Customers increasingly expect effortless and personalized interactions with companies. As the need for exceptional customer service continues to increase, enterprises must opt for AI-based solutions to remain competitive.
Predicting customer behavior has always been difficult. With the advancement of technology, customer expectations have rapidly increased. Their demand for seamless experience has further been exacerbated in the aftermath of the pandemic due to digital being the only way for their communication. However, providing a great experience doesn’t mean brands should opt for automated technologies along their customer journey.
Instead of oversimplifying their customers, and treating them as mere numbers, brands should appreciate the uniqueness of every one of them. But doing it is easier said than done. It requires the brand to have advanced data solutions in place that ignores the potential of upselling or even churn lurking in the background. Afiniti’s Enterprise Behavioral Pairing technology is one such advanced data solution that helps the marketing team to understand the value of their customers. It enables organizations to navigate through the continuously changing customer behavior and develop strategies that value the customers.
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“During this major push towards digital, we have seen that humans prefer humans when interacting with customer service and that such interactions are generally more successful than their automated equivalents,” says Julian Lopez-Portillo, Head of New Products, Afiniti. He further adds, “If you’re looking superficially at your balance sheet, sending customers to digital looks great because you’re saving money – but it doesn’t really take revenue and loyalty into account. It’s essential to not make decisions based on the initial cost of servicing a customer and instead focus on the revenue that a customer might bring over the long-term.”
With customer behavior continuously changing, it is difficult to predict and follow a pattern for making decisions. However, this is not the case with the Afiniti solution. “Our Behavioral Pairing technology takes data about customers and agents in order to match them based on the best possible outcomes.” says Julian Lopez-Portillo. He adds, “It’s a little like matchmaking for customer experience, and it’s a major revenue booster for companies. That core concept of making optimal matches is versatile enough to be applied in many different situations.”
“Companies have big datasets about their customers, and we’re not the only people who are putting them to use to make the customer experience better. Where we are unique is in the sophistication of our analysis. Our AI modeling happens in real-time. It takes the available data, secured behind the client’s firewall, and asks: what is the customer’s intent when they contact customer service, and what are the possible outcomes from interacting with an agent? That’s an acceptable but significant difference against seeing the customer as a static product of historical data.
The other great thing about Behavioral Pairing technology is its measurability. At Afiniti, it is run on and off over the day to measure the difference between when the service was used compared with when it wasn’t, giving organizations very clear data about its efficacy.
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Afiniti pushes for native integration for Enterprise Behavioral Pairing solutions as much as possible. Julian Lopez-Portillo says, “We push for as much native integration as possible. We’re a managed service so after we’ve done the implementation, we continue to work with our clients closely on seamless integration. Additional integrations will only increase the effectiveness of Behavioral Pairing and we partner closely with our clients to implement those as well.”
“We know that CIOs get jumpy about the cost in time and money of implementing systems. But Afiniti usually takes on those costs, not our clients. We then take a percentage of the uplift that our clients make. And those numbers can be pretty significant.”
Afiniti is planning to take its Behavioral pairing solution beyond call centers and set it free in all sorts of places. The organization is currently exploring self-service AI solutions for smaller contact centers to drive revenue and customer satisfaction.
“Another problem we’re looking at is how to help an agent make offers at the right time, and in the optimal order,” says Julian Lopez-Portillo, ”that’s clearly a data problem – one in which AI is going to be able to augment human performance. We can look even further, past the agent’s domain knowledge and the offers on the table, and ask if there are aspects of the agent’s behavior that could play a part in a successful outcome.”
“We’re pretty excited about where we are. Our Behavioral Pairing is a world-leading technology for modeling and understanding human behavior, as well as delivering precisely measurable business value, including huge increases in revenue. We’re confident it will be an integral (and seamlessly integrated) part of the customer experience landscape,” concluded Julian Lopez-Portillo.
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Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
