4 Ways Data Science Will Improve Customer Communication Efficiency in 2022

Customer communication is fundamental to any business. Efficiently communicating with customers, resolving their issues, and answering their questions earns you their trust. You’ll see this reflected in both your sales figures and the reviews people leave online when it comes to nearly every review site. The reverse is true as well.

Unanswered emails. Hours spent on hold. Incompetent agents on the line. All this can easily result in lost business and bad reviews. In fact, 65 percent of customers have ditched businesses before due to a bad customer service interaction. When it comes to the data science field, people largely associate negative emotions with this kind of thing. That's because automation has traditionally made these communications workflows much worse. Communications barriers could be costing businesses around $37 billion a year, and that number keeps rising.

There's no reason that this has to be the case. By deploying cloud-based predictive artificial intelligence subroutines, some organizations are actually set to dramatically improve the relationship between customers and businesses. These four strategies, as well as many others, are set to light the industry on fire in the fiscal year 2022.

1.  Businesses Move to the Cloud and Consider UCaaS Technology

To start with, it is high time to move your communications to the cloud if you haven’t done so already. One of the biggest sinks of time and resources in customer communication is disparate communication channels. For instance, many businesses are still working with PBX business phone systems, a regular old email client, and maybe a Facebook page where people can message them. That is not enough in 2022. Especially if you’re dealing with large numbers of customer interactions.

Instead, consider moving all your communication workflows to the virtual sphere. Thanks to voice over internet protocol (VoIP), voice and video calls can now be routed over the cloud. Modern virtual business phone services and contact centers allow you to access your business numbers from anywhere through desktop and mobile apps. This provides a single source of truth, as it were, when it comes to communicating with clients.

Going further, there are platforms that help you centralize all of your communications. These are called UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platforms. They typically include voice and video calls, conferencing, messaging, live chat, virtual fax, email, and other communication channels. In spite of their advanced appearances, they're actually still based around the same storage and retrieval technologies that have powered this space for quite some time.

Consider the example of a company that has to manage several thousand contacts on a daily basis and needs at least some method of tracking them beyond a simple bubble sort. One could deploy a collection of binary trees to do the task, which could then be linked up directly to traditional telephony resources as well as email, SMS text, and social accounts. Cloud storage servers that use btrfs or even NTFS file structures as a medium of physical storage technically utilize this same system since it's built into these storage systems. System administrators who back cloud data up to an encrypted HFS+ volume are doing the same even if they don't realize it.

Regardless of which cloud storage system is in play, the major advantage of UCaaS platforms is that they help you eliminate friction losses. Your team no longer has to jump between channels. Instead, they can efficiently take care of customer needs, no matter how they reach out.

2.  Harness AI for More Than Just Basic Tasks

Next, you can harness artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make your customer communication more efficient. Modern business communication platforms come with a wide array of productivity tools, many of them AI-based. For example, interactive voice response (IVR) uses natural language processing to allow callers to state the purpose of their call in their own words.

Then, the AI can either route them to the best available agent, or it can directly take care of routine tasks like giving account information or scheduling meetings. In either case, the customer won’t have to languish in a call queue or listen to endless iterations of, “Press 1 for-”. Chatbots, too, can efficiently take care of routine requests on your website and on various social media channels. Your agents won’t have to deal with trivial requests such as booking or canceling appointments. Instead, they can focus on handling more complex issues to your customers’ full satisfaction.

Another application of AI in communication is documentation. Algorithms can easily transcribe entire customer conversations. Then, these transcripts can serve as valuable information for future interactions. Also, you can use them to review your communication efficiency. 

A final way to harness AI to step up your communications is analytics. AI and ML are fantastic at sorting through huge amounts of data and identifying patterns. Analyzing your communication data can help you pinpoint room for improvement.

These algorithms have to be put through a period of learning, in which they master certain skills by rote repetition. Industry insiders will often describe this as emulating the thought processes of a human student, but technically the process is somewhat different. Many new AI modules are explicitly designed to accept input from pre-existing dynamic libraries. This allows them to jump-start their development based on what's already known about a problem. Companies that already have sophisticated data collection and retention practices are taking advantage of this by allowing their AI-based networks to understand their customer base before they start to teach them more about customer intake.

3.  Automating Workflows Through Integrations

A third way of making sure that your customer communication will be top-notch in the coming year is automation through integration. One advantage of cloud-based business communication is that you can easily integrate your communication tools with other business platforms your team might use. These include digital marketing suites such as Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce and HubSpot, or productivity apps like Trello and Todoist.

Consequently, you can automate many workflows that are manual now, and save a lot of time. For instance, you can automatically push customer communication data from your UCaaS platform to your CRM. As soon as a call with a customer about resolving an issue is over, the transcript plus an automatically generated summary are stored in your CRM.

Then, if a customer calls again about the same issue, your agent can pull the relevant records in a heartbeat, and get an instant overview of the problem. This saves the customer from having to recount the entire history of their interactions with you. As previously mentioned, however, there have been a fair number of problems when it comes to this kind of technology. Many businesses have deployed it in such a way that customers feel as though they're communicating more with a machine than with an individual. Using AI routines to take customers to a waiting human representative is a good idea. Highly advanced, yet simple text chat services can handle many issues without requiring human intervention simply by following the XML-coded equivalent of FAQ sheets.

4.  Deployment of Legacy Languages

XML isn't the only markup language you're likely to come into contact with when dealing with the business cloud. Data scientists are rediscovering everything from APL to SmallTalk and everything in-between. Chances are that you haven't heard much about these languages outside of a classroom. SmallTalk itself was more or less developed with academic settings in mind. APL, as well as COBOL, hasn't been used much outside of governmental and institutional applications for quite some time. The fact that a virtual machine deployed in the cloud can use almost any data structure it wants is making these more attractive than they have been in decades.

Customer management teams can write scripts in whatever programming language that they'd prefer, so they can leverage their skills with the tools that would work best for their particular circumstances. Some organizations are even deploying shell scripts in the cloud. While Almquist and Bash aren't exactly the most sophisticated methods for developing a data analysis package, they're easy to learn and can be debugged without any esoteric tools. That makes them a rather interesting choice for this kind of work.

In some organizations, it's likely that staffers will develop their own simple syntax that's best suited to their specific needs. It's equally likely that rapid development environments, such as Ruby on Rails, will start to supplant so-called no-code IDEs that aren't as well suited for deployment in the field of customer communications.

Moving Forward With Customers in the Cloud

Communication is always the key when running a business. It's the key to customer satisfaction and, consequently, business success. By moving your communications to the cloud, harnessing AI, and automating workflows, you’ll be able to increase your efficiency in 2022 and give your customers a fantastic communication experience. Those who wish to take advantage of any of these new technologies may need to do nothing more than review their existing workflows and see which of them need to be swapped around.