According to tech giant Microsoft, by 2025 almost 95% of consumer interactions will be through AI-supported channels. The omnichannel experience is increasingly gaining traction with businesses all over the world. Unfortunately, too many businesses still don’t realize their consumers have evolved. They still believe in paths of engagement that are too outmoded for the modern customer. However, artificial intelligence may be the key to offering an informed, convenient, and intelligent customer experience. Read on to find out more.
The Room for AI in Customer Experience
Customer experience can cut both ways. If successful, it becomes a strong force driving growth. On the other hand, it can be a huge risk if your customer experience strategy is not up to the mark. Take the Spectrum Gold package, for example. It is because the provider offers a great customer experience that subscribers sign up for top-tier packages. CX is a key factor in long-term business growth.
Data and analytics are two primary customer experience enhancement tools. The problem is that a dataset pertaining to the business’ customer experience is often messy. And when you factor in the chaos in customer behavior it adds new challenges. However, this very complexity makes it an ideal application to unleash AI computing power.
Think of it this way. Every component of the customer experience, such as employees, call center agents, and employees cannot reasonably remember a customer’s entire history. And even if they did, they lack the structure to derive useful insights from this information in real-time. Automating processes by hand cannot account for every conceivable type of customer. To offer a better customer experience, you need to assess all CX touchpoints and identify trends. This is an area in which artificial intelligence remains very strong.
Why AI Is a Good Choice
AI has 3 key characteristics that make it ideal for successful application in customer experience improvement. These 3 fundamental capabilities are the reason AI is so promising in the field. They include the following:
Data Unification
If you want to analyze customer behavior you must first create a single customer view. AI data unification tools are the best way to do that. Think of an AI as a pet that learns and grows more when you feed it more data. Using AI for this task cuts both the monetary costs as well as the time it would otherwise consume. With new developments in AI, unifying and integrating data takes just days, instead of weeks.
Delivering Insights in Real-Time
To truly offer a seamless experience, businesses need real-time insights on customers at any touchpoint they choose. That means all touchpoints need to be integrated accordingly. Of course, many SaaS companies have APIs and allow for third-party integration. But in reality, APIs do not account for all touchpoint data.
Businesses use a plethora of other data sources in addition to SaaS data streams. Customer care, point of sale systems, payment gateways, etc. are all valuable data streams. With so much information, it is virtually impossible for a human to deliver real-time insights on every customer at each touchpoint.
Offering Results in Business Contexts
Every customer has a unique customer journey. Every business has its own set of touchpoints as well as distinct methods to use them for customer engagement. An AI solution is only as good as the context it works in. To truly add value, the AI needs to understand the significance and role of each touchpoint. With this information, AI can find you the best course of action in the relevant context. It can even start locating room for improvement and other touchpoints as well.
How AI is Shaping CX
We know why AI is an ideal candidate to give the customer experience function a modern makeover. But did you know AI is already being applied to many aspects of CX today? We have seen a lot of them in action over the years. Some of the modern applications of AI in CX follow below.
Chatbots
Using a chatbot helps businesses offer immediate and personalized responses around the clock. Chatbots have different applications in different customer engagement situations. What they do is stimulate human interaction by offering relevant and useful responses 24/7. This reduces delays and errors, particularly in the customer service aspect.
Delivering High-Value Insights
The best customer experience occurs when businesses are able to remember customers and offer personalized responses to their needs. AI can mine data across billions of customer journeys, identifying areas for improvement and high-impact insights in real-time. This is helping many businesses optimize the customer experience they offer.
Virtual Assistants
Nobody’s a stranger to virtual assistants. They use the power of AI to answer questions or obey commands. For example, I could ask Google assistant about ok Google call Spectrum customer service and get an immediate and accurate response. Some businesses make use of this in the form of personal virtual shopping assistants for customers. It streamlines the customer journey by finding visitors exactly what they are looking for based on their responses.
