A global research study has found that businesses in the UK and elsewhere are overrating their Customer Experience, and are underperforming when it comes to providing omnichannel communication.
The 2019 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark report polled contact centre leaders in the UK, US, and Australia. Results reveal that businesses are confident in artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) role in delivering exceptional Customer Experience, but they overrate their own CX performance.
The CX Transformation Benchmark found that 63 percent of contact centre leaders agree that chatbots and virtual assistants make it easier for consumers to get their issues resolved, and 68 percent of those surveyed agree that consumers want to use virtual assistants to interact with them.
However, compared to consumers, businesses give themselves higher net promoter scores for every method of communication tested. Businesses overestimate most channel-specific NPS by broad margins. For example:
Automated assistant/chatbot: While consumers award automated assistants an NPS of -8, businesses estimate they earn an NPS of 25, for a gap of 33 points.
Email: The consumer NPS for email is -9 while the business NPS is 19, for a gap of 28 points.
Text: Consumers give text a -2 NPS while businesses estimate 25, for a gap of 27 points.
Meanwhile, the report shows that businesses are 15 percent more likely than customers to agree that they make it easier for consumers to get their issues resolved in their preferred channels, and that they provide a consistent Customer Experience across the purchase journey.
While 93 percent of businesses surveyed agree that consumers expect companies to provide a seamless experience when moving between channels, only 24 percent of businesses globally give themselves an excellent rating on allowing consumers to switch seamlessly between methods of communication.
Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact, said: “We are at an inflection point for AI in the contact centre. AI innovations are at their best when paired with the human touch and deployed to address targeted customer and agent experience opportunities. AI in the contact centre has the potential to add significant value to CX outcomes and operational performance.