How have customer service expectations changed over the past year? According to the 2022 State of CX in South Africa Survey, customers expect an immediate response to their queries and want to be able to reach out on their preferred channel.
The survey was carried out during March and April by ITWeb in partnership with Freshworks and aimed to examine how customer service expectations have evolved, and how chatbots and apps are being deployed to improve customer experience (CX).
Vivek Ethiraj, head of solutions engineering at Freshworks, says the key findings are in line with global trends. “According to McKinsey, 73% of customers want anywhere, anytime support, using multiple channels to engage with their favourite brands. Forrester notes that 69% of customers prefer to do business with brands that offer consistent experiences across channels,” he says.
However, CX teams continue to struggle, he says. “One reason for this is overwhelming support volumes because live walk-ins don’t happen anymore. In addition, working in a hybrid environment continues to be a challenge for many organisations.
Omnichannel remains a pain point across many African organisations, with 55% of African leaders feeling their omnichannel strategies are below par.”
African customers want brands to meet them wherever they are.
Vivek Ethiraj.
Only 10% of respondents to this survey rated their organisation’s ability to provide seamless customer service as excellent; and 35% said it was good, while the majority (55%) were undecided or felt their organisation’s omni-channel communication strategy was poor to basic.
Ethiraj says businesses have focused their attention on expanding their support channels in recent years, but that this often results in more windows and tools for agents to work on that support the multiple channels used to communicate with the brand, which causes a fragmented experience for both customers and employees.
African customers want brands to meet them wherever they are, says Ethiraj. “They want to choose channels that are convenient to them, they want personalised service, it should be easy for them to find support, and they want help fast. They also want contextual data offering insights that drive customer delight, and human centric processes to drive lifetime value.”
The main challenges organisations face in achieving a single view of the customer is the existence of multiple customer channels that are not integrated and customer data across different teams that is siloed (reported by 47% of the respondents). The second biggest challenge (25%) is that customer service is viewed as a stand-alone function.
Asked to list the three most important priorities for their customer service operations, most respondents chose maintaining service quality without adding headcount (25%) and enhancing self-service capabilities (25%).
How AI improves CX
Ethiraj says AI plays a key role in enabling advanced service, supporting chatbots, intelligent ticket automation and as an easy assistant for agents. “If implemented correctly, AI can support your team throughout your ticket lifecycle,” he says.
“Customers need to feel wanted, cherished and special all the time. Freshworks takes a fresh approach to enabling businesses to delight their customers, with advanced AIenabled solutions.”
Respondents understand this, saying that the best way for their organisation to improve customer service levels is to step up the use of AI, virtual agents and chatbots (45%); and invest in a cloud-based support platform to reduce upgrade costs and get an easy, single view (35%).
When it comes to how respondents expect AI-powered chatbots to improve their customers' experience, 24% expect them to reduce time to response; 22% expect to automate resolution for frequently asked issues to reduce agent workload; and 17% expect to reduce cost to serve.
Encouragingly, 39% of South African organisations have either fully implemented virtual customer assistants or chatbots as part of their channel mix, or are in the process of implementing. However, 28% have no plans to implement chatbots any time soon.
The vast majority (92%) believe that bots will help human agents perform their tasks better – by doing repeatable/automatable tasks and enabling agents to focus on tasks that require more human intervention.
When it comes to CX benefits envisioned by integrating chatbots in the channel mix, providing clear, concise and consistent answers to commonly asked repetitive questions so as to reduce agent workload came out tops (22%).
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