I’ve got a lot of time for Gartner. Analysts have a tough job scrying the future, as tech moves at such a pace there is a danger, unless you are always on, that things just accelerate so quickly you can’t keep up. It is also hard to spot which trends are here to stay and which will wither and die.
So it was with some pleasure that I picked up on Gartner’s latest predictions in their last press release here:
- By 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will have abandoned native mobile apps in favor of messaging for a better customer experience
- Messaging channels such as SMS and third-party messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp have been widely embraced in the global market, making them ideal for service organizations
And the especially relevant:
- By 2025, proactive customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive customer engagement interactions. Customer engagement is often reactive rather than proactive. This has resulted in high-customer-effort experiences limiting the effectiveness and profitability of self-service. However, the current pandemic and economic crisis has motivated many organizations to more rapidly develop capabilities to personalize proactive conversations.
Well that’s interesting. The thing is, we (almost by accident) began proactive communication many years ago and we’ve done it hundreds of millions of times so far. We can categorically attest to the fact that proactive is the future – so much so that four of the world’s sector-leading companies in telco, retail, logistics and white goods use us to let their customers know stuff at exactly the right moment in time.
We also recently sponsored a research project conducted by Delineate whereby over 10,000 people in total in the US and UK were surveyed about how they communicated with over 100 different brands. The results are startling:
Blimey. In the modern era, is it really acceptable that customers have to contact brands and not the other way around? Worse still, the research also showed that just under half of these calls were because a problem had not been fixed the first time. Nuts, huh?
So if you want to know more about what your customers think about proactive conversational AI – go buy the Gartner reports that these titbits come from, or for free (because we love what we do so much we want to share), help yourself to a 4,000 word report here which proves that apps don’t cut it, messaging channels do cut it, and above all, that you should be proactive and show your customers you really do care about them.
