With the current challenging economic climate and supply chain issues, businesses are looking for ways to future-proof themselves and drive increased productivity and cost-effectiveness. This interview highlights how AI and automation integrated with CX technologies can help manufacturers reduce costs and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, the benefits of AI in increasing operational efficiency among manufacturers are also discussed.
Zendesk is a customer service platform that helps businesses communicate with and support their customers across various channels, such as email, phone, chat, and social media. By consolidating all customer interactions into one platform, Zendesk helps organizations create a more seamless and efficient customer experience (CX). Zendesk also integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology into its platform to further enhance CX and streamline support operations.
With AI-powered features such as intelligent chatbots, automated workflows, and predictive insights, Zendesk is able to deliver faster and more personalized support, ultimately helping organizations improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Machine Maker interacts with Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP India & SAARC, Zendesk and he talks about maximizing customer experience (CX) with Zendesk AI-Powered Solutions.
Reducing Costs through CX Automation in Manufacturing during Economic Challenges
The economic downturn across the world is raising concerns among businesses of all industries, including manufacturing, on whether they can future-proof themselves. According to a recent report by KPMG, 66% of Indian CEOs expect a recession in 2023, while 86% of them say it will affect the growth prospects of companies in the country. Whether it’s a looming recession or geopolitical tensions disrupting supply chains, businesses have always been challenged with uncertain, yet constant, changes. But the most successful businesses are the ones nimble enough to adapt to change. For manufacturers, this can mean investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and automated solutions that drive increased productivity and cost-effectiveness.
Manufacturers are no strangers to AI and automation when it comes to their factories and machinery. But an area where such technologies could make a huge positive impact is often overlooked. When AI, automation and machine learning are integrated with customer experience (CX), it empowers both agents and customers. It gives customers the ability to self-help through robust help centre FAQs and frees up agents’ time spent on repetitive, manual tasks. For example, AI-powered chatbots can provide customers with 24/7 support, which can direct them to relevant help centre articles. AI can also enable seamless bot-to-human handoffs so more complex issues are tackled by agents. Intelligent triaging adds context to customer interactions ensuring maintenance of systems and repairs are identified well in advance so they can be fixed in a timely manner. With the power of AI, manufacturers can further cut costs by remotely fixing these issues. Overall, this helps reduce the time taken to address queries and perform regular tasks required to ensure production is seamless.
It’s in adversity that innovation bears fruit and the most successful organisations are prioritising existing customer support technology to achieve operational efficiency and cost savings while also providing extraordinary customer experiences. And it’s AI that will help define the path to success.
CX Solutions help manufacturers make Data-driven Decisions
Workflows in industrial environments are complex processes that collate and organise multiple systems. With so many functions, manufacturers can benefit from having all the data in one place and eliminating silos. With AI and ML, these businesses can unlock a greater level of transparency as a single system captures all tasks, communications, and data, which is constantly tracked and updated.
With a single source of truth, manufacturers can implement inter-departmental collaboration with automated systems. This would not only boost productivity and facilitate knowledge-sharing, but it can help teams identify major roadblocks to growth and make changes accordingly. It’s true that manufacturers place huge importance on their products, technical specifications, price and performance. With the power of data, manufacturers can identify areas of improvement, which ensure customer expectations are met and even, exceeded.
With the data all in one place, manufacturers can integrate their core business applications that inform the support platform of key customer data. With access to historical customer data and shared metrics, coupled with collaboration between teams through integrated messaging tools, agents will have a 360-degree view of the customer. This allows them to form strong connections that offer relevant sales opportunities — like cross-selling, up-selling, facilitating repeat purchases and driving revenue growth by building loyalty, one conversation at a time.
Benefits of AI in increasing Operational Efficiency among Manufacturers
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become much more sophisticated over the recent years and is increasingly important to businesses, regardless of company size, maturity or industry. AI has the power of offering customers a personalised journey — on a deeper level. Gartner predicts that chatbots could become the primary customer service channel for a quarter of the business globally in half a decade. With slow economic growth predicted in 2023, businesses are tightening budgets. In India, 50% of CEOs plan on reducing digital transformation budgets in the next six months. This requires manufacturers to invest wisely. It’s perhaps why globally, two-thirds of manufacturing businesses believe that chatbots drive cost savings.
It’s more important now that businesses retain customers and rightly so, 74% of businesses feel CX plays a vital role in customer retention. AI helps manufacturers instantly route and prioritise revenue drivers, ensuring agents are working on business-critical requests. It automatically guides teams on how to best resolve a customer’s issue in real-time, by providing the right context, recommending solutions, and improving coaching and training with valuable insights.
Manufacturers can harness the power of AI to build a robust knowledge base and community forums, with bots built into workflows, enabling self-service capabilities that save time and money. These solutions can also connect agents with back-office teams through automated collaboration tools so they can interact with the right teams and solve customer issues quickly.
With conversational AI, manufacturers can make better use of its resources. Implementing an AI-powered chatbot can help support teams address a higher volume of simpler issues while freeing up agents’ time to address more complex problems. Ultimately, doing more with less is the goal here – with chatbots tackling high volumes of repetitive queries and humans taking on higher-value tasks. It’s important to point out that it’s not about replacing humans, but rather complementing each other to drive productivity and efficiency while elevating the customer experience.
And given that chatbots can grow and learn over time to adapt their responses, complementing the human workforce with Machine Learning and AI will allow for better use of resources, improved productivity and, ultimately, a better experience that will have customers coming back for more.
Metrics Manufacturers must look at while choosing a CX Solutions
When investing in CX solutions, manufacturers need to ask themselves: Does this solution add value to the overall workflow? Does it integrate seamlessly into my existing solutions? Can the solution eliminate highly repetitive tasks? Is it enhancing product quality? Choosing the right CX solution requires manufacturers to have a good sense of what’s working and what’s not working within their organisation, as well as customer support functions. This will help inform what CX solutions are needed.
Organisations often measure their CX success through metrics like customer satisfaction scores that factor in first response time, customer wait times and resolution times. However, it is important to note that when it comes to measuring success, there is no one-size-fits-all framework that all leading CX organisations follow, but rather a shared focus of having a strategic overview of their results. This is because the metrics used by organisations largely hinge on their priorities, long-term goals and internal resources, and as such, it varies from one business to another.
Measuring the true value of CX goes beyond just customer satisfaction, but also employee satisfaction and the quality of the CX team’s work. By assessing a mix of internal and external factors surrounding CX’s success, businesses can start to have a more holistic and strategic overview of their impact on the business and the improvements needed.
Importance to democratise access to AI regardless of the scale of the Manufacturing Business
When we look at the state of tech adoption among Indian manufacturers, the progress is gradual and largely because 90% of Indian businesses in this sector are MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium). Over the last two years, small companies are faced with the challenge of a staggering increase in the number of customers needing assistance. With such an influx of support requests and far fewer resources, it’s difficult to scale and meet customer demand.
What these manufacturers need is an accessible and easy-to-use platform that enables customisation. Without the resources to hire talent with deep domain expertise in software development, many SMBs are turning to low-code or no-code platforms. In short, the low code revolution happening now is making it easier and faster to develop than ever before. NASSCOM predicts that the low code market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.1% from 2021-2025. Low code platforms allow businesses to build platforms without technical expertise and meet customer expectations.
When access to AI is democratised, customer service becomes accessible for each business, regardless of their size. With no-code or low-code AI workflow tools, manufacturers across the board can deliver great CX and generate customer loyalty.
