customers are now more connected and empowered than ever before, offering continuous real-time feedback to express their concerns or frustrations.

This shift makes personalized and real-time customer engagement crucial for brands. Sprinklr’s product suite addresses these evolving needs, offering enterprises solutions to enhance engagement, gain insights into customer sentiment, and take proactive measures when necessary. Each suite provides a range of solutions that enterprises can implement either individually or as a bundle –

  • Sprinklr Social – This suite offers AI-powered tools to unify social media publishing and engagement across more than 30 channels. It enables enterprises to manage and analyze social media content, monitor conversations, and improve customer interactions. Key products include:
    • Social Publishing & Engagement: Supports teams with digital asset management, editorial calendaring, and omnichannel publishing
    • Employee Advocacy: Enables organizations to leverage employees in brand promotion, boosting awareness, and generating leads
  • Sprinklr Insights – Sprinklr Insights unifies data across customers, competition, as well as the industry, from both traditional and digital channels, allowing enterprises to monitor customer sentiment and industry trends in real time Key products include:
  • Social Listening: Which enables enterprises to understand unstructured data from 15+ digital channels, as well as automatically identify trends/anomalies to act upon
  • Competitive Insights & Benchmarking: Which enables enterprises to benchmark their social performance against competition and monitor influencers across eight social channels
  • Sprinklr Marketing – Focused on planning, executing, and optimizing marketing campaigns, this suite enables enterprises to manage content creation, collaboration, and performance tracking across multiple channels. Key products include:
  • Campaign Planning & Content: Marketing which has capabilities like brand governance, cross-channel publishing/distribution, briefing, copy assistance and localization

Ads Comment Moderation: Which aids enterprises in managing comments on paid posts at scale, brands can moderate testimonials, product feedback, and urgent customer service queries

  • Sprinklr Service – Sprinklr’s Service Suite is a comprehensive Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution for managing customer support across voice and digital channels. It integrates AI-driven automation, self-service, and agent assistance tools, in order to provide customer care at scale through voice, messaging, social media, and other digital platforms. Products within this suite include –
  • Sprinklr Voice: For managing inbound and outbound interactions with capabilities such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Agent Assist, AI-driven nudges and predictive dialers, and omnichannel workflows
  • Conversational AI chat and voice bot solution: Which comes with a use case library and industry-specific/intent-based bot workflows, as well as Workforce Management & Quality management for contact center managers

Some of Sprinklr’s strategic differentiators include:

  • Unified architecture: Sprinklr’s single-codebase platform allows enterprises to seamlessly integrate channels, unify customer journeys, and accelerate innovation through a “build once, deploy everywhere” model
  • Advanced listening: The platform captures unstructured data from 450 million daily conversations, providing comprehensive social listening and analytics
  • Purpose-driven AI: While it has its proprietary AI models which are industry-trained, it also allows enterprises to integrate other industry-leading generative AI (gen AI) models, which it calls Sprinklr AI+. Sprinklr AI+ leverages generative AI in all four Sprinklr product suites and is powered by integrations with OpenAI, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service
  • Scalable enterprise-grade platform: This platform is designed to meet industry security standards, including ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOC compliance, making it a scalable solution for large enterprises

Powered by Sprinklr AI+, it has also recently launched Sprinklr Digital Twin, a new AI technology designed to enable enterprises to build and deploy autonomous and intelligent AI applications, that can mirror and enhance the capabilities of customer-facing teams.

While Sprinklr’s service suite has become an established offering, the company’s broader vision remains becoming the core operating system for all front-office teams supporting all conversations that an enterprise can have with its customers.

If you found this blog interesting, check out our blog focusing on Building Purpose-Driven Generative AI (gen AI) – Why We All Have A Role To Play In The Future Success Of The Gen AI Ecosystem  | Blog – Everest Group (everestgrp.com), which delves deeper into the topic of artificial intelligence.

If you have any questions, have further interest as we continue to investigate best in-class vendors to support your CX transformation journey, or would like to reach out to discuss these topics in more depth, please contact Anubhav Das and Sharang Sharma.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024 – EMEA

Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment – EMEA

The Customer Experience Management (CXM) market in the EMEA region has been resilient in the face of a difficult macroeconomic environment, driven by the diverse economic landscape and accelerated digital transformation. Specific growth drivers include increased AI and automation adoption, rising demand for enhanced customer service, substantial investments in digital infrastructure, and a notable surge in demand from the energy and utilities sector amid a global energy crisis.

Enterprises across EMEA are aggressively advancing their digital transformation strategies, prompting providers to focus on delivering highly customized digital Customer Experience (CX) solutions strongly emphasizing data privacy and security. AI-driven personalization and localized service delivery’s growing demand reflects the region’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity. To support these evolving needs, providers are establishing centers of excellence dedicated to deploying advanced solutions such as knowledge-as-a-service, conversational AI chatbots, and agent-assist tools, which are driving innovation in digital CX, including gen AI technologies’ integration. Furthermore, many providers are strategically partnering with hyperscalers and AI providers to enhance their AI capabilities and expand their service offerings.

Customer Experience Management

What is in this PEAK Matrix® Report

In this report, we analyze 37 CXM service providers’ capabilities across industries in EMEA. Each profile examines the provider’s service focus, key IP and solutions, domain investments, and case studies.

Scope:  

  • Industry: All
  • Geography: EMEA
This assessment is based on Everest Group’s annual RFI process for the calendar year 2024, interactions with leading CXM service providers, client reference checks, and an ongoing analysis of the CXM services market.
 
Contents:
 
In this report, we: 
 
  • Examine the CXM market in EMEA
  • Assess providers’ key strengths and limitations
  • Provide sourcing considerations for enterprises
READ ON
 

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