Yvette Yanne, EVP Innovation & Transformation, Appnovation.
Picture this: after months of development, your company is finally ready to unveil its latest mobile app enhancement—a series of new features that are all-but-guaranteed to take your customer experience to the next level.
Among the list of exciting new improvements: an AI-driven chat bot and live chat option. The bot promises to efficiently answer customer questions and dramatically reduce call wait times, while the live chat will allow customers to interact with a human being, in instances where they may have more complex questions or require more personalized answers.
Given how long customers have been sitting on hold lately—and how frustrated they’ve reportedly been with your customer service offerings—these two features promise to be a huge step up.
The only problem? Weeks after launching, few customers are taking advantage of the new features.
After some digging, you discover that most users feel the bot isn’t all that helpful. And when they try to connect to a live human being via the chat, they often have to wait hours for a one-off answer, with no opportunity to ask follow-up questions.
So how did it get to this point?
There are probably hundreds of reasons why this hypothetical company—and this particular app—could be having challenges. But if I were to troubleshoot the issue, I’d start with three of the three common sources:
1. Organizational Misalignment
Every new piece of technology should be built around a strong, clear strategy—one that makes a point of defining a project’s desired business outcomes. To do this, it’s essential to have the right team in place.
Because most pieces of technology touch on many different aspects of an organization, the team responsible for creating and executing that strategy should be multi-functional—you want a variety of perspectives to weigh in on the purpose of the technology (e.g., customer service, marketing, operations and IT).
Once it’s assembled, this team will need to determine which problem needs to be addressed through a new piece of technology, and what a desired business outcome looks like. For instance, if an app is considered to be outdated compared to others in the market, should future enhancements focus on driving more sales or improving the user experience?
If a team isn’t multi-functional, or if it can’t agree on which business opportunities or targets the new technology must prioritize, the technology may end up missing the mark. That is, you may end up with a series of expensive customer service enhancements that don’t actually enhance the customer experience.
2. Tech Stack Incompatibility
Sometimes a digital innovation’s failure stems from technical issues. For instance, if a brand has traditionally interacted with customers through its website, but now wants to shift those interactions to a mobile app, they must make sure the app experience is a seamless one.
For that to happen, however, brands need to make sure the app isn’t a standalone entity but, rather, connected to that website through a centralized system. The two need to be able to talk to each other—and they should be able to cohesively manage and aggregate user data to ultimately create a better user experience in the future.
When this doesn’t happen, customers may find the app is glitchy, give a different experience, is hard to navigate or just not worth their time. Whatever the reason, they’ll likely end up sticking with what they know: the website (or, in the example above, the phone).
3. Lack Of Internal Systems And Processes
For a customer-facing digital innovation to function well, you need to ensure internal systems and processes are running smoothly. If an app touches on various different departments—say, customer service, IT and sales—there needs to be a clear plan in place explaining which department is responsible for what.
Not only do people on the relevant teams require appropriate training and support, but the organizational structure needs to be aligned across the board. If a customer opts to chat with a live representative, for example, there must be enough customer representatives available to make that option convenient. The customer representatives need to have the information and resources necessary to answer a customer’s questions—and have a process to follow if they can’t find answers through traditional means.
Without making sure the customer-facing and internal processes are functioning well, you run the risk of providing a sub-optimal customer experience which, in turn, can lead to low engagement and reputational damage.
Start With The End In Mind
A strong foundation and a holistic view can help you avoid these innovation missteps. To build one, it’s important to start with the challenge the technology is supposed to solve—or the end result you’d like to see.
From there, it’s simply a matter of identifying the right technology to address the issue and establishing a cohesive plan to ensure this technology works with your existing tech stack and your internal team is adequately prepared for the changes.
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