When companies and BPOs embark on any digital transformation initiative, improving the customer experience is almost certainly their top priority. Providing customers with an exceptional digital experience — during the purchase process, customer support, or any other interaction — is a major key to business success no matter the industry or vertical.

Customer experience (CX) is now a true differentiator among brands, winning out over product quality and pricing. In fact, 47% of customers say they won’t do business with a brand if they’ve had a bad experience, and when they do, 62% are willing to share it with others, tanking the brand’s reputation in the process.

Today’s customers use a variety of channels and devices to communicate these days — messaging apps on smartphones and tablets, Facebook, Instagram, and customer review sites — making it imperative that brands provide omnichannel support to enhance the customer experience and cultivate a more loyal (and profitable) customer base.

But while many BPOs and internal contact centers are simply looking to solve their most immediate CX challenges, others are taking a more future-focused perspective and planning how they’ll scale and adapt their operations as the business landscape evolves. In fact, analysts have already begun studying investment in CX strategies and software, which is expected to grow more than 10% annually through 2026.

Those investments — made by BPO leaders like you — aim to enable easier, and more widespread automation for optimizing the customer experience for your enterprise clients, now and in the future. Of course, it’s important to understand how automation and other customer engagement technologies are paving the way in CX, so here’s a look at how your organization can reap the rewards today…and tomorrow.

The importance of adopting automation now

Communication is no longer one-directional from the customer to the business, but rather multi-directional, with customers expecting businesses to engage with them via social, mobile, web, and phone.

In response, BPOs and their enterprise clients must find reliable and scalable ways to create more seamless, personalized interactions, and deeper insights into the customers themselves now and as their industry evolves.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, combined with the demand for greater efficiency that comes with automation, are spurring new generations of customer engagement solutions. But many of these solutions are still in their infancy, not quite ready to meet the business challenges at the scale and effectiveness they promise.

For BPOs like yours, it’s a golden opportunity to stake out a leadership position in an ever-changing landscape and evolving industry. Instead of investing a small fortune in dollars and time implementing the latest and greatest in AI platforms, you can utilize cost-effective but impactful chatbot and automation technologies along with live chat platforms to handle a variety of frontline customer interactions quickly, reliably, and at a scale your enterprise customers and competitors cannot.

This approach accomplishes three things:

1. You can deliver the quality customer experiences your enterprise clients expect and need to stay competitive.
2. You gain necessary experience with automation that you can draw upon down the road when you or your clients are ready for larger AI initiatives.
3. You can keep your human teams in place to handle customer interactions that require a complex or more personalized approach.

The advantages of implementing automated chat tools

In addition to being a provider of valuable chatbot technologies to your enterprise clients, and, by extension, facilitating the benefits of automation for them, you can also act as trusted advisers and own bot, automation, and chat operations on their behalf. With chatbot performance and outsourced human-team metrics, you can run an analysis and make expert recommendations to your clients for future automation investments that will further optimize the customer experience.

There are a number of other advantages to adopting simpler chatbot technologies now while you’re still ahead:

• You can bust through automation’s barrier to entry. Instead of wrestling with extremely complex AI platforms that reach into every corner of the enterprise and take months to roll out, you can implement simpler, automated smart bots on your own in a matter of days or weeks with few, if any, specialized technical skills.
• You can avoid an enormous financial commitment. The cost of purchasing robust AI systems and paying for the skilled human resources that are needed to deploy and manage them — skills that are often in short supply — is beyond the reach of many organizations.
• You’re in a better position to scale and capitalize on business growth opportunities. Employing chatbot technologies allows you to expand services within your existing accounts, enable growth for your enterprise clients, and even create new streams of revenue as chat and automation consultants.

The need for automation isn’t going away. That’s why adopting automated chatbot technologies as soon as you can puts you in the vanguard by helping your clients, and your own organization, keep up with market demands and take incremental steps toward wider-reaching digital transformation.

Seize the CX opportunity

CX is more important than ever and can mean the difference between maintaining a competitive edge or falling far behind. As customers increasingly do business via more digital channels, the need for optimal digital customer experiences is at a fever pitch.

But while your BPO organization may see customer engagement solutions like AI-powered chatbots and automation as a threat in some ways, a shift in perception will show they’re actually high-value business opportunities. Enterprise-grade live chat, bot, and automation technology gives you the confidence and the tools to:

• Incorporate automation into your customer engagement strategy without overwhelming the system or disregarding the value of human agents
• Meet customer expectations and deliver the best customer experiences you can
• Add value to your partnership with your enterprise clients and set them up for future CX success

To learn how to improve customer experiences with a hybrid human-chatbot solution, download our eBook “Co-existing.”