As we move rapidly towards a digital world, the relationship between businesses and customers has transformed, with customers’ expectations higher than ever, and companies trying to find new ways to interact with them and improve customer experience. It is in this context that many organizations are starting to board the AI train to enhance their customer success teams with smarter tools and process automation.
Companies that are able to successfully implement AI into their operation often experience very positive results within a short period of time. But studies show that only 1 in 10 companies has been able to successfully implement AI at an operational level. Smaller companies struggle to adopt it, while larger ones with dedicated teams and tools only use it on some key projects.
Why do companies struggle to implement AI?
Talent shortage: it’s very difficult to find and retain experienced and knowledgeable developers and data scientists.
Access to data: most companies don’t have access to quality and centralized data that AI-embedded apps can use and learn from.
Know-how: most organizations don’t know how to do it, what to do, and how to start an AI initiative effectively.
Available solutions don’t hit the mark: Most out-of-the-box AI solutions don’t return meaningful results and can be hard to implement as they are too generic and not specific to the company’s industry.
Some companies understand the need to invest in technology to help them overcome these challenges, that’s why choosing the right partner is key to being provided with the best solution and results. We invite you to read about our real-life example of Fisher Funds, a company that successfully applied artificial intelligence to empower its customer success team.
Fisher Funds’ transition from reactive to predictive customer success:
Fisher Funds is a New Zealand based specialist investment firm, managing more than $14 billion for over 270,000 investors. Fisher Funds has a mission to be the one investment company that focuses on giving its clients the confidence to make better financial decisions at every stage of their lives.
Fisher Funds are known and recognised for their great investment returns and superb client service. We spoke to Carly Bartlett, Change Manager at Fisher Funds, about the benefits of implementing Micado’s recommendation engine to improve customer experience:
Connecting with the right people at the right time:
Carly recognises Micado’s Next Best Action (NBA) as having enabled Fisher Fund’s Client Services team to provide a highly-personalised customer experience and improve the effectiveness of her team’s client engagements. Carly also added: “Prior to using NBA, only four out of every ten calls resulted in a meaningful outcome, where clients engaged to make a change to their investment strategy or increase their contribution rate. After implementing NBA, the proactive client decisions doubled, with almost eight out of ten calls resulting in a meaningful engagement. This is an extremely high success rate by industry standards.”
Increase in lead generation:
“We were able to optimise our lead generation from client engagements. Before using Micado’s smart data recommendation engine, less than 5% of our outbound client engagements resulted in a lead, but with NBA, the team has more than tripled its success rate. When we implemented the new tool I expected an improvement, but I didn’t expect it to start performing so well in such a little period of time.”
“With over 270,000 clients, we had to find a way to anticipate our customer’s actions to be able to optimise our time and resources.”
Increase in conversions:
“Next Best Action provided all the information the team needed in a single view with the actions that needed to be taken to serve our client’s needs. Being served with relevant alerts enabled my team to spend their time on the phone advising our clients rather than fostering and searching through various lists to identify those clients who would value a conversation with the team. This resulted in better customer service where our clients valued an interaction and advice on their investment strategy.”
Anticipating customer needs:
“In the past, our goal was to make sure that our clients were always promptly listened and responded, but after the first lockdown in early 2020 there was an overwhelming number of client interactions. With over 270,000 clients, we had to find a way to anticipate our client’s actions to be able to optimise our time and resources.”
Working more efficiently:
“Micado aggregated multiple data sources to leverage our client information and display it into a single view to our agents. This eliminated for the Client Service team the need to search for client data across multiple systems or screen views. This simple improvement has significantly increased the team’s operational efficiency, allowing the team to focus on providing a personalised client experience and inspiring their clients to make better investment decisions.”
When asked about her experience working with Micado, Carly shared some insights:
“Introducing Micado’s NBA tool addressed a number of our key pain points. For example, I no longer need to manually create campaign lists for each team member to call through. This frees up my time but more importantly, it gives us confidence that we are reaching our clients at the very time when they need our expertise.
Clients used to be added to a list time and again for a call when it wasn’t entirely necessary. This created low-value manual work for the team. NBA uses more dynamic filtering to ensure unnecessary contact does not occur.
My team is much happier now that they’re working from one place rather than juggling multiple campaigns. They also appreciate that the tool itself has built-in automation which means fewer ‘clicks’, clearer visibility, and improved efficiency.
Changing the way your team works can be challenging, but Micado made this process very simple. Their team was able to offer support and facilitate improvements quickly, enabling my team to remain focused on what they love - helping our clients."
Take Your Customer Service to the Next Level
Customers today are more demanding than ever. They expect smooth and effortless experiences that provide continuous value. The application of artificial intelligence can help you enable your customer success team by improving its efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing churn.
If you want to see a demo of Next Best Action, get in touch with us and we will show how AI and Machine Learning can make your customer success team a lot more efficient while enhancing user experience.