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Auto Dialer: Key to Improve Agents’ Productivity

An Autodialer goes precisely by its name, software that gathers a list of phone numbers from a database and automatically dials them. If the call reaches a busy line, fax machine, or voicemail, it ends the call and heads to get the following number on the list.

Once the call is answered, it is immediately transferred to an agent. This software is also proficient in gathering several data bits that are beneficial for agents, like how long each call lasted and which the recipient answered all calls.

Globally, The auto-dialer market is expected to reach nearly $6.6 million by 2026
–GlobeNewswire

The market growth of auto-dialers software is driven by the significant increase in call centers and the improvement in the business’s productivity. Additionally, the demand for auto dialer software is propelling due to automation across several industries, besides a growing demand for cloud-based software to enhance customer relationships and sales.

The main purpose of the auto-dialer is to save the time and energy of agents. As previously mentioned, most of the time and energy of the agents used to get wasted on manually dialing phone numbers and waiting for a response.

So, with an auto-dialer, agents can focus on talking over potential calls instead of listening to busy signals. Moreover, irrespective of business or industry, the agents have several calls to make each day; thus, auto-dialers can help to reduce their idle time besides increasing their productivity tenfold.

These days modern contact centers have cloud-based solutions that work online, so to get an autodialer installed, you need a stable internet connection and a platform subscription.

What is an Autodialer and its Types?

An automatic dialer, also known as an auto-dialer, is software that automatically dials phone numbers to help the agents. Once the recipient answers the call, the auto-dialer connects it to the agent or plays an IVR.

Auto-dialer adds efficiency as it lets agents work on other aspects of the call while dialing phone numbers and screen out voice mails and negative calls such as busy signals and no answers. In addition, auto-dialers are good at managing large outbound campaigns that need more calls.

3Ps of Dialer

autodialer

1. Preview Dialer

Preview dialers work somehow like a telephone book. First, the customer list is prepared and shown to the agent, wherein he checks the customer’s information/history prior to making a call. Usually, businesses choose this as the first auto dialer for implementation in their business before moving to a more complex one as it is much better than the existing system of manually dialing the numbers.

It provides a preview of the information regarding the customer to help the agent prepare and doesn’t waste time dialing the number. Once they see the information provided about the customer agent can decide whether to dial or skip the customer.

Using this software help agent get time and information to prepare; thus, they can offer a personalized experience and enhance the success rate.

2. Power Dialer

Sequentially dial the following number once the agent is done with his call power dialers. The agent needs to indicate their availability in this scenario, and the dialer automatically dials the call. It helps the agents to make calls without even dialing numbers manually.

For instance, if a number is unattended, busy, or disconnected, then the power dialers automatically dial the next number. Thus, for agents power dialer saves a lot of time by reducing manual tasks and proportionally increasing productivity.

3. Predictive Dialer

The predictive dialer simultaneously makes multiple outbound calls. And once the customer answers the call, it is connected to the next available agent. The most important difference that a predictive dialer has is that it takes several variables into account to predict the availability of the next agent.

The dialer calculates how much time an agent would take for a call. What is the likelihood of a customer answering the call and so on, thus, further placing the call dynamically?

For example, if an agent takes a max of 3 minutes to finish a call, then the dialer would dial in every 4 minutes for that particular agent so that he gets time to complete the call and get prepared for the next call.

This reduces the idle time between calls, especially for call centers having a large number of agents with higher call volumes, thus enhancing agents’ productivity without hampering customer experience.

How does Auto Dialer Software Work?

Setting up a simple auto dialing system won’t cost much, nor is it complicated to install. To create a basic system, you need four things:

A voice modem is beneficial for recording or playing audio over the phone line. A basic desktop computer can accommodate two or four internal modem cards, and each can be connected to only one phone line. Thus, if you have more modems, the computer can make more phone calls simultaneously.

Suppose you use this auto-dialing software for a call center with several live operators. In that case, every operator will require having their telephone with a headset that should be connected to a dedicated phone line. Auto-dialers can be connected by a regular public switched telephone network (PSTN) or Voice over IP (VoIP).

The most imperative thing about an auto-dialing system is the software. Voice detection technology helps auto-dialing software analyze the difference between a human voice and an answering machine.

So let us discuss here how voice detection works:

  •  If a call is picked up within four rings or like 25 seconds, then there is an increased chance that an answering machine will answer the call.
  • Once the call is answered, the software tries to measure the first spoken words besides waiting for a pause. So initially, if the response is of short words (one to three seconds) then followed by a break, then the call is answered by a human. For instance, if the response comes as “Dr. Simon’s office. Can I help you” then it’s a human answering.
  • The software that passes this call is then passed to the operator by the software, or it plays a pre-recorded message.
  • During a telemarketing call, the telltale pause that accompanies is the point of time that the software takes to recognize a human voice and pass the call to the available operator.

Improve Agent’s Productivity with Auto Dialers

Auto dialers support the proficient functioning of outbound calls for a call center. Implementing an auto-dialer eliminates the need for an agent to dial every number manually from the contact list.

An auto dialer automatically dials the numbers in an electronic file linked through it. This particular file consists of a list of contact numbers. The auto dialer keeps on dialing the number one after the other without any need for manual dialing. It is also required that call centers maintain this list in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool these days.

autodialer

1. Saves Time

The time it takes for a call to get connected to a customer, the ringing time, and the time a customer takes to pick up the call are all significant. An auto dialer connects to a number present in the predefined list, and if the call gets unanswered, it is not passed to the agent. Instead, it picks up the next number on the list and makes a call.

Every minute is essential for contact centers as they are time-bound

Call centers also have numerous agents available to take up the calls. At peak hours, the auto dialers proficiently identify which agent is free and route the call accordingly. Therefore, it is beneficial in reducing the number of missed calls besides the average waiting time.

2. Increases Talk Time

Auto dialers pass the call to the agents only when a customer answers it. This helps to eliminate the waiting time for your agents. In this way, they can utilize this time talking to others which helps to turn leads into customers. Additionally, agents get more time to speak to valuable customers. This enhances productivity and uses their time to maximize business benefits.

3. Supports Broadcasting Features and SMS Blast

Auto dialers can send bulk messages besides broadcasting to the list of contact numbers. All these messages may have service and product information, details regarding promotional offers, and also help in conducting surveys.

To trigger this blast, you don’t need an agent. For this broadcast, you just need to prepare a recorded message and should have a contact list in place and start the broadcast.

4. Improves Lead Generation

Time is very crucial while communicating your brand message. Auto dialers know this very well. Thus, messages are delivered depending on customers’ time zone, working hours, or holidays. 

This helps ensure that the messages are delivered to your customers at an appropriate time. In addition, it makes sure that the message is delivered to the customer at the preferred time.

5. Enables Real-time Monitoring

Auto dialers are also helpful in tracking live calls as they are efficient in recording all calls and beneficial for measuring the performance and productivity of the representative. It also helps to identify the areas where improvement is required. Further, these recorded calls are beneficial in identifying grey areas where agents can work toward it to improve them.

These call records also serve as training material for newbies. This helps them understand the nature of the job even before hitting the work floor. Thus, it helps to boost their confidence and productivity once they begin to attend calls.

Wrapping Up..

Undoubtedly, call centers have embraced new technology to enhance their growth. However, the most important feature for the success of a call center is to reach out to the customers. A good amount of time is required for all the processes thus one should adapt mediums to automate all the processes.

Auto dialers help automate the dialing process without even needing an agent. Auto-dialers have several advantages like saving time, providing better conversion, and real-time monitoring of customer calls. Thus, you can opt for auto-dialers and let them be automated and smooth to make your business more successful.

40 Inspiring Customer Satisfaction Quotes to Boost Employee Morale

We’ve learned that companies who measure customer satisfaction are more likely to consider themselves successful than those who don’t. A company’s only continuing resolution should be to deliver better customer service across individuals, teams or an entire organization. Customer satisfaction and euphoria can take businesses to the highest elevation and vice-versa.

There have been some awe-inspiring quotes made by people who are no lesser than visionaries that constantly act as motivation to every business person. These people have surely brought revolutionary changes with their innovations and remarkable perceptions.

Continue reading “40 Inspiring Customer Satisfaction Quotes to Boost Employee Morale”

Latest Updates in Products: Small features that bring great customer experience

It is always exciting to interact with our customers and know their thoughts about our product line. It gives an opportunity to collect their feedback and check out all the possibilities to bring out a better version of our products accordingly. While it helps us get the reality check done with different industries and teams using the same product with a lot of different aspects, it also gives a sheer scope of embracing a number of expectations and molding them all together to re-shape our products for unbeatable usability across industries.

Here we are with yet another set of such amazing product updates to help you work, monitor, and earn more with a great customer experience.

Interact with your customers via Instagram Direct Messaging

With the latest product release, Ameyo gets you to interact with your customers via Instagram Direct. This, certainly, is going to catch your eyes if you have a good customer base of millennials who find it more convenient to talk to a business via Instagram. 

With this feature in place, you will be able to interact with your customers via Instagram Chat, create tickets out of these interactions, track these tickets,  and take necessary actions on them. In order to make it easier and faster to analyze for a business, we’ve introduced ‘Instagram Chat’ under different monitoring and reporting screens. We got so many requests for this particular update and we hope it will work for your business too. 

Hide or delete customer posts from your social media page

Social media is an open platform for your customers to appreciate your services and products as well as for deteriorating your brand reputation in a few clicks. At times a business is unable to meet the expectations of their customers or encounters a bad customer experience due to delayed delivery, faulty product delivered, delayed customer support, or any other known or unknown reason. Such scenarios are really critical for any business nowadays as customers can make you or break you in seconds on social media. For instance, assume a customer booked an Ola cab and forgot his belongings in the cab. He tried connecting to the driver but due to bad network, was unable to reach him. He then tried calling Ola’s customer support to connect him to the driver but he was put in a waiting queue. All this collectively made the customer frustrated and ruined his customer experience. He ended up writing a post on Ola’s Facebook Page using foul language. This post could get viral in no time and could drag the company’s brand reputation substantially down. 

To avoid these defaming posts and comments, Ameyo comes up with a feature that allows businesses to hide or delete posts and comments by their customers. The details about the deleted post or comment will be stored with certain important parameters, such as:

  • Details of the post
  • Details of the agent who deleted the post
  • The time of post deletion

This is a configurable feature and is again incorporated on demand and is likely to help your business too. 

Hiding a social media post by a customer

Easy searching of tickets even when the ticket source id is removed from the subject

There has been a provision of global ticket searching corresponding to a call within Ameyo. However, in some cases, we realized that if the subject of a ticket is changed or the call or source id is mistakenly removed from its subject, the ticket could not be searched. 

Considering such scenarios, we’ve come up with this solution which includes the call or source id of a ticket within the ticket body or messaging instead of its subject. This small update brings a lot of sense to ticket searching in uncommon circumstances.

Amendment in call disposition method

In Ameyo, there are two levels of dispositions – Disposition Class and Disposition Code. This two-level disposition is really helpful for contact centers in every domain and saves a lot of operational time for agents. However, the existing disposition method works with a single drop-down where the agents have to search for the disposition class as well as for the disposition codes in order to dispose off the call. 

To make it even faster and easier for the workbench users, we have introduced an amendment to this method by bringing in two dropdowns instead of one. With this new update, the user doesn’t need to search and scroll for the relevant disposition class and code provided in the common dropdown. With two dropdowns – one for disposition class and another for disposition code in place, the users can save their time and improve their productivity. 

Call disposition with two dropdowns

Chat disposition with two dropdowns

Locale language support for BYOB approach

When you’re providing customer support from your official website, requests can arise from anywhere – in any language. For this, it is important that the chat feature should understand the language that is selected by the customer. Earlier, webchat used to understand the language but with bot integration cases, the language was not understood by the bot. To solve this, we realized the need for locale support for BYOB approach to ensure that the bot is understanding the language preference of the customers and can pass it to Ameyo as well.

For instance, suppose there is a website named XYZ that uses a chat interface for customers developed by a Bot provider. When the chat is initiated by the bot, it asks for the customer’s preferred language (and says type 1 for English or type 2 for Arabic). Let’s say the customer chose Arabic and continued the chat, now when the chat is transferred to an agent, the Bot should be able to pass the language selection information as well as all the system-generated messages in the selected language.

Efficient supervision with visibility of voice player while scoring a call

With this new update, supervisors and analysts will have access to the call recording player in the QA modal while scoring the call at the same time. This eradicates the need of closing the QA modal and listening to the call recordings and increases the efficiency of the analyst or supervisor to score the calls.

Visibility of voice player while scoring a call in VLA

These were some of the major highlights of new features and updates that we’ve brought up in our latest release. We’re sure you’ll definitely love them and would like to know more about them. Having one or more of these features in your contact center, you can get to see improved efficiency and productivity with significant ease in getting hands on them. 

We’ll keep you updated on more of such amazing features and updates coming up in the system in our subsequent releases. Hope you felt like investing your time in something good reading this blog, stay tuned for the next one!

Best AI Chatbot Features to Deliver Expectational Customer Service

AI chatbot solutions are leading the way in providing exceptional customer service to businesses worldwide. They play a major role in delivering consistent and engaging customer experiences across eCommerce, retail, banking, insurance, and travel.

Close to 79% of global contact centers will invest in AI to improve reach, productivity, and data analytics capabilities over the next few years. Chatbots are helping optimize customer experiences through greater personalization, multilingual support, end-to-end conversation tracking, and dynamic integrations to improve chat experiences.

Customer Experience and its Significance

For many businesses, optimizing customer experience (CX) is one of the most important aspects of generating revenue, improving retention, and driving growth. In fact, three out of five buyers would leave their favorite brands if they’ve had a bad customer experience. Almost 66% of customers would refuse to purchase from a brand again if no ideal solution was also offered. 

The value of good customer experiences is undeniable and can impact business success in the following ways – 

1. Improvement in growth is a significant reason companies want to enhance their customer experiences. Therefore, enterprises design the customer journey and ensure that touchpoints are well integrated to provide a positive customer experience. 

2. Strengthening relationships through good customer service is one of the best ways to enhance loyalty and retention. For 55% of global buyers, timely issue resolution is one of the most important aspects of building trust with companies. 

3. Positive customer experiences can transform marketing initiatives, especially as customers recommend enterprise services or products within buyer groups. Conversely, the likelihood of customers actively demoting brands online and offline also rises if customers have had bad experiences. 

4. Good customer experiences driven by technology can lower the overall cost of business. They expedite resolution, lower attrition, and streamline acquisition significantly. Delivering positive customer experiences can reduce costs to serve buyers by around 33% in many instances. 

5. For close to 73% of buyers, a good customer experience is essential in the purchasing process. Companies that invest in customer experience optimization through AI-based chatbots and other technologies streamline the decision-making process for buyers.

8 Proven Ways How Chatbots Help Deliver Enhanced Customer Service

AI chatbots empower customer service agents and managers with overarching benefits of automation and transparency in engagement. Here are some of the ways AI-powered chatbots impact customer service for companies.

1. Hyper-personalization of Customer Engagement

With nearly 71% of customers expecting companies to deliver personalized interactions, the need for scalable engagement is key. Companies leverage natural language processing and machine learning to drive highly personalized interactions with every customer. For example, Chatbots can drive customized interactions based on rich data history and provide highly targeted responses that solve queries immediately. 

2. 24*7 Conversation with a Customer Service Chatbot

AI-based chatbots are highly accessible, but they also don’t require consistent maintenance or monitoring for ensuring 99% uptime. This significantly optimizes the customer journey and experience, enabling brands to transform their customer service operations. It also opens opportunities for upselling and retention beyond customer service hours through auto-generated ticketing, scheduling, instant alerts, etc. 

3. Scalable Quick Responses to Customer Queries

From telecom to retail, large volumes of calls can be categorized as quick responses or single-focus calls. These calls resolve specific issues, such as billing, onboarding, delivery time, etc., which can be streamlined with an AI-powered chatbot. For some companies, this could translate to more than half of incoming customer queries, which can be responded to quickly in a highly automated way.

4. Optimized Capabilities Beyond One-on-one Calling

Chatbots are one of the most optimized interactions solutions and are essential for brands if they want to scale engagement. Users can share photos, documents, and files to support queries, optimize onboarding, and ensure compliance through chatbots.

In addition, customers can interact with chatbots the way they want to, without losing context over a conversation. Chat logs are also shared with customers, and they can track multiple conversation tickets within their accounts. A live call with an agent cannot offer these features.

5. Multilingual Engagement through Chatbot Processing

While teams may be trained extensively across languages or hired specifically for their multilingual abilities, the first contact line for all conversations can be chatbots. With multiple languages supported across the omnichannel ecosystem, brands can engage with prospects, customers, and stakeholders in the language of their choice. Data storage, meta-analyses, and smart recommendations can also be performed in native languages.

6. In-depth Consumer Behavior Data Capturing

A vital area where chatbots offer indirect value to customer service teams is consumer behavior data capturing. Through chat conversations, pop-up surveys, and automated response capturing systems, chatbots can gather high-quality primary data for millions of customers. 

In addition, a meta-analysis of chat conversations can also be performed to strengthen buyer profiles, with data shared with customer service teams for further operational optimization.

7. Improved Productivity Leading to Better Service

Agents can shift their focus towards offering a highly data-driven service to customers while handling more complex and hands-on queries. They can also shift towards a more conversational service experience rather than investing significant time in solving routine queries.

Customers also have a better experience interacting with agents that can have contextual conversations that are more meaningful. With the improved productivity of customer service agents, they can focus on relationship building rather than transactional chats.

8. Strengthening Security and Data Compliance

Data security is a core area of concern for enterprises, especially as they scale up to offer real-time customer engagement experiences. AI-based chatbot solutions are encrypted while also following the latest cybersecurity rules to prevent data leaks.

Companies that need to comply with GDPR, PCI DSS, and other mandatory data handling protocols can set the right rules within chatbot consoles. This drives better compliance monitoring through intelligent flagging systems.

Also Read – Customer Experience Management: What Is It & Why It Matters

Final Words

AI-powered chatbots are revolutionizing customer experiences and impacting business success holistically across industries. Companies are realizing the benefits of adopting the best AI-based chatbot solutions while increasing their investment in the domain over the next few years. Incorporating data-driven AI chatbots to optimize customer experiences fully is a must for all enterprises.

Find out how to leverage AI-powered chatbots the right way. Ameyo’s conversational AI chatbot offers the right solution for enterprises.

How To Handle Call Volume Efficiently with Call Center Solutions?

How do you manage high call volume at your call center? Do you have any strategies in place, or is it just simple fire-fighting that your team does and leaves much damage behind, like dissatisfied customers?

A situation like this is not favorable for your business’s health. Customers waiting in long call queues, being addressed with below-par support from the call support team, and your support team being exhausted and strained are some of the primary effects of a poorly managed high call volume situation. The secondary and the more permanent effects would be tarnished consumer experience score and your customers moving on to buy from your competitors and leaving a negative word for you in the market.

In case you are wondering how robust call center solutions help your business to retain customers, then the following numbers will give you a clear picture. To win and retain these sorts of loyal customers, a company should take extraordinary measures to maintain a great customer experience.

What is High Call Volume at a Call Center?

Whenever there is a hike in call volumes, the work output for call centers is bound to increase. The industry standard for high call volume is 10 percent higher than normal volume. However, any challenging number for your contact center can also be termed a high call volume bar for internal clarity. The 10 percent figure can also vary depending upon the operating industry of the business, company size, customer base, etc.

Cause and Effect: What Brings High-call Volume?

High call volumes are events that are specific to a few events and scenarios. Some of these situations are mentioned below:

1. Holidays or Changes in Seasons

These are purely time-specific events, and companies can prepare themselves well in advance for these moments. Pest control or pool cleaning businesses will experience a surge in customer calls during the warmer seasons. Another example is restaurants and food delivery apps, as they deal with higher call volumes during weekends and even higher during a holiday.

2. Marketing Campaigns

A business can expect a significant surge in calls during or post a marketing campaign. Many people can get intrigued by new products or valuable offers mentioned in the marketing drive and will possibly reach out to the business for more details. Even though it is a good sign, these extra calls need to be addressed properly to reap the maximum benefit from the marketing efforts.

3. Service Outages

While service outages cannot be predicted (except maintenance), companies can still keep themselves ready for some level of spiking in call volumes. The service outage is one event that sends the call centers into overdrive, with many customers asking about the disruption or unavailability of service.

Top 6 Proven Ways: Manage High Call Volume Rate

Forecasting a surge in call volume can give an idea to the business about the upcoming challenge. But, just the availability of data can’t help in efficiently managing such situations. Appropriate tools and strategies are required to make the best use of the forecast and navigate successfully through a high-call volume event.

The following six methods are some of the best call center solutions to manage calls during surge events:

1. Deploying Chatbots and Encouraging Customers to Use Them

Most customer queries during a surge are basic. They don’t necessarily require an agent to solve the issue. Using a chatbot, many customer queries can be solved, bringing the call volume to a lower level.

Chat support handled by live agents may not be as cutting edge as modern-day AI chatbots, but they efficiently serve the purpose. A self-service content base can provide customers with the necessary answer without the support agent getting actively involved in it. Hence, freeing up much time to solve complex queries.

2. Encourage Self-service

More often than not, the issues faced by customers are not very unique from each other. Managing the same type of queries over and over can also negatively affect the support agent by making the job overtly monotonous, especially during high volumes. A super effective call center solution to avoid this is to encourage customers to go for self-service content mentioned in FAQs in the app’s or website’s helpdesk.

The support staff usually writes this content as they are well-versed in all the challenges that customers face during various event-specific call surges. This content can be detailed articles, brief FAQs, or even video content. The decision should be yours while choosing the form of content as you would know what will best serve your customers.

3. Provide the Right Tools to your Agents

When your support team is equipped with capable tools, dealing with high call volumes will become significantly easier. An omnichannel ticketing system can go miles while helping an agent manage a higher number of calls with a much better customer satisfaction rate. Some of the many features and benefits of these tools are mentioned below:

  • Canned responses can close basic queries way faster.
  • Third-party CRM tools can give an in-depth insight into a customer’s conversational history with the business.
  • Allow customers to leave swift feedback.
  • Access to customers across various communication channels like social media, website tickets, etc. through a single dashboard

4. Be Honest and Upfront

Customers loyal to a brand will always appreciate transparency and honesty. Despite applying proven strategies, a business may face a situation where they cant effectively handle the high-call volume. In such a scenario, being transparent about the situation, communicating the expected wait time, and pointing toward other possible solutions will be well received by the customers.

5. Givebacks

No customer likes to be put on hold and wait in long call queues. If the waiting queue is long, your call abandonment rate will shoot up. That is not a good sign for the customer experience score that your business must be trying to maintain.

A good alternative is to provide the customer with an option to get a callback for their query. It is crucial to let them know an expected time for that call and adhere to that timeline; it is also important to keep the timeline reasonable. A 30 minute return time is the most reasonable, according to a study. Once a call center masterfully uses the callback strategy, it will witness decreased costs and enhanced customer experience.

6. Proactive Business Communication

 Much time and human effort are saved when businesses proactively relay information about an ongoing issue to the customer before they encounter it themselves. Using notifications or SMS to alert the customers about an outage or maintenance are simple yet effective call center solution to manage impending high-call volumes. The same communication channel can notify the customers about resolution time or provide an option to schedule a call for more clarity.

Wrapping Up

Managing high-call volumes is not a simple task. Businesses may need to use various call center solutions to deflect a fire-fight situation at customer support. Forecasting such events based on past experiences and ongoing business activities is the first step in the right direction. Once the data is processed, using the strategies from the aforementioned list would put your support staff in a comfortable position to tackle a high-volume situation.

Depending on individual business needs, one can also opt for outsourcing or resource management strategies to deal with a high-call volume event.

Types of Chatbot and Which Should You Choose?

As we step towards the fast-paced digital world, the relationship between businesses and customers has changed a lot in the last few years. With time, customer expectations are getting higher; thus, companies should find new ways to interact. Besides, companies also need to enhance their processes and service proficiency. So, numerous organizations have taken a step forward to board the AI train to improve their customer service.

Companies investing in AI efficiently increase their revenues and save quite a good amount on operational expenses and ordinary tasks. AI helps businesses in customer acquisition and retention.

As per a study by Aberdeen and IBM, nearly 33% of customers are much satisfied because of the personalized experience provided by AI

In today’s scenario, Chatbots have become imperative for companies to streamline their operations and answer consumer queries without burdening their service team. With the advancement of technology, chatbots give a feel of personal touch to customers and meet their expectations.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is known to be an AI-based program simulating human conversations. They act as digital assistants that are well versed with human capabilities, understands the user intent, promptly answer their questions and give solution to their issues.

As per Forbes, nearly 80% of marketers plan to use chatbots to optimize their businesses

There is a substantial reason why brands are making investments to enhance customer experience. Chatbots can communicate through voice and text and are deployed across apps, websites, and messaging channels like Twitter, Facebook messenger, or Whatsapp.

Here are some of the key reasons why most businesses are adopting chatbots:

chatbot
  • Reduces waiting time: Nearly 21% of customers feel that chatbots are the easiest way to contact any company. Chatbots ensure that consumers receive an instant response to their queries without waiting in a queue.
  • Enhance customer engagement: AI chatbots can deliver consistent answers, and it is also helpful in avoiding irrelevant answers to customers, thus increasing customer engagement.
  • Increase lead generation: Chatbots are formulated with advanced technology and thus are much more efficient in engaging customers with personalized messaging throughout their call. So, chatbots are beneficial in lead generation and ensuring higher conversion rates.
  • Fulfill customer expectations: Customers always expect to respond quickly to their complaints and queries. Due to their 24*7 availability, they consistently meet customers’ expectations.

Various Types of Chatbot

With the invention of chatbots, the interaction between customers and brands has completely changed. Having conversations with customers and providing them instant responses has made chatbots beneficial for businesses.

Chatbot

1. Button or Menu-based Chatbots

In today’s market, button or menu-based chatbots are considered the most basic and slowest chatbots to get the customers to their desired result. However, they need users to make numerous selections to get the ultimate answer.

Menu-based chatbots are well programmed to answer FAQs in nearly 80% of support queries; however, they fall short in advance scenarios where they need too much knowledge to answer customers’ queries.

2. Rule-based Chatbots

If you can predict what type of questions your consumers may ask, a rule-based chatbot is suitable for your business. Unfortunately, rule-based chatbots are usually slow to develop and use if/then logic to create the conversational flow.

In rule-based chatbots, businesses need to define the language condition of the chatbots—conditions ( asses the order of the words, synonyms, and many more). Then, if a customer makes any query that matches the condition defined by the chatbot, the customer can receive the required answer in no time.

3. Machine Learning Chatbots

Have you ever thought about what a contextual chatbot is? This type of chatbot uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to remember conversations that occurred with a specific user. ML chatbots have contextual awareness and are competent to self-improve depending upon what customers are querying about and how they are querying it.

For instance, a contextual chatbot that helps a customer order food would store the data from each conversation and, this way will know what the customer usually likes to order. So, eventually, bots can suggest food recommendations based on previously stored data or ask if they would like to repeat the order.

4. Keyword Recognition-based Chatbots

Keyword recognition-based chatbots are proficient in listening to what users are typing and responding accordingly. These chatbots use customizable keywords and Natural Learning Processing (NLP) to provide an appropriate answer to the customer. However, they usually fall short while responding to many similar questions. NLP chatbots start slipping when keyword redundancy is there between numerous related questions.

5. The Hybrid Model

Usually, businesses like the sophistication of AI-chatbots but often don’t have the talent or large volumes of data to support them. Thus, they go for the hybrid model as it offers the best of both – the simplicity of the rules-based chatbots besides the complexity of AI chatbots.

6. Voicebots

A voice-based chatbot provides a frictionless experience to the customers. These days, businesses are initiating voice-based chatbots to make the conversational interface more vernacular due to its convenience. For a customer, it is quite easy to speak instead of typing.

Essential Tips to Choose the Best Chatbot for Your Business

Chatbots have come up with a new realm of communication between machines and humans. They are beneficial in enhancing a company’s customer service, besides improving operational efficiency and driving better engagement. Chatbots have gained immense popularity; thus use of chatbots is important for the success of your business.

So here are some tips for choosing a perfect chatbot as per your business requirement.

Chatbot

1. Evaluate Functionalities and Features

Evaluation helps identify the essential features and functionalities businesses would want from a chatbot to make them successful. A proper evaluation can help enterprises choose the right chatbot that would benefit their business in every manner.

Businesses should decide which features are required, like integration, NLP, contextual awareness, analytics, and many more.

2. Responding Speed Matters

Consumers always wish to get quick and easy answers to their queries. If the answer is delayed, the customers may get irritated. Choosing appropriate chatbots can be beneficial for businesses to avoid any delays.

While managing a complex issue, they should ensure that the chatbot efficiently gathers information without any delay. Also, if the call is needed to be transferred to the agent, it should be done fast and seamlessly.

3. Advanced NLP

In the Chatbot space, there are two options available: AI or Click. As per your requirement, you may choose one over the other. AI-powered chatbots use advanced Natural Language Processing to understand consumer queries in their language and respond accordingly in a conversational and friendly way. They should also maintain 85% accuracy in understanding the queries and responding accordingly.

4. Multilingual AI

In this fast-paced world, it’s not just enough to chat in one language.  As your business expands and you have more international clients, you should keep in mind to have a system that can understand English and other languages.

An enterprise-ready powered chatbot enables the consumers to talk in their local language to have a natural and meaningful interaction. Also, the platform should keep on enhancing its multilingual capabilities by updating itself with new languages.

5. Know your Target Audience

Like every business should be aware of its target audience similarly, the chatbot should also know its target audience. It is imperative that the chatbot should serve as the bridge between you and the consumers. The chatbot should be capable to understand your customer’s needs and cater to them with proficiency.

6. Define your Value Proposition

The value proposition means giving prime consideration to the most important factor of your business. It helps to understand whether your potential clients would come to you or be inclined toward your competitors. So companies need to determine a value proposition to choose the right chatbot for their business and fit their budget.

Conclusion

Today’s customers are more demanding than before. They expect effortless and smooth experiences, and chatbots help businesses maintain such expectations. Here, chatbots play a crucial role in enhancing efficiency and providing seamless services to customers.

So by evaluating the objectives of your business, besides keeping in mind the expectations of your customers, your business can maximize the benefit of chatbot technology. Well, choosing the right chatbot that would be a perfect fit for your organization would get your business to the next level.

AI-Based Chatbots: Can They Improve Customer Loyalty And Provide A Better Experience?

Chatbots are no more stylish additions to websites. On the contrary, its use has grown exponentially over the last few years to become one of the essential parts of the marketing mix for brands. 

The primary reason for the chatbot adoption is the versatility of using such a tool in providing an unmatched customer experience. 

As a brand communication technique, the impact of chatbots cannot be neglected anymore. Almost two billion consumers use a plethora of messengers regularly. 

Therefore, the potential of chatbots in engaging these consumers is massive, especially with the technological evolution occurring in the recent chatbot developments. 

This blog explores the effectiveness and utility of using chatbots in business operations to increase brand loyalty among existing and new customers. 

Improving Customer Loyalty – The Secret To Consumer Satisfaction

Marketing your product can be tricky in the current competitive marketing. Brand loyalty helps you define the success of your product or services among the consumer. 

Since customer satisfaction is a vital factor in maximizing sales, dedication helps you differentiate your product from the competitors’ products. 

Customers are usually inclined to buy products from relevant brands or trusts. Therefore, understanding customer preferences and delivering according to their needs can help brands build loyalty faster.  

Chatbots come into the forefront of providing an engaging customer experience. Today, consumers are bombarded with advertisements, promotional emails, and other forms of communication from brands. Chatbots help customers develop interactive sessions anytime they want. 

Developing Brand Loyalty – How Chatbots Can Help

Some brands deliver on specific parameters. They include reliability, ability to interact positively, responsiveness, and innovation. For example, a modern-day chatbot relies on AI and machine learning capabilities. Let’s find out how.

  1. Welcome message using chatbots

Chatbots can be programmed to deliver welcome messages and greet customers while interacting with them. It is a valuable act of personalization and can potentially begin the conversation positively. 

For instance, your chatbot can request users submit their details and consent to receive tailored communication and offers from your brand. 

This becomes a crucial step in building a first-party database, as cookies are now being discontinued. You can use this information to calibrate brand communication, deliver targeted messages, and improve their experiences based on their preference. 

Moreover, the machine learning abilities help you learn about your customers more as they interact and help build accurate buyers’ personas.

  1. Considering the human factor

While implementing your chatbot, you must consider the human factor. Having a poorly configured chatbot can be detrimental to your strategy. 

Further, customers become quite uncomfortable sharing their personal information with a robot, and you must inform them that they are conversing with a chatbot before delivering the solutions. 

The solution to this dilemma is to build a chatbot according to your brand personality. It should act according to your brand’s values and maintain a human-like conversation. 

You should consider their interests, needs, and preferences based on the customer data. Here, you should visualize and outline the actual process of having a conversation with the customer as a human. 

You should also determine the conversation’s vocabulary, warning signs, and local slang and act appropriately. 

The impact of humanizing your conversation has a far-reaching effect. It helps you deliver an engaging discussion and improve customer satisfaction as they grow comfortable using the chatbots.

  1. Round the clock customer support

As consumer expectations grow, delivering high-quality customer support becomes necessary. A faster response system that answers customer queries around the clock can provide a seamless customer experience. 

You can improve the chatbot performance by “teaching” the machine learning algorithms to take care of the primary issues of customers. Then, as customers receive immediate assistance, the experience improves.

  1. Improving sales with Chatbots

Chatbots can be a valuable medium to reduce frictions in the customers’ purchase journey. As chatbots are capable of developing user personas from the first interaction itself, they can identify the customer pain points and bottlenecks quite effectively. 

Consequently, they can offer them help, support, and relevant information to make the process more convenient. The chatbots can also be leveraged to develop a predictive path for the customers based on their previous activities or online behavior, increasing the buying intent. 

As chatbots better understand the user persona, they can deliver an opportunity to convert the customers faster.

  1. Eliminating the human-error factor

Chatbots are primarily used to deal with the most redundant tasks. These tasks were often prone to human errors due to manual interactions and data collection. 

Eventually, these resulted in customer dissatisfaction due to the slow and erroneous response systems. Chatbots help reduces customer discontent and improves brand satisfaction by making the process error-free and smooth. 

Moreover, the productivity of the overall process is also enhanced by delegating the task to the chatbots.

Wrapping Up

As a business, you should always try your best to improve your services and strategize robust marketing drives to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. 

Developing a plan to improve the current customers’ loyalties is the most convenient option to boost your brand perception. 

Delivering a seamless customer experience helps you to improve trust and simplify customer interactions, which usually translates into enhanced customer loyalty. 

Want to learn more about chatbots or the impact of implementing them? Get in touch with us.

6 Surefire Ways to Improve Customer Experience

A successful business runs on many wheels. It might have high-quality products, affordable pricing, a top-notch marketing team, and more. Yet, it still might lose customers if it cannot provide a great experience to its users.

Brands have evolved when it comes to attracting customers, but so have the customers. They are aware of their preferences and needs and open to exploring other options at the slightest inconvenience. In other words, having a better product or being a more prominent brand is no more a crowd-puller in today’s business landscape. 

However, suppose you can provide your customers with an unforgettable experience. In that case, the chances of attracting more users or retaining them become convenient.

Customer experience has become the buzzword for most businesses today. It is seen as the benchmark that defines the success rate of any business. Statistically, 86% of the customers prefer to pay more for an improved customer experience. Therefore, not having a strategy to fulfill your customers’ expectations might deter growing your business.

Simply put, the impression that you create of your brand to your customer is defined as customer experience. It lasts throughout their buying journey and even beyond that. 

Therefore, following the basics of good customer experience practices can help your business achieve sustained growth.

So, how much does customer experience affect a business or design a process that delivers a rich customer experience? Let’s find out.

Why improving customer experience practices is essential for businesses? 

Delivering an immersive customer experience is mandatory for any business today. Below are some direct benefits of having well-defined customer experience practices.

  • Boost sales conversions: 

When customers interact with your brand or buy a product, they expect you to value them. The process of brand discovery to conversion takes some time. Providing your customers with an unforgettable experience according to their preferences can make decision-making easier for them. 

You have to engage your customers accurately and deliver what your brand promised. A delighted customer can help you generate 2.6 times more revenue than a somewhat satisfied happy, which increases to 14X extra revenue than a dissatisfied customer. 

The key to achieving such a conversion rate is a consistent customer experience across platforms and channels. A well-connected buying journey builds a positive experience. It helps you exceed the customer expectations, resulting in higher sales conversion.

  • Higher customer retention: 

As the previous point established, providing a customer experience can boost sales conversion by quite a notch. However, modern-day businesses have realized that acquiring customers alone is not much achievement. 

Companies look to retain as many customers as possible and drive repeat conversions to derive maximum benefit from their customer base. 

Acquiring new customers can become costlier by seven times than maintaining the existing one. Therefore, strategizing an effective customer engagement plan can help drive retention efficiently.  

  • Increase customer loyalty:

Besides improving sales volume and retention, excellent customer experience practices can also instill brand loyalty. Today, brands and customers are connected over several common platforms, such as social media channels. 

The transparency in your product quality or customer service is shared incessantly by the customers. Providing a good experience turns your customers into brand advocates. 

Satisfied customers drive more customers to your business through word-of-mouth marketing and help you eliminate the acquisition cost for these new sets of buyers. Conversely, any negative experience leads to poor reviews, prompting prospective shoppers to move elsewhere.

How to Improve Customer Experience

The process of delivering a good customer experience begins as soon as users discover your brand and starts interacting with it. Below is a list of some of the best practices for optimizing the customer experience for your brand.

1. Audience segmentation and understanding of buyer’s persona:

Before improving your customers’ experience, you need to understand your audience. Your audience consists of many customer information, including age, gender, location, income, and hobbies and interests. 

Each of these demographics and personal choices determines the buyer’s persona. Using a particular strategy that works on a set of audiences might on others. 

You should segment your audience according to their persona to create an inclusive experience while interacting with your brand.

2. Personalize and engage:

Your customers like to feel valued while interacting with your brand. Personalizing your communication can help you drive a human touch while engaging them. Customers expect you to treat them as real people and have an honest conversation while interacting with your brand. 

Quick-response customer care service or an automated response center helps you improve customer experience quite efficiently. It also allows you to understand the customer’s pain points and provide solutions faster.

3. Omnichannel Strategy:

The digital platforms are expanding. Your customers are now available across channels, media, and devices. Reaching them with the right content at the right time through the right channel has become a necessity.

Having an omnichannel strategy that corresponds with your audience using cohesive communication is much essential in driving effective engagement. 

Further, the messages should not be repetitive or frequent. Instead, they should be coherent, systemic, and are sent according to the different stage customers s of buying journey of the customers to generate maximum engagement.

4. Avoiding the data silo:

Driving audience engagement is dependent on your tech stack. Several platforms could drive your campaigns, interact with your customers, and collect user data. 

Running these campaigns is further distributed among various team members across departments. Often, this leads to the creation of data silos in an organization, where the audience insights are restricted within the tech platforms, resulting in a poor customer experience. 

Avoiding the creation of data silos is a vital requirement for delivering a seamless experience that exceeds customer expectations. The data silos might form due to the limitation of the tech stacks or lack of interaction among team members. 

Whatever might be the reason, you should identify and break the formation of the silos to use customer data effectively and provide an immersive experience to your customers.

5. Opting for full-stack solutions:

Having multiple tech dependencies can lead to data silos or inconsistencies in customer communication. A full-stack solution helps brands adopt the capabilities across channels and platforms, break data silos, and send seamless communication to engage the customers. 

Further, the solution can leverage user data across channels and match the changing customer experience across all active touchpoints. As a result, it improves the audience engagement and helps them connect with your brand cohesively, leading to better conversion and retention.

6. Measure, analyze, and improve:

Creating a sustainable and enriched customer experience is not a one-time task. However, measuring the success metrics and analyzing the process’s bottlenecks can help you identify the missing link that leads to a poor experience. 

It would also help you identify the customer behavior and improve the parameters according to their expectations. The amalgamation of business analytics, artificial intelligence, and big data is already here. 

They can help you measure customer satisfaction in real-time and deliver a unified experience to your audience.

Conclusion

Delivering a poor customer experience can cause tremendous financial loss. Customer expectations are increasing as they become more empowered. 

Having the right strategy in place and executing the best customer experience practices helps you improve conversion and drives retention and loyalty, irrespective of the size of your business.

Continue reading “6 Surefire Ways to Improve Customer Experience”

Introducing Advanced Monitoring Capabilities with Group Manager User Role

In organizations that have a few employees, there might not be a lot of layers to supervise, but in large organizations, with thousands of employees, it becomes extremely important to have clear visibility of employees’ tasks at all hierarchical levels.

To better understand this, assume a company of 5000 agents that are assigned to a supervisor. It is extremely difficult for the supervisor to monitor these many agents, which further results in making him a bottleneck in the decision-making process.

So for large organizations with complex business hierarchies, Ameyo has introduced a user role of Group Manager. This user role can be used by team leaders to monitor associates, managers can use the group manager capability to monitor team leads, and area heads can monitor managers using the Supervisor capability.

Group Manager Role for Improved Monitoring

  • Distributes supervisor’s work 
  • Allows easy monitoring of all agents
  • More focus on the team’s performance and improving agent’s productivity
  • Group Managers can easily barge, snoop and whisper
  • Provides access to callback and call details 
  • Detail visibility of all the agents such as break time, on-call time, etc

Group Hierarchy CRUD

As we know, the Group Manager feature allows Group Manager to supervise all the agents under him, but there was no one to supervise the Group Manager. As a result of it, the Group Hierarchy CRUD has been introduced. This allows keeping a check on the performance of Group Managers under a particular Group Manager.

The following activities can be done:

Create – While creating a Group, the administrator can assign and unassign Groups and other Users to the Group. A notification is sent to the Users about the same. 

Read – Once the Group is created, it is listed in the My Available Users and Groups list.

Update / Edit – The Administrator can edit the Groups. While editing a Group, the administrator can perform all the actions just like creating.
Delete – The administrator can delete the groups as well by clicking on the delete icon on the Group stab.

Group Hierarchy Callback

On the Callbacks tab, Group Manager can view callbacks and schedule or add callbacks for the following users:

  • Direct users of his Group
  • Users of child groups 
  • Group managers of the child groups

Group Hierarchy for Call Details

The call details can be filtered on the basis of the groups and group manager. 

The group manager can do the following tasks:

  • listen to the voice logs
  • score the call records
  • download the Voicelogs, 
  • apply filters and search on the users of the child group.

For each user on the list, group and immediate group manager’s details are listed. In case a user is assigned to multiple groups, then all the groups and respective group managers are listed.

With this new feature enhancement, businesses can easily solve the challenges of poor agent performance, improper monitoring of leads, and lack of clarity around their work. Group hierarchy allows managers at any level to monitor and supervise all the levels below him/her which brings overall transparency to the organization.

Apart from its primary benefit of monitoring and quality, the enhancement also allows organizations to streamline their processes better. This is one of the many capabilities that Ameyo’s full-stack customer engagement platform provides. There are many similar features that will help you make better decisions, resulting in business growth.

To know more, connect with our experts!

Importance Of Personalized Customer Service And 5 Tips To Do It Right

Businesses across industries have been focusing on personalized customer service. Yet, personalization has multiple facets when it comes to the customers. 

Some are motivated to engage with your communication with as little as their name, while others might need extra persuasions such as customized offers or special discounts. Usually, personalization levels differ for each customer depending on their needs and preferences. 

The multiple cohorts can often derail the best-laid plans while offering personal customer services. Since customers now look to have preferential treatment from the brands they engage with, they want a prompt response from you. 

Further, they also wish for product suggestions and curated offers, especially on different personal occasions. Identifying the needs and satisfying their expectations can get overwhelming if your customer service desk does not address them appropriately. 

To help you improve and nurture your customer service responses better, this article will take you through the fundamentals of personalized customer service. It will also enlist five vital tips to simplify the process further. 

What does Personalized Customer Service mean?

Personalized customer service is defined as delivering customized assistance to your customers through your service desk according to the consumer’s profile. This approach helps you appeal to customer behavior and make them feel empowered while interacting with your service agent or brand. 

The importance of such personalized service cannot be downplayed anymore in today’s business landscape. Personalization helps satisfy consumer expectations and drive repeat sales in almost 93% of customers. 

Additionally, 90% of customers become further inclined to buy more from you. This can have a significant business impact in building trust, loyalty, and brand recall. 

Personalization of customer service can be beneficial for both you and your customers. Let us have a closer look at some of its advantages.

Effect of personalization on customers

Personalized customer service can help you bridge the gap between your customer and brands quite effectively. When customers approach your service agent, they expect a prompt and reliable resolution of their issues. 

Personalized service helps your agents respond faster to customer queries and solve them as per their preferences. It can improve service satisfaction among your customers and help you reduce cart abandonment or churn. 

Further, it enables you to build meaningful conversations, adding to the brand perceptions and customer experience. Subsequently, personalized service improves trust and loyalty towards your brand because of faster response and preferential treatment, resulting in a seamless experience over desired touchpoints.

Personalization impact on brands

Personalized customer service improves your ROI significantly if implemented appropriately. Since you deliver a customized experience to your customers, you can make them feel appreciated and valued. 

This can lead to better brand adherence and increased customer loyalty toward your brand. It can also increase conversions and retention by fulfilling customer expectations adequately. 

Personalization also allows you to deliver curated communications and responses to your customers at every stage of the customer journey and remove the factors that disrupt the sales cycle.

Five Tips to Provide Personalized Customer Service

Now that we have defined and learned the benefits of personalized customer service, a few suggestions can help you develop an effective strategy. You can use the following tips to implement personalization in your customer service offerings.

Use Omnichannel Customer Experience

 Using an omnichannel approach can significantly improve personalized customer service efficiency. It helps brands advertise and sell their product or services and provides support and troubleshooting across channels. 

The complete process becomes seamless since it treats every touchpoint or customer interaction as a part of a whole system for each customer. 

Omnichannel helps you reduce friction between the touchpoints and improves customer convenience while interacting with you. It further enhances customer retention and improves brand loyalty because of consistency in the buying journey. 

Additionally, omnichannel helps you gather insights across channels such as social media, chatbots, and email communications, among others, enhancing your audience’s reach. 

The omnichannel strategy helps you gather insights into customer behavior and intentions on a microscopic level. Subsequently, you can improve your brand communication, value propositions, and response system according to customer expectations.

Apply Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey is a complete set of events that every consumer goes through while interacting with your brand, starting from discovery to conversion and beyond. 

The process follows several steps, which can be visualized through the customer journey map. It is a mechanism that sums up every customer’s experience at various stages of the journey on a real-time basis. 

Therefore, you can identify the customer’s shortcomings that do not meet their expectations and address them before they escalate. A journey map helps you alienate the issues in your conversion cycle and smoothen them efficiently without disrupting the complete process. 

It allows you to deliver a superior customer experience, resulting in faster conversion, improved conversion, and better retention. It also helps you reduce churn and drive loyalty among customers.  

Personalize your Customer Experience offerings

Personalize your Customer Experience offerings: As mentioned earlier, personalizing your communications based on customer behavior and preferences can significantly affect the overall customer service expectations. 

You can use the customer names as the first step of personalization. It provides you an opportunity to create a better first impression as they feel more valued. You can also add to the experience by providing them with help and resources, including FAQs, knowledge bases, blogs, articles, and industry reports according to different customer journey stages across channels through an omnichannel approach. 

It will help them find support and reach you across touchpoints in case of any bottlenecks, making the sales cycle more efficient. Certain personalized offers or allowing loyalty points can also improve the buying propensity of the customers.

Leverage AI

Having a customer service desk with human agents can have certain limitations. This is particularly true when dealing with a vast amount of data that needs to be collected across platforms to fine-tune and create a customer profile. 

However, deploying AI tools in customer service platforms can solve the issue efficiently. A modern-day AI interface, such as chatbots, can collect customer insights across channels, create accurate customer profiles, and use the data to solve the basic queries personalized according to their preferences. 

These chatbots can use real-time customer data to identify their online behavior and address them accordingly. Further, you can also automate the chatbots with standard responses to solve the most common queries. Subsequently, it improves your availability and response time and eventually enhances the customer experience.

Create Smooth Transitions

Managing their preferences might become cumbersome when they use multiple channels and platforms to interact with their customers. Managing data across touchpoints and creating holistic buyer profiles can make the situation challenging. 

Therefore, you should maintain a smooth transition across channels while strategizing your customer service offerings to avoid disrupting the customer experience. You can use customer service software with comprehensive functionality according to your needs. 

The software can efficiently ease the transition between platforms and seamlessly help your customers navigate communication channels. It allows customers to avoid situations where they have to repeat their queries to multiple correspondents while switching communication channels, improving their overall brand experience. 

Your agents can also find the customer insights across touchpoints at their fingertips and provide a better resolution to the customer queries.

Wrap Up

The versatility in customer behavior and intentions makes brands reformulate their business strategy across domains quite frequently. 

They must have a robust plan to improve their brand appeal, and personalized service is an efficient way to build and nurture customer relationships. Personalization shows that you are willing to take the extra step to help your customer, which acts as the key differentiator between you and other brands.