LogMeIn’s mission is to simplify the way brands connect with their customers

Rahul Sharma, Managing Director, LogMeIn India speaks to VARINDIA of the role that AI plays in enhancing customer experience and how LogMeIn empowers brands to use AI to deliver better experience to their customers -

How do you try to position Bold360 from other chatbots and virtual customer assistance channels available in the market?

At LogMeIn, our mission is to simplify the way people connect with each other and the world around them to create amazing outcomes – for both our customers and theirs. We support over 200 million customer interactions every year, and being one of our core markets, our customer engagement and support (CES) solutions are designed to empower companies to deliver personalized customer experiences. Bold360 ai is the most tightly integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot and agent workspace in the industry today.  It includes the flagship Bold360 omni-channel agent workspace, and adds AI chatbot and self-service technology, in one solution.  With Bold360 ai, the move from bot led transactions to agent led transactions is seamless – continuing the conversation in the same window - and arming the agents with contextual knowledge based on previous interactions with the customer. Bold360 ai helps companies use AI for both conversational self-service as well as agent-assisted interactions, to make each and every customer engagement efficient, effective, and delightful. 

In addition to bringing together the best of agent and AI self-service together, Bold360 ai also provides the fastest time to value. Where most AI powered customer engagement solutions today require complex data analysis, months of set-up and significant amounts of data, Bold360 is accessible and ready-to-use, delivering value in weeks, not months and does not require data scientists.

What role is AI playing in enhancing customer experience?

AI helps improve the customer experience (CX) in multifarious ways. From the customer perspective, it ensures consistent and personalized experiences at scale. For companies on the other hand, it helps recognize pain points and know more about their customers’ preferences, thereby helping them serve their customers better and address issues efficiently. As AI helps empower agents, we will see a shift towards a hybrid model of customer engagement, one that consists of the human element, with technology helping share the workload, as AI powered chatbots will feed customer information and recommendations to the agent, helping them deliver a superior experience.

How are you empowering brands to deliver better customer experience through different AI channels?

A customer today does not rely on only one medium to reach out to a brand for support, and this provides an opportunity for brands to engage with their customers across various touch points. However, they must ensure that the experience is not different when customers move from a company’s website on their desktop to their mobile device, and more significantly, when they move across channels, such as Facebook Messenger, live chat or speaking to a customer support executive. By adding AI across both self-service and agent-assisted channels, customers can now receive more human, personal and consistent experiences throughout their journey. 

Facilitating seamless movement from one communication channel to another is necessary for a company to efficiently solve customer queries, and the omni-channel capabilities of Bold360 ai enables companies to deliver consistent support across channels, without straining the contact center. 

What impact can good CX have on brands?

The market today is rife with competition and numerous similarly positioned products. In such a scenario, good CX, or the lack of it, can be key differentiator for companies. What constitutes as good customer service has changed since the advent of on-demand services, incorporation of artificial intelligence, and mobile-first lifestyles, and customers expect personalized, quick, and round the clock services across communication channels of their choice. Today’s consumers are informed, demanding, and do not have high brand loyalty, and a company may lose out to their competition on the back of one bad experience. However, a good experience helps foster long-term brand loyalty and advocacy, which has led to CX becoming a boardroom priority now.

How can start-ups take advantage of CX to drive business growth?

Delivering exceptional CX should be a vital component of a start-up’s strategy and overall business model. As start-ups are generally not tied down to legacy systems, they can adopt newer and better technology, quicker than larger organizations, and this empowers start-ups to move away from traditional CX practices, and embrace emerging technologies. This will also equip them to compete with established companies in their space by enabling them to deliver better, more personalized experiences – at scale – without having to staff a large contact center.  Being able to deliver these types of experiences helps start-ups create higher customer value and build customer relationships that will grow over time without significant investment. 

What challenges do brands face while offering customer experience and how do you try to address them?

Brands often lack the ability to identify and leverage the different touch points of a customer’s journey – making it tough to create a personalized connection with customers. Coupled with the inadequate fund allocation that we often notice for CX, brands have been unable to leverage the benefits of delivering good CX. While brands may successfully glean information about their customers, the challenge remains in being able to sift through the information, determine the value of it, and derive actionable insights from it. The key to creating an effective CX strategy is finding the right mix of people, process and technologies, and our suite of products helps customers establish CX practices that are scalable, seamless and effective.