Value-creating customer dialog in times of digital automation
How companies can redesign customer interactions through intelligent automation and AI.
Today’s customers expect fast, personalized and relevant responses – regardless of the channel. Digital automation and AI offer enormous opportunities here, but real added value can only be created if they are used correctly.
This book shows you how you can strategically rethink customer dialogs. It combines scientific findings, practical examples and concrete tools to make communication more efficient, more personal and more sustainable.
In many companies, customer service is under pressure: rising expectations, limited resources and the need to keep an eye on costs. At the same time, technologies such as AI enable completely new forms of customer interaction.
Together with Nils Hafner, I wrote this book to show companies how value-creating customer dialogues can be designed in a digitalized world – with the right interplay of people, processes and technology.
This book is ideal for:
In this book you will learn, among other things:
The future of customer dialog is hybrid: automated systems take over routine tasks, while people are responsible for complex, emotional or strategic interactions.
Generative AI enables new forms of personalization and efficiency – companies that miss out on these developments risk being at a competitive disadvantage. This book shows you how you can actively shape change.
Researcher, lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and doctoral candidate in the field of Conversational AI at the University of Fribourg.
She has been advising companies and organizations on the use of chatbots, AI and automation solutions for many years.
Professor of Customer Relationship Management at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, author of numerous specialist books and experienced consultant in the field of customer experience and digital transformation.
Together, we combine research and practice to provide clear guidelines for value-creating customer dialog in the digital age.
No. The book is aimed at specialists and managers who design customer dialogs and is deliberately written with a practical orientation.
Yes. It contains numerous best practices and practical examples from companies.
Yes. A separate chapter is dedicated to the relevant KPIs for customer dialog management.
It combines scientific principles with practical recommendations for action.
This specialist book provides suggestions on how we can deal with the current challenges of modern customer service on the basis of concepts that can be implemented sustainably. Esteemed scientists and practitioners have made several contributions.
First, Prof. Dr. Nils Hafner demonstrates the necessity of an integrated customer dialogue strategy and presents approaches for optimization. Gregorio Uglioni, the “CX-Goalkeeper”, demonstrates the need for a human-centered culture as the basis for the design of customer dialogues, while Prof. Dr. Dominik Georgi and Prof. Jan-Erik Baars measure and support this culture with newly developed management tools and key performance indicators. Dr. Sebastian Pyka and Dr. Uwe Stuhldreier use the holistic example of customer dialog management at HUK24 to show which concepts have already been implemented at mature companies. The example can therefore be seen as a beacon for very good automated customer dialog management.
In a second part, Prof. Dr. Claudia Bünte will focus on the degree of use of artificial intelligence and its potential in marketing, while Prof. Dr. Ralf Kreutzer from HWR Berlin will provide a concise overview of the possibilities of modern marketing automation. Dr. Sarah Seyr from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts will focus on the role of data collection and use. Finally, Dominic Boller and Dr. Severin Lienhard give examples of automated dialogs that sell.
The third part of the book is dedicated to customer dialogs in service, which are often neglected in practice. The organizational form of the customer contact center, which Harald Henn from CEX Trendradar describes, is more relevant than ever. Rémon Elsten, founder of the Service Excellence Cockpit, outlines the most important key figures and benchmarks in customer service. Anna Rozumowski and Prof. Dr. Marc K. Peter show that even automated contacts are essentially based on the basic prerequisite of trust, using a wide range of research results and a high level of practical understanding. The same applies to the experiment by Sophie Hundertmark from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts on the design of optimal chatbots “Be the bot”. The practical examples of Swisscard AECS by Dr. Kai Duttle and CSS Krankenversicherung by Gary Bachmann round off this volume.
In a fourth part, Prof. Dr. Edy Portmann from the University of Fribourg takes a look into the future and classifies the importance of customer dialogues using the example of conversation theory. He shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can become a sustainable and human-centered technology of the future using fuzzy logic. Finally, Prof. Dr. Nils Hafner and Sophie Hundertmark show the role of Large Language Models for the automation of customer dialogs.
