Three Ways to Improve Customer Experience Using AI
For businesses across all industries and niches, it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) is a viable solution for efficiency improvements, customer experience efficacy, and more. From large multinational corporations to new startups, AI is now affordable, and it has the power to transform certain aspects of the business. Often, we hear about how AI can help a business to become more efficient with its resources. However, we want to spin this around because it also has tremendous value for the customer experience.
Why Introduce AI into Customer Experience?
What is the customer experience? Although some will mislabel it as ‘customer service’, this is actually just one corner of the idea. Customer service is certain a part of customer experience (which we may refer to as CX), and we’ll even talk about boosting customer service with AI marketing later, but CX actually covers the whole customer journey. From the very first point of contact with the brand to the moment they get their hands on our product, this is the customer journey. When we get customer feedback, it tends to cover every single stage rather than just the customer service section.
Next, you might be wondering why customer experience is so important. For us, it’s the reason why many businesses fail and why others are able to succeed. In order to improve customer experience, we need valuable data insights. The problem? CX datasets are typically messy and difficult to understand. By introducing AI into the process, there’s an opportunity to enjoy automated systems while organizing the many different data points.
If we were to ask call center agents, salespeople, and other employees to assess the entire history of a customer and glean some insights, it would take days (or even weeks!). With the brilliance of artificial intelligence, we can do it in minutes.
If you’re wondering why you should introduce AI into CX, we believe it allows us to boost all areas of the customer journey whether it’s through chatbots or using the insights to introduce cross-channel integration. As we learn more about the business and our customers, we make decisions based on fact; we can also personalize and tailor to the customer. If you still aren’t convinced, all of this has the benefit of pushing the business beyond where a competitor can go. With invaluable insights, you might be able to jump on a trend before anybody else or offer a service that has been missing from your niche.
How to Ensure the Successful Integration of AI
Later in this guide, we’re going to look at three ways we can use AI to boost customer experience as well as explaining how to choose the right AI solutions. But first, how do you ensure that AI is introduced correctly? What foundation do you need to build? We believe there are three steps;
1. Unification of Data — When it comes to behavior segmentation and understanding this sort of analytics, data unification and creating a single customer view is important. Thankfully, this is easier than ever thanks to the customer journey analytics platforms. Rather than wasting time bringing together copious amounts of data sources, everything is done within days rather than a number of weeks.
2. Delivery of Real-Time Insights — If we really want to make the most of AI and improve customer experience, it’s pivotal that we get insights as soon as possible. If we get them too late after the consumer touchpoint, our reactions will be too slow, and we won’t be able to get the competitive jump we desire. Again, we turn to customer journey analytics platforms and note that development kits and API options are helping in this regard.
3. Business Context — Finally, no two customer journeys will be the same, and this is something we have all come to understand in recent times. AI can provide some help, but it cannot transform your business without context. More than just recognizing order fulfilment and inbound calls, AI will need to understand how each event shapes the behavior of customers. With full context, AI provides real value in the shape of tactics and suggestions for improving customer experience.
Without these three in place, you won’t fully utilize AI, and your investment will go to waste. With data unification, real-time insights delivery, and business context provided, you make the most of AI in the ways we’re going to introduce in just a moment.
Three Ways to Boost Customer Experience with AI
As promised, we now have three ways to help customer experience with AI. From here, we’ll explain how you can choose the right solution for your business (we know the options are wide and varied!).
Improved Customer Interactions
Firstly, we said that customer service was going to play a role in customer experience, and some will say it forms the largest part. Not only will AI allow for automated systems, it will make the jobs of salespeople and call center staff easier than ever before. Can we expect these employees to learn the entire history of a customer before speaking to them on the phone? Absolutely not. Likewise, we can’t expect customers to sit and wait happily while the staff member reads a file. With AI, both of these problems are resolved.
Elsewhere, you might have the following to improve customer service and interactions;
- Virtual Assistants — Perhaps there’s no better example of a virtual assistant in action than the one introduced by Spring, one of the first retailers to go down this route. If you haven’t seen this previously, they use the Messenger Bot from Facebook to offer a personalized service. Essentially, each customer has their own shopping assistant to help with products and decisions.
- Chatbots — Meanwhile, AI-driven chatbots can be placed onto websites to allow customers to ask questions, get more information, and generally get closer to a purchasing decision. Even when there are no employees in the office, customers can communicate with the brand, and this can have a brilliant impact on sales numbers. What’s more, it’s also a useful tool for customer feedback.
Better Customer Insights
As mentioned previously, another benefit to introducing AI is the fantastic insights we get about our customers. Many years ago, we would create products and services in the hopes that there would be an audience. Even during the early days of the online era, we would create articles and hope to get some attention. With the many fantastic AI tools, it’s possible to fully understand what people want. It’s no longer a guessing game, we can learn EVERYTHING. With this in mind, the only thing separating us from success is actually listening to these insights.
It’s one thing gathering data, it’s another reading this data and spotting trends from it. Using employees alone, it would take significant amounts of time to find patterns and behaviors. Suddenly, AI has opened this level of data analysis up to even the smallest of businesses.
More Effective Targeting and Personalization
As the third use of AI in customer experience, we believe it allows us to improve both targeting and personalization. If we think about the advertising methods of old, they would be sent out to the masses. Whether it’s handing out leaflets on the high street or sending emails, it wasn’t with a strategy in mind; the strategy was to hit as many people as possible in hopes that a small number would be attracted to the brand. Today, we’re in an entirely different world.
With the addition of AI, we can target the right people, at the right time, with the right content. We learn about customers and their behaviors, we ensure our products fit their needs, and we reach out to them in the right way. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.
Finding the Best AI Solution(s) for Your Business
With the very best customer experience, we can build a brand that people love; with trust and loyalty, they will have no second thoughts in recommending the brand to others. This sounds great, but it all starts with finding the right tools in the first place. We recommend the following five steps;
- Create a CX vision and strategy.
- Understand the different touchpoints that customers have with your business (this includes everything from sales to discovery to aftersales).
- Write a list of your needs and start to learn what sort of solutions are available on the market.
- Take the time to consider the ‘buy vs build’ debate (if you have the budget and the resources to do so, you might consider the latter so that it’s tailored to your business).
- Don’t ignore everything once it’s all set up; track the key performance indicators and metrics to see what is and isn’t working.
Conclusion
If you want to shine throughout the customer journey, AI is quickly becoming the answer. Juniper Research believes that, by 2022, we will save $8 billion each year through chatbots alone. However, this doesn’t need to cause panic in the workforce. Humans will always be important for the creativity, and we believe that the future will see a collaboration between the human mind and artificial intelligence.
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
