Businesses across industries are investing a lot of resources in AI (artificial intelligence), hoping to reap huge benefits from it. They’re implementing and using AI technologies in a variety of ways – from automating processes in their back offices, crunching huge amounts of data to identify trends and derive business insights, to delivering more efficient, versed, and personalized customer experiences.
Initiatives related to the latter goal may be particularly critical to generating ROI. According to research from Gartner, Inc., one of the top three sources of business value is customer experience. Gartner also states that “customer experience is a prerequisite for the widespread adoption of technology to unlock its full potential and enable value.”
This is positive news for businesses that develop and use technology. But what about customers? Are enhanced customer experiences capable of delivering value to them? The short answer is yes.
In this post, we cover the basics of AI for customer experience, including its benefits, challenges, and real-life examples of how innovative companies are using it.
What are the Benefits of using AI for Customer Experience?
Artificial intelligence or has revolutionized the customer experience landscape, boosting efficiency and providing personalized interactions. Here are some of the key benefits of implementing AI in your customer service:
24/7 Availability: With AI-powered automation, businesses can provide round-the-clock customer support, ensuring customers can get help anytime, even outside regular business hours.
Data-driven Insights: AI technologies like conversation intelligence can collect and analyze customer conversations at scale and automatically surface trends. Customer experience teams can use these insights to get ahead of common issues, update conversation tracks, and improve contact center agent training.
Incorporating AI into customer service strategies helps businesses deliver exceptional customer experiences and build lasting relationships with customers to stay ahead in today’s competitive market. Check out our other blog post here to learn more about the benefits of prioritizing your customer experience.
What are the Challenges of Using AI for Customer Experience?
Although AI offers many benefits to improve customer experience, its implementation also comes with some challenges. Here are some challenges businesses may face when incorporating AI in customer service:
Lack of Human Touch: AI-powered interactions, though efficient, may sometimes lack the human touch and empathy expected by customers, potentially leading to alienation and dissatisfaction.
Integration Complexities: Integrating technologies with existing customer service systems can be complex and time-consuming, requiring seamless alignment to ensure a seamless customer experience.
Overcoming Customer Trust Issues: Building customer trust in AI-powered interactions remains a challenge, as some customers may be skeptical about the reliability and accuracy of AI-powered solutions.
Balancing Automation with Human Intervention: Striking the right balance between AI-powered automation and human intervention is crucial, as excessive automation can lead to a lack of personalized assistance, while too much human intervention can negate the efficiency benefits.
AI Customer Experience Statistics You Need to Know
Our recent report on the State of the Contact Center highlights important customer experience statistics. These findings provide valuable information about the impact on customer interactions and service delivery. Here are our top three important statistics from the State of the Contact Center report:
AI can help your call center numbers by answering those annoying repetitive questions that can be easily answered with information on your website!
There’s a high chance that your competitors will also adopt one of these solutions. And if they don’t, your service will stand out from your competitors because you’ll reap the benefits of automation!
Contact center staff who use conversation intelligence report that they analyze a higher percentage of their calls. Contact centers that analyze more than 80% of their calls use conversation intelligence, 30% of them use conversation intelligence, and 13% use manual call listening. Conversation intelligence is much more scalable than listening to every call! Plus, since it harnesses the power of AI, its scores are unbiased and free from human error.
Transform the Customer Experience with AI-ready Solutions
AI is revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers, making each interaction more personalized, efficient, and impactful. Integrating AI into your customer experience strategy is essential to increase satisfaction and loyalty.
Get more information about our AI-ready solutions and start transforming customer experience today.
13 Ways AI Can Improve Customer Experience
Here’s how an artificial intelligence customer experience can increase customer satisfaction and enable teams to work more efficiently, and in turn, boost your profits.
- Enable a great customer service experience for longer
Using AI for customer service effectively allows businesses to manage high support volumes for longer periods while maintaining customer satisfaction and building customer loyalty.
For example, AI can arm agents with insights to personalize each customer interaction. Liberty London, a prestigious UK premium department store, uses Zendesk AI to identify and label customer intent (what an issue is about), sentiment (if it’s positive or negative), and language, so that agents are more informed about each customer’s needs.
Additionally, businesses can deploy bots to enhance their support across email, social media, live chat, messaging apps, and other channels. Bots can also enable service teams to manage increasing support volumes, especially during times when they need to scale quickly, such as during the holiday season or product launches.
- Provide fast, 24/7 customer support
Customers expect fast, convenient, 24/7 support from humans or bots. According to our CX Trends Report, 51% of consumers say they prefer interacting with bots when they need immediate service.
Using conversational AI, digital agents can provide natural, human-like interactions at any time, such as on weekends or late at night when your agents are not at work. These chatbots help improve customer support by giving agents quick answers to common questions, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.
In addition to providing always-on support, AI can also help your agents provide quick answers. Intelligent tools like macro suggestions allow agents to provide pre-written answers to customers based on the context of the conversation. There’s also generative AI for agents that instantly expands content, creating a complete answer based on just a few words. These features can help your team achieve faster first response times, shorter handle times, and shorter wait times.
- Onboard CX teams faster
When it comes to getting new customer service agents up to speed, AI has some ready-made solutions. AI can act as a virtual assistant, giving new employees real-time tips and feedback during customer service training. For example, AI can make the tone of their answers friendlier or more formal. It can also show similar support tickets, so agents can see how other team members answered the same question. - Improve efficiency and productivity
AI tools increase agent efficiency and productivity by simplifying workflows, AI-powered chatbots handle requests, and automated processes tackle repetitive tasks. These tools reduce agents’ workload, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks and complex customer issues.
Intelligent routing and triage features use AI to analyze incoming conversations to understand customer sentiment, language, and intent. This increases routing accuracy while reducing ticket escalation. Skill-based routing further optimizes customer service by directing tickets to agents based on their expertise availability, conversation priority, and more.
=We’ve seen time savings of 220 hours per month by eliminating manual triage.”
- Provide hyper-personalized interactions
AI can act like a personal concierge for each customer, understanding their history and preferences, and allowing agents to better understand their needs.
For example, the sustainable e-commerce brand Grove Collaborative uses AI-powered insights to enable agents to deliver personalized conversational service. =
- Anticipate customer needs and potential problems
AI can use data such as order history, behavior, and preferences to anticipate customer needs and identify potential problems. This allows you to generate proactive solutions and improve customer retention.
- Provide AI-driven quality assurance
Traditional quality assurance in CX often relies on human evaluations. However AI-driven quality assurance can objectively score agent performance, identify customer sentiment, and pinpoint areas where real-time coaching is needed based on data collected from customer interactions. This allows businesses to identify trends, proactively address issues, and personalize training for agents to ensure they consistently deliver a great customer experience. - Analyze customer data to predict and prevent churn
AI-powered tools enable customer support teams to track and analyze unstructured data – such as customer sentiment – to see who is at high churn risk and immediately pay attention to them. AI algorithms use predictive analytics with natural language processing (NLP) to look for thousands of different keywords from customer interactions. - Using sentiment analysis can also help you analyze customer feedback to better understand how customers feel about their experience with your brand. This enables you to identify where challenges may lie, so your reps can take action to prevent churn.
- Offer customers special offers
AI can be a great tool for offering customers relevant, engaging, and timely special offers.
For example, AI can recommend sale items that a customer viewed previously or products similar to their previous purchases. AI can also use real-time data to activate promotions.
- Improve workforce management
Our CX trends report found that nearly 80% of CX leaders are eager to increase their budget for better agent management tools. Many are starting to use AI in workforce management. Workforce management tools can automate tasks, provide data-driven insights, and enable decision-makers to proactively plan their staffing needs.
Meanwhile, automated agent scheduling saves you valuable time, and real-time tracking provides visibility into agent activity and compliance timelines.
- Reduce operational costs
Integrating into your customer experience can significantly reduce operational costs by automating low-value tasks, deflecting inbound interactions through self-service, and eliminating the need for additional tools, training, or staff. excels at task automation, content recommendation, and predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs. - Create a more consistent brand experience
With generative, businesses can create a chatbot personality that matches their brand identity. This helps maintain a consistent tone and personality across all customer interactions. It also makes your brand stand out, enhances your brand image, and increases customer satisfaction.
Additionally, agents can use it to adjust their tone during customer interactions.
- Improve knowledge management
AI-powered knowledge management tools help you keep knowledge base content updated and relevant.