Creating the Customer Experience of the Future Using Conversational AI.

Organisations are failing to truly harness the power of Conversational AI to deliver real business outcomes. Limited understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has resulted in its hurried and ineffective implementation. The Customer Experience (CX) leaders of tomorrow can avoid this by following a framework that focuses on using AI and Machine Learning to deliver a tangible business case that enhances their overall customer experience.

A recent CIO survey by Gartner found that by 2022, 20% of customer service will be handled by intelligent conversational agents and yet, 54% of organisations still have a very limited understanding of the technology. This has set the premise for the emergence of a plethora of vendors offering niche solutions using AI. However, to truly empower these solutions, enterprises need to take a holistic approach to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence that combines the best technologies in Machine Learning, Natural-Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural-Language Processing (NLP) to enrich every stage of the CX life cycle.

To achieve this, organisations should implement a multi layered framework that focuses on the key capabilities of AI technology to:

· Understand your customer and find meaning in their words, speech, images and context.

· Examine this meaning and use it to predict outcomes, find relationships and create associations.

· Implement the analysis provided by this examination and use it to optimize processes, respond to issues and take informed actions both automated and assisted.

Implementing this framework is easy and can be the difference between enterprises that simply have an AI layer and ones that are genuinely using AI to get ahead of their competitors. Methodical implementation of AI can be arranged into a few easy steps that when followed will ensure a holistic and targeted deployment of the technology.

1. Map and analyse existing customer journey’s without AI consideration.

To make sure AI is as impactful as it can possibly be it is important to first recognise what the real issues are that it needs to fix. Problems and inefficiencies cannot be solved and optimised if they are not first explicitly identified. Before doing anything else it is important to start at the basics and ask:

What are the experiences that my customers are having at the moment?

How do our customers view us?

What is the current journey that our customers are taking from buying to owning cycle?

2. Explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence to help you understand your customers

Traditional structured data is easy to understand and analyse, it includes data that is clearly defined and easy to report on. However, more and more of the data we collect today is unstructured and difficult to define and analyse. This includes voice recordings of customer interactions, call centre notes and transcripts, online comments and reviews and many more interactions between enterprises and their customers. Conversational AI solutions are far superior to humans in their ability to mine and examine unstructured data and reveal previously hidden insights into your customers thinking.

Asking key questions can help ensure that you choose the right AI to deliver a real business outcome for your organisation.

What unstructured and unused data on our customers do we have?

What insights could we hope to achieve?

How can this drive and focus our sales and marketing strategy?

3. Use Insights from AI to examine, explain and guide your decision making and customer journeys.

Once you have insights, utilised correctly AI can help guide your CX strategy by using white space analysis to recommend opportunities, generating forecasts and providing explanations. Nowadays, Conversational AI has the ability to drive truly empathetic sales strategy by recommending decisions based on a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and desires over time.

AI assistants can be deployed to generate forecasts and qualify and prioritize leads from the insights gained through customer analysis. It is this holistic integration of different AI capabilities that will truly revolutionise your customer experience.

4. Create original targeted content and customer interaction by using Conversational AI built on the previous understanding and examination of your customers.

Deep insights into your customers thinking combined with intelligent analysis and predictive analytics can allow you to use Conversational AI to drive focused and original content through all channels including email, text, social and voice.

By following a guided and methodical framework you can ensure that Conversational AI is creating content that is driving genuine value for your business.

Get ahead of the competition

The artificial intelligence revolution is among us, make sure that you get ahead of the rest and avoid getting trapped deploying expensive AI technologies with lots of hype and very little utility. By following a clear and methodical framework you can ensure that your decision making when implementing this disruptive technology is informed and educated. This will ensure that AI will cease to be a novelty and become an invaluable part of the enterprise delivering genuine business outcomes.

Team Mesh