Machine learning and AI has been a growing force for years now. More recently, the huge effort to structure data and, increasingly, build products in a machine-readable way first have led to a world where AI may be a realistic possibility for all kinds of organizations.
Today, we’re getting to zero in on 4 ways to use AI to reinforce the customer experience.
- Know Your Customer Better
The most obvious application of IA to reinforce the customer experience is that you simply can know your customer better.
First, let’s assume that as an enterprise, you’ve unified your data in order that AI can mine all interactions with a selected customer.
If that’s the case, then you’ll bring that massive amount of data in touch by knowing your customer better, and personalize every level of the experience. This means:
- Personalized product offerings: by analyzing purchasing patterns of both the individual and therefore the aggregate customer base, AI can help businesses show only relevant products to customers.
- Personalized communication methods: By evaluating your entire customer journey across your entire customer database, AI can find new relationships between customer, product, and communication channels, allowing companies to only communicate with customers where they’re presumably to interact .
- Personalized product and repair timings: By watching both internal and intent data, AI can help businesses predict the simplest time for a product or service offering, and eventually shift from predicting purchase intent to predicting product and repair needs.
Collectively, these personalizations mean that customers are only engaging with companies once they want, where they need, about the items they’re curious about at that specific moment.
- Speed Up Customer Support
The second major innovation is that AI can massively speed up customer support, and also improve the standard of support that customers receive.
It does this in two main ways.
First, AI can help predict when a customer wants support, and start to both preempt support requests and also as offer product insights to companies to form support less necessary (more on product during a bit).
Second, AI can help customers automatically, reducing wait times for live agents. It also can take a number of the requests off the shoulders of support teams, solving simple queries fast and getting complex issues to humans faster, again improving the customer experience.
- Create Better Products
As we mentioned, AI can help create better products. But this is often worth double clicking into.
AI can help design better products because it can help connect dots and variables in datasets that are difficult for analysts to ascertain.
When humans approach a drag in product design, we tend to define the variables that we’re watching — the matter, who it’s for, and potential solutions. We do that because the image is just too complex to not define some parameters.
AI, in contrast, looks at the entire picture. it’s at every aspect of the customer and therefore the product usage to seek out optimizations. AI also can be helpful in running experiments and tests to develop optimized solutions.
These insights can then be fed to a product team, where they’re ultimately taken and turned back to new product innovation.
The ideal state is that AI can help product teams more clearly define problems they’re getting to solve and support a holistic view of the customer, instead of a narrow predefined view that’s necessary today.
- Optimized Customer Journey
Finally, AI can assist the whole customer journey.
AI’st can also holistically optimize how companies engage with customers.
By watching the mixture of customer engagement, AI can find patterns in how people want to figure with businesses, then develop customer flows that reflect that new, better journey.
Conclusion
The advance in data structuring, systems integrations, massively reduced computing costs, tongue processing, and machine learning have all worked to make AI a reality now. And AI can now potentially transform customer experiences.
We’ve outlined a couple of key ways we see AI functioning, but there’s no single improvement that AI will make. Rather, it’ll touch every element of the customer experience to reinforce it overall.
Better products, as an example, would require less support. More personalized communication will lead naturally to customers who are happier with their purchases and need less help. And an optimized customer journey will go hand in hand with communicating with customers within the right place, with the proper message, at the proper time.
AI can help us connect the dots on complex customer experiences, and is potentially getting to drive CX forward like nothing we’ve ever seen.
