Optimized operations, happy customers, reduced costs…
It’s time we personalize CPaaS for you.
Different channels work well at different stages of the customer journey.
They also change with the industry. For example, a travel and hospitality customer will react differently to WhatsApp notifications in the attraction stage, than a customer in the retail or banking industries would at the same stage.
That means, connecting all of these channels to create the perfect customer experience requires a more granular look at the unique challenges of every industry. So, let’s tailor the use cases and find out if CPaaS is really worthwhile for your industry.
New-age shopping is almost entirely online, and most retail brands have taken steps to adapt to the digital transformation of the industry. While brands have started seeing value in using a multichannel approach for customer reach, engagement, and support, the efforts are still woefully siloed. Let’s take an example.
A large retail brand, that we’ll call Luminuxe, has already adapted to multichannel technology. Luminuxe currently reaches out to its customers and prospects via SMS, WhatsApp, email, and push notifications. It has employed a large marketing, sales, and customer support team to manage each of these channels in order to get the best results.
But Luminuxe noticed that instead of improved purchases and customer satisfaction, the numbers were actually dropping. It lost close to 25% of its online shoppers, and the overhead costs of maintaining the channels were becoming too high. In a last attempt to understand what went wrong, they invited a few customers to participate in a quick conversation, and this is what they learned:
Customers were being targeted by sales, marketing, and support all at once with multiple, irrelevant messages.
They were getting bombarded with emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages, and push notifications non-stop about items that they didn’t really want.
In the end, they had to block the brand on all avenues and uninstall their app as well, even though they liked the items that they did buy from the brand earlier.
The multichannel experience was also inconsistent for customers from other countries as most channels weren’t available to them to reach support.
Once Luminuxe realized this, they looked at ways in which the multichannel approach could be made more cohesive, and easier to maintain without requiring as many resources. That’s when they found CPaaS—and just like that, with no training or tech interventions, they were able to onboard and begin using the platform instantly. These are the effects after they implemented CPaaS:
Luminuxe unlocked a treasure load of customer data that they were able to use for better personalization and targeted communications.
They could see which channels customers used based on age, geography, time, etc., and target them accordingly.
They introduced chatbots to intuitively suggest related items to buy as and when customers added items to their carts.
They used channels like WhatsApp and RCS to send videos of products that customers had abandoned to give them a powerful nudge to complete transactions.
They used push notifications to send timely offers and discounts for abandoned carts as well.
Their automated SMS program was a huge hit, where they notified customers when items on their wishlist were about to go out of stock. CPaaS enabled customers to place orders immediately via SMS for better convenience.
Channels like WhatsApp, email, and SMS were used to inform customers of loyalty programs to get more referrals.
While chatbots took care of common FAQs and nudges during the purchase process, Luminuxe was able to dedicate a personalized voice communication strategy for more high-value purchases, giving the customers a lux experience.
With CPaaS, Luminuxe was able to comply with regulations across geographies and didn’t have to compromise on customer data security.
The impact?
What Luminuxe was facing is similar to most retail brands across the world. In the UK alone, almost 45% of shoppers stop buying from brands that don’t give them personalized, relevant offers. To top it all, the brands’ multichannel efforts are driving away customers instead of attracting them, and 87% of brands find that it’s costing them more time and money than it warrants to maintain these channels.
With CPaaS, retail brands keep customers happy by providing the right communications and improving sales by guiding them in a personalized manner. It combines the rich customer data that retail brands have with its communications strategy (through CRM plugin and API integration) to optimize the results, and ultimately drive sales. The brands can also keep up with the cut-throat competition by easily adding more channels to their stack without drawn-out processes, thanks to CPaaS.
Hotels, airlines, holiday platforms, travel agencies, and other businesses within the industry have specific use cases that CPaaS can address.
We’ll focus on airlines. For the most part, a lot of travelers ignore small inconveniences while traveling by air. And most of the booking process is shifting online for a better booking experience. Airlines do use CPaaS during this process, like sending SMS confirmations of the booking, web check-in reminders via email and SMS, discounts via push notifications and email, and so on. The unsuspecting passenger gets to the airport, and maybe even reaches the destination without any problems. And then, their worst nightmare comes to life — lost baggage.
They roam the airport in search of someone in charge for maybe hours.
They’re asked to provide their contact details at the airline helpdesk, they’re given a note of acknosledgement, and they’re asked to go home and simply wait.
This agonizing unknown period of waiting is marked by the customer trying to call customer support over and over, going through multiple levels of IVR, only to get vague responses.
The customer desperately tweets out messages to the airline only to get automated responses and no action.
An eternity later, the airline calls with the news that their baggage has been found — and that’s if they’re lucky.
While cutting costs is a big priority for airlines, they can do so without traumatizing their passengers, and not really going too far out of their way.
Here’s how airlines can leverage CPaaS:
Tracking down lost or mishandled baggage costs the airline industry a significant amount — close to $2.5 billion in 2019 alone. The cost of staffing and training customer support stands at an average of $1.5 billion per year, according to a study by the International Air Transport Association (AITA). Even though airlines spend so much, customers are still miserable because of archaic communication tech.
By leveraging channels like chatbots and automated SMS, email, and push notifications, airlines can reduce the need for human customer support representatives for avoidable cases. Adopting CPaaS comes at a much lower cost, improves operations by miles, and gives customers immediate and relevant support.
The top 3 obstacles to smooth customer engagement that most BFSI companies face today are:
Over-staffed yet overwhelmed departments
Excessive costs incurred on low-value transactions
You know what we’re going to say—CPaaS is the answer to them all. But, that’s not bias or exaggeration. Let’s take a simple example:
Many banks are now losing out to new-age, more digitized fintech companies because of broken, archaic customer journeys. Here’s how CPaaS can fix these issues easily:
The customer can use a chatbot to understand the requirements and their eligibility to apply for a business loan without talking to any employee.
The chatbot leads them to the application link and also assists them with their questions while filling it.
The customer fills out the application and sends the signed documents to the right department via WhatsApp or email.
For high-value loans, CPaaS facilitates setting up WhatsApp video calls for verification purposes eliminating the need for a branch visit.
The loan approval process is kept transparent by sending automated/ scheduled SMS or emails to the customer to keep them updated.
So, at the end of it all, this is the result:
Optimized operations: Automating communications helps the employees at the bank to instead focus on interactions that actually need their attention.
Reduced costs: Introducing more scheduled and automated communications means banks can reduce the staff required for routine, redundant tasks. Banks can add whatever channels they want using CPaaS, saving them the need to build and host new infrastructure.
Happy customers: With customer queries being handled and resolved automatically without losing the personalization quotient, resolution time is lowered, and customer happiness is automatically improved.
CPaaS significantly reduces the effort required to understand and help customers. It brings together disjointed efforts into a frictionless, proactive, and meaningful journey.
This applies to every component of financial service banks have to offer — CPaaS helps conquer customers with a unified communications approach that just makes sense.
Note: You might have noticed that chatbots have made frequent appearances in this eBook. Why is that?
It’s because the significance of AI, especially in the fields of retail, BFSI, and travel, cannot be stressed enough. Chatbots are fast becoming the best mode of customer engagement and are significantly reducing the workload of support teams leading to a reduction of costs, more operational efficiency, and happier customers. AI in retail alone is currently valued at $5.8 billion and is expected to grow at the rate of 24% till 2030.
It has become a popular channel that customers are expecting brands to provide as it offers several benefits, including:
Convenient and immediate access to answers: AI-powered chatbots provide customers with easy and quick responses in real time.
Personalized experience: Chatbots can be programmed with NLP and ML algorithms to automatically provide personalized and contextual recommendations to customers while they interact with the brand, which can improve overall customer engagement.
Increased efficiency: Chatbots can automate repetitive tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions, which can improve employee efficiency and reduce their workload significantly.
Available at all times: AI-powered chatbots are available 24/ 7, which can provide consumers with access to customer service at any time, regardless of business hours or where they are in the world.
Adding AI-powered chatbots to the channel mix brings benefits to both the business and the customers, and is infinitely customizable to every brand’s requirements. CPaaS blends chatbots into your channel mix without any coding requirements at all.
Adapt it and make it your own!