IoT will create many more avenues to learn from customers directly: Future Group’s Jacqueline Mundkur

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer experience are the imperatives in today’s world. It is critical to embrace technology not only to reach out to maximum customers, but also to make an impact and deep connect with customers. Hence, enterprises need to have strategies that are implemented, keeping technology as the backbone. Customer experience is one function which has increasingly felt the need for this symbiosis.

In an interaction with Express Computer, Jacqueline Mundkur, Group Head – Customer Service, Future Group, shares how customer experience has begun to occupy a central space for today’s service organisations thus enabling the creation of sustainable differentiation. Mundkur discusses how the digital influence doesn’t just stop at the customer touchpoint; rather it requires deep data mining.

How is IT shaping-up customer experience?
IT is the key to approach customers and influence them, thereby making them adopt and become loyal to a brand. This requires identification of the customer’s behaviour as an essential ingredient, and how organisations can provide an offering which will be of value to customers. Today, customer experience is driven by speed, simplicity, and instant gratification. Once an enterprise understands these key drivers then it becomes important for all the strategies and investments to be aligned to meet these needs. Eventually, all great services should translate into great sales, top line growth and loyalty. Hence, the effects should be measurable.

In this connected era, IT plays a major role in enabling delivery of contextual customer experience. Technology allows us to capture the customer interactions, enables us to build customer personas and identify the customer segments and micro-segments; which enable us to meet customer’s aspirations and expectations. Personalisation and contextual commerce is what we achieve.

How does enterprises churning the satisfied & dissatisfied customer feedback on social media?
All responsible enterprises have been working on the reactive aspect of service delivery for the longest time. The reactive service aspect is almost three decades old and and smart technology platforms have enabled more channels of communication being catered seamlessly with the help of IT.

The fundamentals of the future lie in service differentiation that is being proactive and predictive of the needs of your loyal customer. That’s where technology has given us real-time visibility and enables the professionals to quickly react and prevent issues from cropping up in future. Therefore, I would say social media has boosted decision making and responsiveness.

Also, most sensible enterprises collect ‘direct ‘ customer feedback. This humongous information from customers can create an immense source of knowledge for feeding assortment decisions, training, infrastructure augmentation, stakeholder synergy and much more; provided precise mining and machine learning inputs are painstakingly given.

How are the enterprises keeping up the pace with the ever-changing customer behaviour and technology?
Today, the story is all about relevance. Whether what is being offered is relevant to customers through multiple channels of choice, or being relevant to those employees who serve the customers. We professionals spend a lot of time strategising about the customer and forget there is a huge cohort of employees who are our brand ambassadors. Technology will help weld these two cohorts together for seamless contextual conversations.

India has the large ratio of millennials/ GenZ who lead the customer experience by virtue of being the workforce at the frontline. Their unique mindsets and exposure have to be catered to. Fortunately, sophisticated technologies like mobility, IoT, etc have enhanced the effectiveness of all solutions delivered to the customer through an enterprises’ employees.

Technology is all pervasive and professionals are constantly being exposed to the relentless pace and variety of disruptive innovations. It is imperative that all responsive organisations embrace these technologies to ensure that they stay constantly connected and reach out through their customer (prospective or existing) and the market demands.

Hence, a fine balance is required where we professionals strive to simultaneously evaluate which technology is to be embraced and when, so that best meets the business goals.

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