In the era of AI, customer experience is more important than ever.
Artificial intelligence may help a company’s marketing department a lot (AI). Technology has the ability to make a significant impact in matching goods or services to consumer demands and persuading them to purchase.
While AI has made gains in marketing, according to a new Harvard Business Review report, it is projected to play “greater and bigger roles throughout the function in the coming years.”
Customer service is one area where AI can be put to its best advantage. Businesses that prioritise customer service should include artificial intelligence (AI) into their customer experience initiatives. AI tools are available online and may be used to increase consumer participation when they explore websites or applications.
These kinds of solutions are becoming increasingly prevalent, and they may help organisations get a better understanding of user behaviour and satisfaction ratings from surveys and other forms of direct input. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset, machine learning (ML), may therefore be used to enhance the consumer experience by delivering timely information, prediction capabilities, correct knowledge, and customer care. The technology may also be utilised to enhance the entire consumer experience when it comes to providing on-demand information.
AI businesses focusing on self-driving cars and other mobility technologies got the highest funding, with USD 19 billion in 2021 and USD 95 billion from 2012 to 2021.
So, today, we’ll look at what the dawning era of AI has to offer CX – both now and in the future – and how you can utilise AI to create memorable experiences that boost customer conversion, retention, advocacy, and lifetime value.
1. Moving away from “conversational AI” and toward “experiential AI”
For customer experience, brands are turning to AI solutions in droves. Artificial intelligence is being invested in by more than nine out of ten prominent companies.
Allowing AI to scan for valuable user data, offer consumers attention while they wait, and free up people to deal with complex demands benefits these organisations. Some of this AI technology is aimed directly at customers, allowing them to communicate with them through text chat or voice interfaces to replicate human connection.
It’s also known as conversational AI. AI is used to enable individualised consumer communication in chatbots, voice assistants, IVR, virtual assistants, and digital people.
Conversational AI’s application cases are expanding as it grows more advanced. It evolves into more than simply a tool to rapidly answer basic queries, and it starts to provide a more immersive experience. Buyer trips may be made more interesting by adding comedy, personality, and enjoyment. Experiential AI solutions can offer empathy, warmth, care, and friendliness to customers who are contacting about an issue.
In 2022, Venture Capitalists investments in the wide area of business processes and support services placed third, accounting for 11% of the total. The amount of money invested showed a growing understanding of the role AI may play in making corporate and government operations more efficient and cost effective, as well as a rise in automation.
2. Using artificial intelligence to personalise the consumer experience
Despite the vast amounts of client data collected, just 13% of companies claim their marketing customization efforts are “very or very happy.”
To that end, anticipate AI to play a role in an organization’s customer experience strategy by organising and simplifying consumer data, automating time-consuming procedures, and enabling real-time tailored customer interactions.
According to IBM, these three jobs are the aspects of the customer experience where AI is projected to have the most influence. When it comes to using AI to enhance customer experience, IBM advises firms to have a well-rounded plan.
Conversational AI has a lot of potential for improving personalisation efforts. What’s more intimate than a one-on-one chat, after all?
And there’s a reason why personalisation is still such a great marketing, sales, and company development prospect. It can be attributed to improved CX, customer loyalty, and ROI, as shown in the graph below. Given the fact that just 13% of organisations are completely satisfied with their current personalisation efforts, experiential AI has a lot of potential to develop in the next months and years.
In 2021, US venture capitalists were the most active investors in AI startups, accounting for 43% of the global value of VC investments in AI, followed by Chinese investors (20%) and EU27 investors (13%).
3. Scalability of AI reducing consumer wait times
Anyone who has worked a busy retail shift knows the agony of being stuck behind a cash register, watching a long line form and seeing no one to assist. It’s also not much more fun for consumers – in any case.
In fact, three out of ten consumers would prefer not to be placed on wait and would rather watch paint dry.
Customers who have to wait a long time are inconvenient in any situation. How can you create a real-time customer experience without putting extra staff on the phones or behind the counters? Remember, we’re living in the AI era.
Customer support queries may be triaged using conversational AI, based on the type and value of the request. What’s fascinating is how different types of AI may assist in various settings.
Chatbots, for example, are ideal for addressing very short, low-value queries when clients want a single response in seconds. In the B2C arena, voice assistants like Siri play similar functions.
Digital people want to provide greater discussion and conversation with personality at the forefront of the experience so that they may provide lengthier customer experience encounters when convenience is important and the value of the engagement is high.
Finally, conventional “person-to-person” channels are still available for customer support demands that require a real human touch. Conversational AI technologies have triaged the lower-value, easy-to-automate queries away from actual humans, making them more scalable.
Both US and Chinese venture capitalists are significant players in their respective national markets, but their respective market shares are shrinking. Chinese venture capitalists seemed to be more interested on China
4. Moving away from chatbots and toward a more personalised experience
While incorporating conversational AI into your website will improve the client experience, it does not guarantee a victory. Especially if chatbots are supposed to be the be-all and end-all of your digital client experience.
People have different expectations when it comes to interacting with chatbots, and they aren’t necessarily good. However, there are methods to tip the odds in your favour and guarantee that these AI companions improve the customer experience and get the results you want.
Chatbots may assist clients in a variety of ways, the most apparent of which is by swiftly linking them to the information they want. Customers may communicate the always-ready and -willing chatbot to get their question resolved quickly rather than waiting for a human agent to become available.
Chatbots allow your employees to concentrate on the tasks that are most important to them, while ensuring that customers with minor difficulties get prompt attention and support. According to Salesforce research, more than three-quarters of decision makers feel that chatbots are most useful when they’re assisting and freeing up the company’s employees.
Annual venture capital investments in AI start-ups increased 28-fold from USD 2.6 billion in 2012 to USD 73.6 billion in 2020.
Chatbots aren’t enough to provide a great client experience on their own. Only around one-third of individuals believe chatbots are warm and accessible. Many organisations are discovering chatbots’ fundamental limits, especially after believing them to be the solution for all customer experience woes.
The absence of individuality is one such constraint. Advertisements employ personality to convey a narrative and interact with people in almost every case. Employees that interact with customers for a company have a lot of personality. Their chatbots, on the other hand, become a true lull in personality-driven CX.
It’s no surprise that 42 percent of organisations see incorporating a more “human experience” into their chatbot initiatives as a top priority. After all, how else will your chatbot stand out when everyone else has one?
5. Customer service is no longer about transactions, but about encounters.
More than half of the CEOs polled by IBM said they’re drawn to conversational AI because they want to keep their businesses’ customer-centric focus.
This is going to be a quick one. People don’t want to be treated like numbers, and consumers don’t want to be treated like numbers either.
Customer interactions are prioritised above transactions in experience-focused AI.
Customers may have as long of a chat as they want, ask as many questions as they want, and may even feel more comfortable expressing things they wouldn’t ask a real person.
Sure, some clients are looking for a fast and easy transaction. But it’s available for them when they want and need a higher level of customer care — one with a longer-lasting effect and more connection and engagement.
In 2020, US-based and Chinese start-ups together accounted for more than 80% of the monetary value of VC investments in AI start-ups. This compared to 72 percent of all Venture Capitalists investments made by the two nations across all industries.
There are several advantages to incorporating AI into the consumer experience. These are some of the advantages:
1. Businesses can forecast what consumers may require using algorithms and sophisticated systems, such as the next item in a shopping basket or which items are most likely to garner client loyalty. Businesses save time and money since they are no longer need to collect consumer data for each individual user.
2. Businesses may use AI to keep track of their consumers’ activities and preferences over time. They will be able to target adverts at their most probable buyers as a result of this.
Furthermore, utilising AI to target advertisements may allow firms to get client permission before beginning the advertising process.
3. AI can do more than just enhance the customer experience and raise the chances of a positive reaction from consumers. It may also save a lot of money for corporations.
Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience Challenges
Artificial intelligence is one of the most promising customer experience technologies. It has the ability to improve the personalization and efficiency of interactions. However, there are a number of obstacles that must be overcome before it can be broadly used. The AI system must be trained to comprehend client wants, which is a difficulty. Another difficulty is ensuring that the AI system answers quickly. There are also issues regarding data security and privacy. These are the major obstacles that must be overcome before AI can be utilised to improve consumer experiences. Customer service Chatbots may assist with customer service concerns and AI can deliver automatic solutions to requests.
In 2019 and 2020, American investors made up 10% of Venture Capitalists investment in Chinese AI companies, down from 25% in 2017.
Finally, this was just a quick overview of how artificial intelligence might aid companies in improving their operations. This page is merely a basic introduction of AI in customer experience since there are so many various products, services, and technologies that may assist enhance processes and people’s lives.
To understand consumers’ demands, AI may conduct customer experience management services such as sentiment analysis, data mining, and predictive analytics. AI may also be utilised to automate monotonous and time-consuming processes, allowing agents to concentrate on higher-value interactions.