How can AI Benefit your Customer Experience?

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise in the business world and for good reason; it’s effective. In a 2017 survey it was found that 49 percent of consumers said they would shop at an online store more frequently when they use AI and 34 percent would spend more money there. Those statistics are in direct relation to the ability of AI to positively affect the experience of the customer at various touchpoints. As a top web development company, we wanted to share how AI can benefit your customer experience and increase sales.

The Need for AI in CX

Artificial intelligence has the ability to create better experience for the customer through a combination of convenient, intelligent, informed, and lightning fast interactions. That is something which most employees cannot always manage. That is why it is so interesting to see companies force their customers into outdated interactions instead of more efficient ones.

The customer experience (CX) has numerous interactions with employees from salespeople, customer service or call center personnel, and other customer-facing roles. However not all of these interactions necessarily need to be with an actual person when the process could be much more efficient using AI; something customers now appreciate.

While there was an initial resistance to AI in the marketplace by consumers a few year ago, that is no longer the case. The technology has become accepted by consumers and now looked for if not expected because as humans become more creatures of comfort, they have less time to waste, and AI does not waste time.

Artificial intelligence has all of the customer data at virtual fingertips along the ability to analyze that information and derive insights in real time to better serve the customers needs as efficiently and quickly as possible in certain scenarios.

Why would a customer want to sit in the slow lane when they could be in the express lane?

Ways AI can benefit the Customer Experience

• Improved Personalization — A key part of the customer experience is personalization. Without personalization your message is easily lost in the shuffle of digital noise online. Using personalization makes customers feel special and that they are important to a business. AI has the ability to perform predictive analysis based on behavior and purchase patterns to engage customers at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way as well as identifying which action would be most effective to take in given situations.
• Data-Driven Insights — AI has the ability to analyze, combine, categorize, organize, and obtain insights from large databases faster than teams of employees. These insights can be applied by providing better context for interactions and recognizing customer trends. Good customer management relies on data to form a full view of the customer, which is easier when AI is handling the heavy lifting of reviewing the enormous amount of customer data businesses have.
• Customer Support — AI, specifically chatbots, are greatly accelerating the customer support process. The combination of self-service agents, virtual assistants, and chat bots are handling basic problems customers have when interacting with a business from simple questions, resolving problems, product assistance, or navigation. With little, if any, waiting time, customer needs are met quickly which increases satisfaction and frees up time for human agents to solve more difficult problems.
• Content Discovery — Understanding what customers are interested in is very important as businesses look to engage their customers as effectively as possible. With the vast amount of data available from existing customer data to social media listening, AI is able to recognize trends and patterns which can discover gaps between what customers are clamoring for versus what is in existence to meet those needs.
• Increased Relevancy — With the ability for real time analysis and predictive behavior modeling combined with machine learning and algorithms, AI is able to better run the show behind the scenes providing more pertinent information and offers at a more relevant juncture increasing engagement.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that AI can greatly benefit your customer experience in ways that humans simply can’t. The combination of speed and data analysis of vast quantities of data is impossible to replicate by a human while AI can do it with thousands of customers simultaneously. As more and more businesses make use of AI, customers will increase their expectations of how their interactions should go and those companies that insist on using outdated methods we be left thinking of the good old days when they had more conversions.

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