Business is fluid – it transforms, progresses, and adapts to its changing environment in order to stay current. And as an integral part of business, customer service also needs to embrace those changes. The rapid technological shift has brought upon quite a few major advancements, one of them being artificial intelligence (AI). AI customer experience is a relatively new concept but one that companies worldwide are beginning to integrate.
Keep reading to explore what AI customer experience is, how it works, and and how to use ChatGPT to boost customer experience. Let’s get started!
What Is AI Customer Experience?
AI customer experience, also called AI CX, implements artificial intelligence to enhance customer service and shape a better user experience. It uses machine learning (ML), deep learning, and natural language understanding (NLU) to achieve more productive results faster.
While customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably, they’re not quite the same. Customer experience is a client’s holistic experience with a brand based on all previous interactions. It includes but is not limited to customer service. As such, the service your support team provides to clients is crucial, but there is a lot more to creating a positive customer experience.
The main role of AI in customer experience is to automate repetitive manual tasks that don’t require human intervention. AI is also very efficient in gathering data about user behavior and increasing project productivity while reducing costs.
How Does AI Improve Customer Experience?
Now that we covered the basics, it’s time to explore further how AI helps in customer experience. As mentioned, AI is used to automate tasks and boost team productivity. Let’s see how!
We can’t rely on machines to entirely take over our work. But one job these non-human assistants excel at is performing mechanical activities over and over with incredible efficiency and speed. Where humans are prone to error, inaccuracy, and burnout, automated tools show great proficiency.
Take answering frequently asked questions, for example. While a human agent can only tackle one question at a time, AI customer service tools can cater to multiple clients without making anyone wait. This gives customers instant answers, agents — free time for meaningful work, and companies — satisfied clients.
Where things really get interesting, though, is when AI compiles and analyzes customer data to give brands invaluable insights into their audiences. Algorithms can mine repeat questions, interaction blocks, recent page visits, and other data to help businesses identify missed opportunities and improve customer retention.
5 Ways to Use AI to Improve Customer Experience
There are many different ways AI can help to improve customer experience. Curious? Let’s discuss five key ways your business can benefit from an AI experience.
1. Effective Customer Communication
We wouldn’t be surprised if the first AI experience that crossed your mind were chatbots. After all, they’re one of the most practical and widely used AI solutions. Different types of businesses have different needs, but proactive customer communication is a need most brands share.
Conversational AI facilitates communication with clients by providing immediate answers to regular customer queries that don’t necessarily need human contact. Here are a few examples of services that can be easily automated with AI:
- Answering frequently asked questions
- Helping navigate the website
- Scheduling appointments
- Taking orders
AI assistants work faultlessly across time zones, holiday seasons, and other hindrances that affect people’s productivity. While support specialists work in shifts, AI assistants are available around the clock, making 24/7 support easier.
Of course, AI has its limitations and is not equipped to replace human interaction altogether. But it can become a reliable assistant to your team, saving time, money, and effort that can be spent on more creative and complex issues.
2. Personalized Experiences
Whether it’s an email campaign, social media ad, or blog post, your content will yield better results when targeted towards a specific audience. Personalized brand experiences are more engaging and memorable, and you can achieve those using AI.
Wondering how artificial intelligence can help you forge a more personal connection with people? The answer is data! AI can process and analyze a massive pool of information: conversation and browsing history, buying habits, demographic data, etc. With more information, you can segment your audience and distribute your content more wisely.
Besides, a human-to-human connection is not always available to consumers. Support agents get busy, customers are put on hold, and their experience with a brand suffers as a result. These scenarios are easy to prevent with conversational AI.
Instead of waiting for an agent to pick up the phone or reply to a message, your web visitors can interact with an AI assistant. The latter will provide instant answers to common questions and help users complete simple actions. It can even entertain the guest with witty replies, creating a unique and fun interaction your customer will remember.
3. Profound Customer and Business Insights
The importance of knowing your customer is nothing new; however, AI continues to introduce new ways of gaining customer insights.
The enormous amount of data available online can help your business get a crystal clear picture of its target audience. The primary function of AI is to use this massive resource to extract useful information that can help businesses and marketers make data-driven decisions.
AI continuously learns from the data and keeps improving with machine learning algorithms. This results in more accurate insights, more relevant suggestions based on your business needs, and better sales opportunities.
4. Predictive Behavior Analysis
Today, there’s more information to consume than ever — which is true both for people and AI. As digital data grows with each new platform, website, and social media profile, AI gets more effective. Besides analyzing the past, AI has learned to peek into the future!
Predictive analytics uses historical and statistical data and machine learning techniques to make educated predictions. This can provide tremendous value to companies to identify profitable opportunities in real-time and take the right action.
Source: Amadeus
A great example of this is recommending users the right product based on their viewed items. Or, it can help send users the right message at the right time by analyzing their behaviour. The above will create pleasant customer experiences and boost your brand image using AI.
5. Increased Lead Generation
In the ideal scenario, your website and social channels would attract traffic and smoothly convert visitors to buyers or, at the very least, leads. The truth is, this process isn’t always a straight line, and AI can help you determine where the line breaks.
AI customer experience uses visitor data to find patterns in their online behaviour and discover what might have caused them to abandon your site. Once you know at which point your visitor has left, you can make adjustments to smooth out the lead generation process.
Another excellent way to facilitate lead acquisition is by using conversational AI. The latter will initiate a conversation between you and the guest, giving them an incentive to take the desired action. The AI assistant can guide them to your blog, email subscription form, pricing page, or any other page that is designed to convert visitors.
Time to Enhance Customer Experience
In an increasingly more customer-centric world, businesses need a clear plan and clever tools to provide excellent customer experiences. Every interaction a client has with your company influences their perception of you. You can ensure a positive perception by smartly merging AI and customer experience.
Your business can leverage AI customer experience to improve communication, provide personalized offers, understand your client base on a deeper level, and even predict their future actions. Artificial intelligence advances as we speak, bringing new opportunities for business growth and expansion.
If you’re excited to explore the possibilities AI has to offer your business, automated customer support is a great place to start. Get 14 days of free access to Hoory, an intelligent virtual assistant, by signing up today!