Features, Insight, Interviews

Infobip empowering personalised customer experiences in the digital economy

Yara Milbes, Head of Marketing – MENA, Turkey & Pakistan at Infobip, outlines how the omnichannel leader is helping businesses to cultivate, build and maintain personalised customer experiences.

In this new digital economy, we know that delivering ‘experiences’ are critical for businesses to retain and grow their customer base. Our dependency on technology to conduct everyday tasks has only served to increase our expectations, and we have no zero tolerance for poor experiences with applications and services. Can you outline to our readers how Infobip empowers its customers to deliver exceptional customer service through their solutions?

Online interactions between businesses and customers have multiplied in the past couple of years. As a result, customer expectations for meaningful, contextual, and convenient experiences have reached new heights. Simply put, customers have grown accustomed to getting what they want when they want it while being increasingly drawn to businesses that treat them as individuals throughout their journey.

Today’s customers want to connect with businesses on platforms that are familiar, fast, and reliable. Our solutions ensure customers get the best value from companies at the right time through the proper channels.

Infobip offers a wide variety of CPaaS channels that companies can reach their customers through anytime, anywhere, and most importantly, all in one platform.

We help businesses build connected and personalised customer experiences across all stages of the customer journey with simple, contextualised interactions and, most importantly, over the customers’ preferred channels. This personalised experience is also ensured by continuing conversations seamlessly from one channel to another –without losing history or context.

In my opinion, exceptional customer service comes from offering secure, uninterrupted communication over the customer’s preferred channel. Therefore, by being active on channels where customers spend their time, businesses improve brand visibility and ultimately build long-term customer relationships.

We also know that an effective way to retain customers is to ‘personalise’ the experience. Can you tell us what solutions your customers leveraged to help them build better one-on-one relationships – and do it easily at scale?

While brands are constantly looking for ways to stand out in a digitally charged world, they must recognise that a digital customer experience isn’t the only thing consumers want.

Today, there is great value in a seamless human approach that offers a personal touch more than ever. I believe establishing an emotional bond and delivering a great user experience are key pillars in building a digital relationship with customers.

An automated customer support solution like Infobip’s Answers allows businesses to create an Ai chatbot that can recognise customers’ intent, instantly provide information on any channel, and, best of all, never takes a day off.

The chatbot can resolve common queries using multimedia and assist customers as a true virtual assistant that’s capable of having real conversations. Once it’s integrated with our cloud contact center solution, Conversations, the chatbot can seamlessly transfer complex queries to the right agent based on the customer’s intent without losing conversation history or context.

It doesn’t get more personal than being always available, a “good listener,” and proactively knowing when to hand over to a live agent for further support.

As cloud-based solutions, both Answer & Conversations allow businesses to engage with unlimited numbers of customers. They can be scaled up or down according to demand and business needs.

Many businesses have embraced AI technologies to increase efficiency within their customer service and contact centers offering – and have turned to automation to achieve this. However, many end-users still get frustrated speaking to conversational bots and have had negative experiences with them, and long to speak to an experienced customer service agent. How important is it for businesses to retain that ‘human touch’ when it comes to customer service?

Today, customers are reshaping the way businesses communicate, demanding more personalised and digital human interactions. I believe that Businesses must pay careful attention to their customers’ needs and expectations, such as knowing who your customers are, how they’ve interacted with you previously, and their interests.

Once you have that data, you can personalise your customer engagement by communicating over multiple channels while using the right messages at the right time to keep customers engaged at different touchpoints.

The frustration builds up here when a customer feels stuck talking to a machine that clearly cannot resolve the issue without the option to enter free text outside the existing conversation flow or get passed on to a live agent for further support.

With Infobip, you interact with an AI-based bot that is contextually aware and understands natural language, with an option to integrate your chatbot with a digital contact center and manage customer support to unify communication from all angles through a single interface.

This integration enables agents to access the entire conversation history and purchase history across all channels and seamlessly take over more complex queries that chatbots aren’t programmed to handle.

Infobip has been an incredible success since its inception in 2006 – and has established itself as the go to cloud communications platform. In your opinion, what is it that ultimately differentiates you from other market rivals?

Our approach mainly entails integrating global standards with local presence and on-ground support. We see customers as partners and approach each customer by first understanding the uniqueness of their business, their existing infrastructure, and what goals they need to achieve.

Our experts stand in the customer’s shoes every time, no matter how big or small the project is, and build a solution supporting their business through a single platform.

Customers today are not interested in seeing or experiencing how businesses operate. They want to be seen as individuals and ensure their expectations are met. They look for simplicity even in every interaction they make or experience with brands, and this is what Infobip is all about: Creating seamless interactions between businesses and people.

COVID-19 has fundamentally reshaped the way we live, work and play. It has transformed major industries such as healthcare and education, but what impact has the global pandemic played in terms of how we define what customer experiences should look like?

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has changed the world and caused human interaction to become much more digital; Working from home, dealing with clients, and managing services are all being done online.

Although the pandemic has brought time to a halt, it has definitely fast-forwarded the world’s digitalisation. People behave in new ways, buy-in new ways, and think in new ways with changing attitudes. With this change, businesses should accelerate their shift to digital-first or digital-only consumer journey because customer behavior will not revert.

This is the right time for businesses to meet customers on their preferred channels and personalise engagement to make customers feel like you understand them and ultimately keep them coming back for more.

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