When it comes to customer service, what do you think is the most dominant trend in the industry?
AI in customer experience can be seen as the most dominant trend. Does it really enhance the customer experience strategy? How are businesses incorporating AI technology to meet their business goals?
AI-powered chatbots can be seen as the first point of interaction for customers on eCommerce sites. Amazon is developing an AI-powered system to manage customer queries. There are more artificial intelligence consulting services being offered due to the increase in demand for providing intelligent solutions to customers.
What's the Need for Businesses to Focus on Customer Experience?
Customer Experience is the key to unlocking the commercial potential as it helps in gaining knowledge about consumers, and the knowledge helps in devising better marketing strategies for customers to provide them with a well-defined personalized recommendation system.
How does AI Help in Improving Customer Experience?
Better Customer Understanding
AI facilitates better customer understanding. AI/ML gathers and analyzes behavioral, social, and historical data to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of its customers. As AI has the ability to continuously learn and improve from the data it analyzes, it's able to perform sentiment analysis with respect to customer’s perspective using NLP services.
With this approach, brands can segregate relevant content to customers and increase sales opportunities along with improving the overall customer’s experience throughout his journey.
Predictive Behavior Analysis and Real-time Decisioning
Real-time sentiment analysis is the ability to make a decision based on the most recent data available. AI in customer experience uses real-time decision-making, which greatly boosts marketing. For instance, it can identify customers that use ad blockers and provide them with other UI components for customer engagement. Personalized recommendations can be used to provide users with more relevant content.
Since AI is capable of efficiently handling large amounts of data, the speed, amount, and variability of data have all increased over time. According to recent figures, data volume climbed from 33ZB (Zettabytes) in 2018 to 59ZB in 2020, and is expected to rise to 175ZB by 2025! This could help to feed more precise real-time analysis using high-performance platforms.
Personalized Customer Service
Customer service is the leading application of AI that is being used extensively. Customers have daily AI-enabled interactions with businesses, including chatbots, facial recognition, biometric scanners, and digital assistants. The use of facial recognition system and biometric scanners developed through various Deep Learning techniques which rely on pixel data analysis aid to a delightful customer experience.
Customers have daily AI-enabled interactions with businesses That have been developed with specialized ML techniques used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Chatbots supplement the human workforce and help employees to be as efficient as possible. AI-powered chatbots services are a valuable tool for businesses that save the business money by allowing customers to tackle minor issues on their own time.
Chatbots should be used to take care of a select number of topics like order tracking, account management, and invoice management. The great thing about chatbots is that they are available 24/7.
Better Customer Retention Efforts with AI
AI has advanced by leaps and bounds, and this also helps in improving your customer retention efforts by reducing churn risks. Machine Learning algorithms effectively help businesses identify issues and tackle them before they turn into something big.
The new technology helps in prioritizing based on real data instead of guesswork. AI/ML helps with what customers like and what they want, which plays a huge role in customer retention and purchasing (GANs being used to generate plausible e-commerce orders).
Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a variation of deep neural network that are believed to learn a generative model given a bunch of real data points.
Prevent Employee Burnout
AI technology doesn't' take breaks, doesn't need sleep, and never gets sick. The performance of AI doesn't get hampered, and on top of that, it keeps learning new skills. As per an artificial intelligence consulting company, it’s not an argument to replace your employees with AI; instead, you can create an environment for your employees where they are not overworked and burned out.
They can bring creativity to the team and focus on valuable tasks that require a human touch.
Improve Lead Generation
To increase the customer experience, the whole process of buying should be made hassle-free. Preprogrammed questions can validate leads before passing them on to a sales agent. Businesses can greatly benefit from AI by improving lead generation. Businesses spend a huge part of their budget on lead generation, and AI can cut costs and provide them with quality leads.
Data-driven insights
AI is hugely beneficial in providing data-driven insights. AI can track:
- Geo-specific events
- Previous customer communications
- Purchasing Behaviors
- On-site Interactions
- Psychographic factors
- Referral sources
Data is crucial; the more you know about your customers, the better.
Task Management
AI solutions used for customer service can handle various tasks all at once, and it has improved the relationship between brands and customers. One thing that customers hate is waiting; waiting hampers the customer experience.
As per a study by IBM, 52% of customers hung up on the customer support line because they didn't want to wait or their queries remained unresolved. AI provides automated replies to customers. Chatbots used for branch communication is up 92% since 2019 and 67% of global consumers interacted with a chatbot over the last 12 months. It mirrors the task and refers to the solution when the issue arises again.
AI can even analyze unstructured data in real-time. It utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to read a 'ticket' and swiftly direct it to the right team. For example, MonkeyLearn automatically identifies customers' sentiments and tags tickets for better prioritization. AI saves time for humans, and they can take up other tasks.
Customer Loyalty
AI helps in gaining customer loyalty. It makes CX more engaging and enables you to stay ahead of the game. It also lifts the burden on customer service agents. Analyzing data, automating quick responses, finding solutions, recommending products and services, and more are done instantly with the help of AI.
Customized Content
Businesses spend hours composing and scheduling weekly emails to different customers. It becomes difficult to deliver customized mail to every customer on your list. AI makes the whole task less stressful. With AI, businesses can send highly personalized emails by identifying topics of interest to recommend relevant content to customers and potential customers.
Emails can be based on the following things:
- Interactions with the business website
- Previously read blogs
- The most popular blog at the time
- Total time spent on a web page
- Initial interactions with emails
Steps to Leverage AI In Customer Experience
Design a CX Strategy
It's important to have your organization's Customer Experience (CX) vision and strategy. Your AI strategy for CX would be useful when you are clear about your company's goals regarding CX. Bring your team on board and collect insights.
Plan and Analyze User Journeys
Users interact with brands at various touchpoints, from discovery through pre-sales, sales, customer support, etc and that is called User Journey. One needs to understand all these touchpoints to create an AI-powered omnichannel consumer experience.
An Understanding of AI Solutions
AI technology can be applied in a variety of ways to improve customer experience, which includes virtual assistants, recommendation engines, sentimental analysis, computer vision, and so on. You have to analyze which is a good fit for your company's goals.
Create or Buy?
When you decide to improve customer experience with AI, you need to decide which path to go- incorporate AI into an existing app or purchase a ready-to-use CX/AI solution? If you have an in-house team or AI specialist mobile app development service, you can go for the former option.
Measure Success
Just using AI for CX is not enough; you have to track and measure its success. To measure the success ratio of AI with customer experience, keep an eye on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics.
Future of AI in Customer Experience
In the last decade, the AI market has evolved at a fast pace; more than 1500 firms, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, have invested heavily in building next-gen apps to improve customer experience.
How will technology alter the future of CX?
It will automate regular tasks so that individuals can focus on more creative tasks. They can focus on their vision as tiny details will be taken care of by technology.
Business-customer interaction will be transformed from one click to zero-click, providing the customer with a seamless experience.
AI will have a great influence on the network connection. With pattern analysis, it will troubleshoot any issue and extract essential user data from various channels to determine what consumers require and that too in real-time.
Wrapping it Up
Customer Experience is one of the most important aspects that businesses need to take care of. A great customer experience means customers love your brand and will return to you again and again. Many things need to be considered to ensure a great customer experience.
Manually, it becomes difficult to take care of every key point like customized content, understanding user preferences, etc., and that's where AI comes into play.
AI streamlines the workflow and makes the whole process a cakewalk. Use of AI in customer experience helps because it can provide and analyze a huge amount of data in real-time. Artificial intelligence app development company can make a whole lot of difference in your business by helping you upgrade and leverage the power of AI technology.
