Research is clear: customer service is one of the biggest drivers of customer loyalty. In fact, 78 percent of U.S. consumers say customer service is important to loyalty, according to Netomi’s State of Customer Service 2020 report. Increasingly, customers expect support that is fast, personal, and effective. To deliver the experience that customers expect, companies are adopting AI to provide immediate resolutions that bring customer delight and business value.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and your customers are scrutinizing your business more intensely than ever. They’re comparing their experience with your brand to the easy, fast, and personalized experiences they’re having with the best of the best. And it’s these customer-focused businesses that get to reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.

Not long ago, handle time was the chief measure of customer support agent productivity. Managers optimized everything they could to lower costs (that is, time spent) by speeding up their teams’ calls. This, according to management consultants at Bain & Company, is what leaders do to make teams more efficient. Efficiency is producing the same with less. Productivity, by contrast, is producing more with the same.

In most organizations, the highest-performing sales reps are eventually promoted to management. But being a manager is a much different job than being a rep. You can be at the very top of your trade, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. I experienced this firsthand when I moved into management. I was good at sales, but I wasn’t really good at leading. You’re not taught that it’s a completely different job that operates in a gray area every single day.

A business can’t thrive without lead generation, however, the more leads you generate, the more selective you have to be in your pursuits. Sales rep don’t want to waste time chasing a large list of dead-end leads. That time could be spent nurturing more promising leads. Yet, when it comes to valuing leads, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Experience and gut instinct goes a long way, but they aren’t enough.

Customers may not be interested in your customer experience software – but your company absolutely should be. When done right, a simple and sophisticated customer experience platform is a key tool for creating loyalty. For companies, it means being able to seamlessly communicate with customers across the channels they want – including email, chat, text, phone and social media. For customers, it fosters a sense of trust that they can reach you the way they want.

Messaging has changed the way we communicate. Relationships big and small — from the personal to the political to the commercial – can be mapped out across conversations in the messaging apps almost everybody uses every day. In our annual conversational business report, State of Messaging 2020, we look at the biggest messaging stories from the past year, along with research, reporting, and predictions on how the future of messaging between brands and customers will play out.

The emergence of bots, AI, and interactivity in messaging has transformed channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage from places we chat to platforms where we do business. Conversational business is only going in one direction—Gartner estimates that “by 2022, 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging tools like chatbots, machine learning, and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.”

In the past 3 years, the AI space has become so noisy that even seasoned executives struggle to cut through the jargon, making it challenging to deliver against an AI strategy. Support leaders face a series of roadblocks. The AI space overall isn’t accessible to the business stakeholders who want to leverage it for improved customer experience.