What do customers expect when they reach a contact center? – To have their problems solved, with empathy.
Providing a solution to a problem is just scraping the surface of customer experience (“CX”) since humans – employees and customers – want to be understood, treated, and respected as unique individuals.
In the age of big data, AI, and personalized CX, a contact center can be all of these: the frontline for delivering human-centered and personalized customer support, a data gold mine, an innovation hub, and a vital touchpoint on a customer journey.
A contact center is potentially where the forces of technology and humanity coalesce, where consumer psychology, data, and AI driven real-time predictions and personalized customer experience meet. A contact center of the future can combine customer support, market research, marketing, and sales all together, with a human touch, to drive both consumer satisfaction and behaviors.
In Pt 1, we will discuss the increasingly important role consumer psychology plays as a qualitative factor in analyzing quantitative data, and applying AI to CX.
In Pt 2, we will explore the future of contact centers where behavioral psychology, AI, market research, marketing, sales, customer support, and customer experience all come together.
Like organizational psychology, consumer psychology focuses on what motivates behaviors, i.e., why consumers buy a product or a service, hopefully again and again.
The psychology of consumer behavior reveals why customers choose particular products, how they make decisions and what factors drive their choices. By understanding consumer emotions, motivations, and behavioral patterns, as well as factors such as social status, identity, and decision-making, contact centers and customer support services can meet their demands, even exceed their expectations.
With data and AI, it is easier to feel the pulse of consumer sentiment in real time, to “identify trends and patterns among consumers. Attributes such as gender, income, age, race, education, religion and region all add up to customer archetypes, such as the Innocent (traditional, hopeful and romantic) or the Explorer (adventurous, innovative and active). That’s just one way … [to] make determinations based on hard data so that companies understand their most likely customers and why they make the purchases that they do.” https://appliedpsychologydegree.usc.edu/blog/what-is-consumer-psychology
AI can flex its analytical muscle while processing real time data, to give insights to contact center agents for personalized customer support, situation by situation, customer by customer.
As a lens, consumer psychology helps decipher customer feelings, motivations, triggers, expectations, and behaviors. It is a vital tool for understanding consumer needs and mindsets, and designing more personalized and unique interactions to elevate customer experience.
Here is an example of how Neutrogena got 289% ROI (an $8.05 return on every advertising dollar) by investing time and money into consumer psychology: Upon learning from its shopping cart data that 75% of its customers were only buying one line of their products, such as an eye cream, Neutrogena introduced product pairings to targeted customers, with video advertisement such pairing a facial cleanser to an eye cream.
Consumer psychology is a tool for understanding triggers, impulses, reactions, trends, and influences that drive consumer expectations, decision making, and purchasing behaviors in both the short term and the long run. It sheds light into why a consumer selects one product or service over other choices, what makes him/her try a new product or service, and why they stay loyal to a brand.
“Brands that can understand the why behind consumer decision-making will have a major edge.” https://appliedpsychologydegree.usc.edu/blog/future-of-consumer-psychology
While AI enabled real-time data provides timely feedback, from consumers points of view, to improve a product and/or service, consumer psychology helps understand the why behind the data and consumer perceptions, motivations, and interactions.
To meet customer expectations and anticipate future trends in consumer behaviors, contact centers need both AI facilitated quantitative data analytics, and qualitative tools such as consumer psychology.
While big data is all numbers as a quantitative tool, consumer psychology puts data into context as a qualitative tool. “While big data may provide deeper knowledge of what consumers are doing, it has increased brand appetite for understanding the ‘why’ behind the numbers.” https://appliedpsychologydegree.usc.edu/blog/future-of-consumer-psychology
The same article cited brands like Sephora, with their success in using a virtual color match assistant to narrow down options for potential customers when they were overwhelmed by the number of choices – an example of using consumer psychology as a roadmap to transform AI data into actionable customer experience support.
For CX services that are not leveraging AI and big data, search histories, website and social media analytics, contact center data, and customer surveys all provide valuable insights into customer expectations, behaviors, and preferences. While contact centers can be a data mine of customer behavioral information, psychology provides the analytical context for the data.
Upon understanding customer motivations and decision-making process, psychology, as a powerful tool for predictive behavior, identifies consumer needs and anticipates future trends, while AI makes this process more speedy and accurate.
“Today, 85% of executives believe that real-time delivery represents the future of successful branding. Yet brands cannot position themselves to customize their services in real time without data analytics and an understanding of customer behavior.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083068/customer-experience-horizons/
In Pt. 2, we will continue with our thoughts on scaling CX personalization with AI and behavioral psychology, and on the future of contact centers where behavioral psychology, AI, marketing, sales, personalized customer support, and customer experience all come together.
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As a leader in the customer experience support services, ApexCX helps customer-facing companies excel with both technology and human-centered, customer-led CX assessment, design, implementation, and contact center management, from end to end. Please contact us for further information. Thank you.
