For businesses across every industry, the customer experience is more important than ever. In a time when a brand’s success is often closely tied to customer loyalty, finding ways to improve and optimize customer service is critical. In fact, 87% of business leaders say they’re prioritizing customer experience to accelerate growth. And it’s not just about a singular interaction between a brand and a customer (such as a problem or question about a product) but the lifespan of a customer’s experience with a business.
So what’s ahead for businesses looking to transform their customer experience? For many, creating super personalized experiences will be key, along with keeping customers engaged. And to achieve optimized experiences, businesses will need to look to technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), to help them innovate and stay competitive.
Keep reading as we dive into five ways AI-powered solutions can help businesses transform and optimize their customer experience.
1.Predicting customer needs and behavior
Our streaming services offer up recommendations on what to watch and our virtual assistants tell us to grab an umbrella on the way out the door so it stands to reason that consumers expect personalized experiences when interacting with a brand. With AI technology, a customer’s experience can feel as though it was crafted just for them. Think about when you order your favorite Starbucks drink from the app. It’s no coincidence that you get a recommendation for a sweet or savory treat that would pair perfectly with your drink. That’s the power of AI and personalized recommendations! By evaluating factors such as previous purchases, behaviors, and trends, AI can help predict what items a customer might be interested in or tell them when it’s time to reorder something they’re close to running out of. Using AI for predictive personalization can help set a business apart and keep customers coming back for more.
2.Improving problem-solving
We’ve all experienced listening to elevator music while waiting to get a problem resolved or a question answered. This experience ranks pretty low on most people’s scale of activities they’d like to do, but with the help of technology like natural language processing (NLP), the process can be less painful. AI-powered NLP has revolutionized written customer-to-organization communications, such as live chat and SMS-based conversations. And with this transformation, we’re beginning to see voice emerge as a digital channel capable of displacing emails to customer service with “say what you want” interfaces. This can take a customer directly to the department or person who can best help with their inquiry. And, NLP can enable the automatic opening and closing of a record so that by time a call reaches a human, much of the background work has already been done.
3.Better customer analysis
The investment in, and utilization of, big data analysis to enable better decision making has become almost universal for most large businesses. Among leading Fortune 1000 companies, 99% of them report that they’re actively investing in big data and AI, and another 91.9% say the pace of their investments in these areas is accelerating. By leveraging the capabilities of AI and machine learning, insights around customers – and resulting decisions – can become smarter and more data-driven. AI can also help businesses more quickly analyze user behavior to uncover trends, identify problems, or reveal insights to improve the customer experience from start to finish.
4.Keeping customers engaged
One critical factor to creating a successful customer experience is nurturing consumers throughout every stage of the life cycle. And AI-powered solutions can help businesses do exactly that. Let’s say you’re a SaaS company onboarding a new customer. Once they’ve registered, you could direct them to a video tutorial to help them get started with your products. From there, you could follow up with an email drip campaign highlighting one key product feature every few days to help them make the most of your services. Later, you might send them personalized insights related to how they’ve used your product. With AI tech, you can automate and streamline this process and help your customers feel connected to your brand along every touchpoint.
5.Creating a unified multi-channel experience
Most businesses have multiple channels for customers to engage with, such as social channels, a website, or a customer service app. As a brand, you want to make sure that your customers don’t have a disjointed experience across these different platforms with inconsistent messaging or information. So how can you create a seamless omnichannel customer experience? With the power of AI. These solutions can help your business link all of your channels and make it easy for your team to keep everything consistent and functioning as a cohesive whole. For example, AI technology can help you create a customer journey that starts with a banner ad and click through to your website and ends with engaging with push notifications on your app.
These five areas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how AI can transform the customer experience. As AI and ML technology evolve and improve, so too will the ways in which they can help businesses up their customer service game in multiple ways. Whether it’s keeping customers engaged, enabling data-driven insights, or creating personalized experiences, AI is making it easier than ever for brands to attract and retain loyal and engaged customers.
At AscentCore, we provide end-to-end product development services, including specialized expertise, in a wide cross-section of industries and solutions. With a focus on AI and ML, we deliver transformational results for our clients by leveraging the latest technology and empowering companies to disrupt, transform, accelerate, and scale. Find out more about us.
