Amazon is known for a lot of things, but what sticks out most notably in the minds of just about every consumer is its incredible ability to curate personalized, predictive experiences. They are known for evolving alongside cultural shifts and consumer trends with a CX strategy that seems almost effortless.
Here are three strategies your business can adopt to become more like Amazon in meeting the ever-evolving expectations of customers sustainably:
Strategy #1: Become Agile & Adaptive
Today’s customers have set a high bar for the experiences they expect when engaging with a business – and these expectations continue to grow. In fact, according to ZenDesk, 60 percent of customers say they now have higher customer service standards after the past years’ crises.
Amazon remains the gold standard for its ability to adapt its CX practices to meet these changing consumer demands. Businesses today can emulate this behavior by prioritizing the use of tools and processes that enable rapid adaptation and agility, versus placing the focus on optimization of a single challenge, need, or experience. This refocusing of strategic operations will encourage a culture of rapid innovation, enabling CX transformation in a matter of weeks or even days, versus months or even years.
What needs to be different? Your value system and culture must change to prioritize flexibility. From here, data-driven decision-making functions as a flywheel, using intelligent, automated technologies that learn and change with the evolving needs of your business and customers. Investing in innovations like AI, machine learning, and automation will power up your ability to remain adaptive, so you can exceed expectations in every customer interaction – even if the unexpected threatens to disrupt operations.
Strategy #2: Deliver Continuity Across Experiences
For customers, having a continuous on-brand experience should feel magical, whether they’re communicating with an employee via chat or in a brick-and-mortar location. Connecting these experiences across the customer lifecycle can enhance the experience. Recall and leverage historic interactions along with purchase history and other relevant data to make every experience a continuation of the last.
If a customer opens a support ticket via chat one day and then calls in the next, they don’t have to start from the beginning again. The context and information are already there to maintain continuity across time and channels.
For Amazon, this means harvesting the data of customer interactions and using it to inform experiences, providing a foundation for empowerment. This data ensures their customers can switch easily between different channels without needing to start over, and also ensures customers receive relevant, predictive information to add richness to their experience. This example is a true definition of what we mean by “omnichannel”: building a continuous experience for customers, regardless of what their request is, when it happens, or what modality is used.
Strategy #3: Invest in Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation is the backbone of Amazon’s customer experience. From conversational AI and machine learning to data analytics and intelligent automation, these tools turn customer interaction data into fuel that empowers customers and contact center agents.
Modern process automation and data harvesting help provide solutions to common questions, such as:
– How can you use the data you’ve already collected about your customers to personalize CX?
– How can you streamline the data for your agents to provide contextually relevant information and an improved CX?
– What can help agents solve customers’ problems in the quickest, easiest way possible?
– Or perhaps most importantly: Where do you begin to improve your customer experience?
In other words, investment in intelligent automation and data solutions can help organizations both streamline and strengthen business operations—driving more meaningful relationships with customers and staff.
Establishing these new CX strategies may require some planning and additional resources on the front-end, but the ROI is clear: the delivery of a more Amazon-like experience equals happier customers and staff, which translates into more loyalty and longevity for your business.
