Today, we’re going to zero in on 4 ways to use AI to enhance the customer experience.
1. Know Your Customer Better
The most obvious application of IA to enhance the customer experience is that you can know your customer better.
First, let's assume that as an enterprise, you’ve unified your data so that AI can mine all interactions with a specific customer.
If that’s the case, then you can bring that massive amount of information to bear 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 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 most likely to engage.
- Personalized product and service timings: By looking at both internal and intent data, AI can help businesses predict the best time for a product or service offering, and eventually shift from predicting purchase intent to predict product and service needs.
Collectively, these personalizations mean that customers are only engaging with companies when they want, where they want, about the things they’re interested in at that specific moment.
2. Speed Up Customer Support
The second major innovation is that AI can massively speed up customer support, as well as improve the quality of support that customers receive.
It does this in two main ways.
First, AI can help predict when a customer is going to need support, and begin to both preempt support requests as well as offer product insights to companies to make support less necessary (more on product in a bit).
Second, AI can help customers automatically, reducing wait times for live agents. It can also take some 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.
3. Create Better Products
As we mentioned, AI can help create better products. But this is 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 see.
When humans approach a problem in product design, we tend to define the variables that we’re looking at — the problem, who it’s for, and potential solutions. We do this because the picture is too complex to not define some parameters.
AI, in contrast, looks at the whole picture. It looks at every aspect of the customer and the product usage to find optimizations. AI can also 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 into new product innovation.
The ideal state is that AI can help product teams more clearly define problems they’re aiming to solve based on a holistic view of the customer, rather than a narrow predefined view that is necessary today.
4. Optimized Customer Journey
Finally, AI can be used to help optimize the entire customer journey.
Just like AI can be used to look at product enhancements, so too can it holistically optimize how companies engage with customers.
By looking at the aggregate of customer engagement, AI can find patterns in how people want to work with businesses, and then develop customer flows that reflect that new, better journey.
Conclusion
The advance in data structuring, systems integrations, massively reduced computing costs, natural language 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 few key ways we see AI functioning, but there’s no single improvement that AI will make. Rather, it will touch every element of the customer experience to enhance it overall.
Better products, for instance, will require less support. More personalized communication will lead naturally to customers who are happier with their purchases and require less help. And an optimized customer journey will go hand in hand with communicating with customers in the right place, with the right message, at the right time.
AI can help us connect the dots on complex customer experiences, and is potentially going to drive CX forward like nothing we’ve ever seen.
