AI – Customer Experience Taken to the Next Level

Time to read
7 min
Image for blog post AI – Customer Experience Taken to the Next Level
No Results Found
Table of Contents
  • The Key Role of AI Customer Experience in Business Success
  • Influence of Artificial Intelligence on the Customer Journey
    • Speed and Availability
    • Multilingualism
    • Support for People with Disabilities
    • Personalization of the Offer for a Particular Customer
  • How Can AI Improve Customer Experience through Machine Learning?
  • Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience – Examples of Solutions
    • Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
    • Using AI for Customer Journey Mapping
    • Artificial Intelligence-based Analytics
    • Cross-channel Consistency
    • Process Automation
  • Brands that Combine Artificial Intelligence and Customer Experience
  • Challenges and Concerns Related to AI in Customer Experience
  • How to Use AI to Create the Customer Experience of the Future?

The entire world has been buzzing about AI and its influence on businesses for years now. Artificial Intelligence has made inroads across numerous sectors and customer service is not an exception. In a world where technology has leveled the playing field between brands, both large and small, it has become obvious that the only true differentiator is customer experience. Therefore, the use of Artificial Intelligence in customer service and customer experience is already widespread.

In this post, we’ll delve into the topic of applying Artificial Intelligence to customer-facing services. Let’s start!

The Key Role of AI Customer Experience in Business Success

Customer experience can be described as the perception a customer has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction which means that each interaction is an opportunity to build a stronger relationship between the customer and the brand. The customer experience encompasses every single stage of the customer journey so it’s essential to take care of each touch point to ensure your customer experience is as pleasant as possible. Customer experience is as important as the quality of your products or services, being a way of standing out from competitors. It:

  • Increases customer retention as you offer customers a satisfactory, unique, and unforgettable experience. Customer experience strategies contribute to the growth of Customer Lifetime Value.
  • Encourages customer acquisition and increases revenue – according to Forbes, companies that take care of the customer experience achieve 4-8% more revenue than other organizations in the same sector.
  • Provides valuable insights that lead to the improvement of marketing and commercial actions and campaigns.

Influence of Artificial Intelligence on the Customer Journey

AI has become one of the top tech trends of the year and more and more businesses have leaned on AI systems to scale efficiency, speed up their time-to-market, and enhance customer experience processes. AI can be used to delight customers wherever they interact with the brand, at any stage of their customer journey.

Speed and Availability

Thanks to AI solutions, you can provide customers with instant service, available 24/7. This means your customers can connect with your business at any time and get help in real-time, even when support agents are offline.

Multilingualism

Artificial Intelligence uses NLU (natural language understanding) to detect a customer’s language and automatically translates the conversation. The entire process happens instantly and doesn’t require a human translator which makes customer support even more efficient and convenient and customer experience even better. For instance, a bot can detect the customer’s native language based on their location and the text in the chat window.

Support for People with Disabilities

Artificial Intelligence has also been put into action to improve the lives of people with disabilities. AI helps them remain autonomous providing solutions for e.g., inclusive interfaces. Those may be keyboard navigation solutions allowing users to talk and hear AI-generated responses on the site, providing contextual descriptions so that visually impaired users can more fully understand the content, and voice-enabled interfaces that enable people with disabilities to interact with the website or app.

Personalization of the Offer for a Particular Customer

According to Zendesk’s CX Trends Report 2023, nearly 60% of customers expect businesses to use the data they collect to personalize their experiences. Artificial Intelligence combined with real-time data enables organizations to deliver content that is specifically relevant to a customer. AI solutions can use data from a customer’s purchase history, preferences, feedback, and patterns to personalize their experience. This allows for personalized product recommendations and customized customer service interactions, as well as eliminating the pain points in the customer journey.

How Can AI Improve Customer Experience through Machine Learning?

Being able to provide outstanding customer experience requires excellent data collection. The data comes from AI systems that learn from experiences without human intervention. Thus, Machine Learning services are nothing but essential to the customer experience. You can use Machine Learning to enhance efficiency, drive customer satisfaction, and provide customized experience which leads to increased customer loyalty and business success.

The examples of how Machine Learning can improve your AI customer experience:

  • Predictive Analysis models can be leveraged to anticipate and proactively address customer issues before they even occur. They employ algorithms to identify patterns and trends, enabling you to make informed predictions. Predictive Analysis can be used to increase customer satisfaction and increase CLV.
  • Speech Recognition technology integrated with ML enhances customer experience by transcribing and analyzing customer calls, automatically categorizing them, extracting keywords, and finally identifying intent. Therefore, businesses can route calls more effectively and provide faster and more accurate support.

Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience – Examples of Solutions

AI has a vast potential to make brands more customer-centric. Let’s dive deeper into real-life examples of how AI can be used to create a perfect customer experience.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Such ML-powered technologies can be implemented to handle basic customer inquiries and provide self-service support. Chatbots using natural language processing can understand customer queries and provide relevant responses based on set parameters. Therefore, support teams can focus on more complex customer issues.

Using AI for Customer Journey Mapping

By leveraging Artificial Intelligence solutions, businesses can gain profound insights into customer behavior and optimize touchpoints for maximum impact. They enable companies to uncover hidden patterns, anticipate customer needs, as well as make data-driven decisions in real-time. You can analyze vast amounts of data to get a comprehensive view of the customer journey to reshape the customer experience landscape and build different customer journey maps for each target audience.

Artificial Intelligence-based Analytics

AI and analytics play a crucial role in managing and leveraging customer data effectively. They allow businesses to unlock new levels of personalization and efficiency. AI-based analytics provide data that is necessary to make churn & CLV predictions, as well as make data-driven decisions.

Cross-channel Consistency

Today’s customers interact with multiple channels before making a purchase. This means that consistency is now more crucial than ever. Artificial Intelligence solutions enable businesses to track customer interactions across channels to ensure that data isn’t lost. AI streamlines the customer service process across various channels ensuring a coherent experience.

Process Automation

AI means streamlined processes, reduced errors, and personalized experiences. AI-powered process automation is the use of technology to optimize and facilitate repetitive, manual, or complex tasks. Automation helps organizations improve efficiency, quality, and compliance without investing more in human resources.

Brands that Combine Artificial Intelligence and Customer Experience

There are many brands from various industries that have mastered the way they use AI in their customer experience strategies. For example:

  • Amazon and their product recommendation system. Personal product recommendations are made by analyzing individual customer behavior, purchase history, and items in the shopping cart.
  • Sephora and their Virtual Artist app. The application uses Augmented Reality to enable customers to virtually try on Sephora’s makeup products. The app scans the customer’s face and shows them how particular products would look on their skin which is great for making more informed purchasing decisions.
  • PayPal leverages Artificial Intelligence to analyze transaction patterns, identify fraudulent activities, and secure users from potential security breaches.

Challenges and Concerns Related to AI in Customer Experience

Artificial Intelligence in customer service offers multiple benefits. However, it also faces challenges, such as:

  • The lack of human touch and empathy that many customers desire, especially during sensitive situations.
  • Potential job displacement.
  • Complexity and cost which may be a deal-breaker for smaller companies with limited resources.

It’s essential to strike the right balance between human and AI collaboration. Human agents can still handle empathy-driven interactions, while AI can excel in handling routine issues. Also, to address the limitations of AI technologies, continuous training and improvement are necessary.

How to Use AI to Create the Customer Experience of the Future?

AI is here to stay in customer service. You can either adopt it or let your competitors outrun you in customer experience. At STX Next, we transform how businesses interact with their customers every day. Our AI development services have already enhanced dozens of our clients’ customer journey strategies and we’ll be happy to help you to better understand it.

Are you ready to create an exceptional customer experience that drives loyalty and improves the bottom line? Let’s get in touch and build an excellent customer journey for your customers!

Get your free ebook

Download ebook
Download ebook
COO/Board Member
Share this post