A recent Forbes study found that 71% of customers want to have a consistent experience across engagement channels. This is a fair ask, especially as the world becomes more remote and the number of platforms for customer engagement continues to grow.
Customers now have many ways to contact companies, including calling, emailing, chatting online, and sending messages on social media. They can also get help from virtual assistants or chatbots. Customers expect to be able to get help quickly and easily, no matter where they are or when they need it. They also want to be able to communicate with companies in the way they prefer. Companies need to be flexible and adaptable in their customer engagement strategies. They need to offer a variety of channels and make sure they are easy to use. They also need to be responsive to customer feedback and make changes as needed.
Most CRM systems only integrate with email systems. Text, chat, and message-based conversations are not yet integrated with CRM systems. For example, you cannot go to a contact in your CRM system and communicate with them using their preferred platform, other than email. You also cannot communicate with them using their preferred language. Third-party integrations that connect messaging, text, and chat platforms to CRM systems are available. However, they come with the same problems as any third-party software: spotty support, broken connections, and lack of resources.
In addition, you will likely need multiple third-party applications to communicate over multiple platforms. This can be a mess. Businesses of all sizes need to be able to communicate with groups of clients and prospects on their preferred messaging system directly from the CRM platform.
It is also important to be able to extend communication to social media. Seamlessly unifying all conversations into a CRM system would put businesses ahead of the curve.
Brining conversational ability to CRM is a major feature that is missing from most CRM systems.
Chatbot solutions that are integrated with CRM covers predominantly marketing and customer support. But the lines between inbound and outbound customer engagement are becoming increasingly blurred and there are a lot more customer-facing business processes beyond these.
It is essential for businesses to stay up-to-date and be where their customers are. While open rates are highest for WhatsApp and SMS engagement, it is important to leverage other channels as well. For example, Facebook recently launched the Messenger API for Instagram, and brands are already beginning to take advantage of this new opportunity.
The next step in the evolution of customer engagement is to focus on building engaging conversational experiences. Through conversational AI, businesses can create a complete experience that unifies every aspect of engagement, from marketing to enabling customer-facing self-service business processes.
This is the need of the hour. In today’s digital world, customers expect to be able to interact with businesses in a way that is convenient and personalized.
Conversational AI is the key to delivering this type of experience. The inability of current automation solutions to deal with the complexity around language context, intent and nuance sets the stage for conversational AI to play a more prominent role. It is the catalyst to scaling automation projects. The ability to use conversational AI to digitally capture, audit and optimize the decision-making process is a game-changer for many industries.
It is time to consider modernizing the conversation technology that can easily extend customer touch points and open up more options for self-service. Personal agents that connect systems of intelligence with systems of action are still in the early stages, but we see them as conversational applications that provide value to end-users through improved information retrieval, discovery, and action.
Businesses need to be able to communicate with customers on their preferred channel, in their preferred language, and seamlessly from their CRM system. This is where Ephanti comes in.
Ephanti is a SaaS solution for customer engagement that uses conversational AI at its core. Ephanti’s platform is built with the power of integrated large language models (LLMs), and it covers the spectrum of messaging apps as conversational tools for end-customer-connectivity. Ephanti provides a multilingual conversation experience, and its conversational AI enables workflow and process automation. The solution covers customer-facing (marketing, sales, service) and employee-facing (e.g. helpdesk, etc.) business processes across business applications.
