How SMBs can overcome customer experience gap with intelligent CX

With the generative AI boom, customers expect lightning-fast responses and personalisation that gives them a sense of being understood. However, there remains a noticeable gap between customer expectations and what CX leaders, particularly in SMBs, believe they are delivering. 

Despite 73% of SMB customer experience (CX) leaders in India rating their ability to personalise customer experiences as good, 84% of consumers feel that most companies could do a better job on this front, according to Zendesk CX Trends 2024 report.

This gap isn’t merely limited to personalisation. Customers aren’t happy about the measures taken by brands to protect their personal data, which is now an important aspect of customer experience. In fact, as per the report, 72% of SMB CX leaders believe they are doing enough to protect customer data, but customers disagree with this, and 73% of them believe most businesses are not doing enough to protect their data.

When we get to the bottom of it, small businesses must understand customer perceptions to truly deliver the experiences they crave. One in three customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience, and 92% of them would completely abandon a company after two or three bad interactions. This makes it doubly important for small businesses, operating with smaller teams and under similar pressures as larger companies, to deliver exceptional CX or risk being left behind. 

The question then arises: how can they achieve this?

Re-examining CX tools and the entire customer journey

While AI adoption does improve the bottom line, small businesses must be careful in its application and not get caught up in the hype. Being thoughtful and assessing where AI can deliver the best return on investment is crucial to the success of AI adoption among SMBs. 

Small businesses must begin by identifying gaps and areas of friction in the entire customer experience journey to understand which aspects require greater investments. For SMBs in India, the biggest challenge is resource crunch. Running on small teams, most SMBs don’t have enterprise-level capabilities to deliver great CX. This is where automation can play a major role. 

Merely implementing AI-powered CX solutions isn’t enough. Small businesses need to understand customer pain points by visualising the entire customer journey. This understanding helps them identify where the journey is smooth or the reasons for any friction. Identifying pain points, regardless of whether they are related to products, processes, finances, or support, helps form a better picture of what customers want and expect from the business. For resource-crunched SMBs, automation can help make sense of all the customer data that’s collected to derive meaningful insights on churn rates, average resolution time and conversion rates. Once businesses identify the pain points, it’s time to implement CX solutions that help them meet customer expectations. 

For example, if long resolution time is the primary pain point of customers, the business would benefit from adopting CX tools that aid in self-service through AI-powered chatbots and help centres. Self-service tools empower customers to resolve issues faster, allowing human agents to focus on more complex customer needs. 

AI to personalise the CX journey

Customers in India today aren’t satisfied with the quality of customer service and are frustrated. While 86% of them say that personalisation affects their purchasing decisions, nearly one third say businesses could do a better job of personalisation. There’s a significant opportunity for SMBs to address this gap by adopting AI-powered CX solutions. This is perhaps why 86% of SMB CX leaders in India are rethinking their entire customer journey due to emerging tech like generative AI. 

With generative AI in play, chatbots can offer the capabilities of digital agents. Generative AI-powered chatbots can convey brand traits in a personable way and resolve a variety of issues quickly, offering customers the instant experiences they seek. For SMBs running low on resources, this is a massive opportunity to scale CX initiatives, which could explain why over one in two SMB CX leaders say they are increasing their investment in generative AI for CX within the next year.

Generative AI-powered bots are adept at analysing customer sentiment and intent, and react accordingly, all while using the brand’s voice. Such chatbots can resolve customer issues without involving an agent, reducing wait time, and freeing up agents’ time. AI-enabled CX tools can give agents the pertinent information they need to quickly solve issues with an empathetic human touch. It helps human agents adapt on the fly by automatically suggesting helpful articles based on real-time messages from each customer, helping deliver personalised experiences at scale. 

However, SMBs must ensure the AI-powered solutions are built on CX-specific data sets that meet the highest standards of accuracy. This largely depends on the model the AI is trained on. SMBs must choose tools that offer AI confidence scores built into workflows so agents can take it into account while responding to customers. Tools built on CX-specific data sets can accurately predict customer needs to deliver enhanced personalisation, proactive customer experiences, and boost efficiency. 

However, transforming chatbots into digital agents requires far more sophistication. This requires the right CX solutions with chatbots that surface information quickly, with an improved ability to tailor responses to each customer depending on where they are in their journey. It goes a long way in building stronger relationships with customers. It’s also why 39 percent of SMB CX leaders in India want to increase their investments in AI-powered chatbots for personalised customer support. 

Protecting customer data to build trust

Customer trust is a fragile thing but also extremely important in building meaningful relationships. In the digital age, this involves personalised experiences, provided SMBs follow safe and secure data protection practices—94% of customers say they would not buy from businesses if their data was not properly protected. 

Trust can make or break your business—because more than half the customers across the world will not give the brand another chance if trust is broken once. SMB CX leaders agree with this as over one in two see themselves as responsible for making sure customer data is safe. However, many small businesses still struggle with protecting their customers’ data, even as regulatory mechanisms tighten norms. Nearly half (46%) of SMB CX leaders admit they struggle to keep pace with the latest legal and regulatory requirements around customer data and privacy.

This is easily remedied if SMBs adopt CX solutions with built-in data protection mechanisms. AI-powered CX tools provide detailed data access records, including information on who accessed what data, when, and from where. They encrypt customers’ personal information using customer-controlled encryption keys, define parameters on what data should be stored and for how long. It can also redact customer information ensuring only the right people have access to the data. 

Customer trust is further strengthened by detailing the ways in which SMBs plan to use customer information to drive deeper personalisation and improve the overall experience. Customer trust improves when SMBs are transparent about how they’re keeping customer information secure, e.g. meeting service level agreements and making the right documentation available to customers so they have a clear view on how businesses are using their data.

Ignoring the CX gap could lead to loss in revenue during a time where a small business’ ability to attract and retain customers is extremely crucial to their survival. CX leaders in Indian SMBs need to identify and understand the reasons behind the CX gap as not doing so will only give way for competitors to get ahead. Delivering great CX has a significant impact on profitability and longevity of any organisation. And SMBs in India recognise this–93% of them say that intelligent CX has a major impact on business growth. 

The good news is that 76% of those who have invested in AI for CX are already seeing a positive return on investment. Small businesses looking to stand out against their competitors need to start investing in CX and embrace AI technology to thrive and scale to the next level.

(Jenny Choo, RVP SMB, APAC, Zendesk)