Conversational AI holds the keys to drive M&E revenue growth, provide customer happiness and win market share.
M&E companies consistently are found to have among the worst customer service and customer experience in numerous surveys, including the American Customer Satisfaction Index1. What’s more, the list of media and entertainment companies that need to provide front-line customer service and support is rapidly expanding.
The evolving customer service landscape for Media and Entertainment Companies
In the media and entertainment landscape today, the average customer has direct subscriptions to many more organizations than they ever did before. As of 2019, the average American had 3.4 subscriptions to paid streaming video or media services, according to Vindica2. If free trials are added in, the number goes even higher. This figure does not include satellite radio or standard cable television packages or premium subscriptions to sports apps, for example. This combination of unbundling and competition means that customer experience and customer support are absolutely crucial to competing, because there are now dozens of relatively similar services competing for customer attention and wallet.
Rapidly changing customer expectations
The explosion of offerings and services happens just as customer expectations have radically shifted. For every question or issue, customers expect immediate response times in every channel, including chat and SMS customer service, social, voice and customer support email. Even worse, the penalty for customer service failures can be hyper-magnified as unhappy users take to Twitter or other media to share their complaints. These highly public service meltdowns are not only bad for word-of-mouth and brand reputation but also for the bottom line. They also may help competitors.
Customer support is something that the M&E industry is consistently criticized for, despite billions of dollars being sunk into improving this part of their business. For example, Comcast, a cable company and content provider that has invested considerable sums to upgrade its customer support, has consistently struggled to shed its dubious distinction of “Worst Customer Service Rating” among all companies. How bad is it? There is even a Wikipedia page3 for “Criticism of Comcast”!
These bad raps are all the more harmful in an age when more consumers are considering cutting their cord and opting into director competitors for broadcast service like YouTubeTV and HBO’s own streaming service. And those same customers are more likely to try and switch among various streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. These trends are all driving towards a future where better customer experience and service is essential to customer satisfaction and retention on any media or entertainment property. One scalable, economical and effective way to move the needle on this is modern Conversational AI.
How Conversational AI can help M&E companies
Conversational AI is newer and more advanced version of legacy AI technologies often referred to incorrectly as chatbots.
Modern Conversational AI can respond on a wide range of queries within the defined domain and it can handle a wide variety of natural language contexts, misspellings, and even slang and short-form. It also is intelligent enough to understand when it needs to ask for new information and when information requests are repetitive and annoying to customers.
Leveraging Conversational AI, M&E companies can respond, within seconds, to a large variety of customer needs. Examples include zero-touch upgrading of customer subscription plans, zero-touch in-take of technical problems and repair scheduling, and rapid updating of payment information or profile information.
If executed correctly, Conversational AI should eliminate the need for human agents to touch 50% of inbound support, according to research. By enabling faster response times and more effective self-service for customers, Conversational AI can significantly increase customer satisfaction with brands.
Interested in learning more about AI for the media and entertainment industry? Download your copy of Conversational AI for Customer Service in Media and Entertainment here.