In our recent webinar, “Develop Once – Deploy Omni” hosted by CCW and with the kind support of industry CX champion Mr Gregorio Uglioni we conducted an opinion poll amongst the attendees and received some great feedback into the use of conversational AI solutions.
For example, it might come as no surprise, especially to those who are personally involved in providing or managing customer services that the biggest driver for the interest in implementing these solutions has been and continues to be the Covid-19 crisis. With all the challenges that this has brought to enterprises everywhere, it is still abundantly clear from our clients that the technology has proven its worth under the harshest conditions, both economic and operational and therefore is something that will continue to help businesses to emerge and flourish, long into post-pandemic times. And this so-called “new normal” is indeed marked by a profound paradigm shift in terms of the way consumers behave and organizations do business.
Yet despite the above overwhelming, statistical endorsement of AI, perhaps a more striking result of the poll was therefore that some 55% of organisations still do not have any form of AI solution. Of course any reader might have easily concluded as much, just from their own experiences, for example when trying to contact a bank or service provider and having to wait – 30 minutes would not be exaggerating – merely to be answered, let alone have their query dealt with satisfactorily.
Picking up on the subject of the webinar, Develop Once – Deploy Omni, in which we attempted to illustrate the difference between Omnichannel and its lesser stablemate ‘multichannel’ solutions, we also enquired as to how organisations handled their mix of channels. The response was that in 56% of cases, the contact channels were managed separately but the respective teams collaborated, whereas 44% did so in isolation. This shows that in the vast majority of situations, the market is served only by solutions with disparate functionality, i.e. ‘multichannel’ whereby cross-channel benefits are only realised via human liaison across the teams.
The great takeaway from the above is that the Omnichannel environment offers a way forward for the market, music to the ears of those who have responsibility to innovate within organisations; older ‘multichannel’ solutions provide a good grounding and pave the way towards achieving the greater benefit from second generation technology in which all digital channels are fully synchronous.
If you weren’t able to join the live webinar, you can access the recorded version here
