Three Ways to Jump-Start Your Customer Experience with AI

Christopher Savio

October 18, 2019

Customer experience has become a boardroom conversation as every interaction with a brand impacts how a customer thinks about the company, its products, and services. Successful businesses understand that providing an exceptional customer experience is a crucial competitive differentiator. Nowadays, great customer service isn’t only about quickly fixing issues when they arise, but about putting the customer first and supporting them at every point in their journey.

Modern technologies, including AI-powered software, provide companies with the tools to elevate the experience they provide by moving beyond one-and-done interactions and creating continuous, personalized engagements with clients – from sales to service, to post-sale support. While creating an AI strategy for customer experience may seem like a daunting task – what use cases should be addressed, what KPIs should be targeted, how will it impact workflows, etc. – businesses can make the lift a little easier by narrowing their focusing on a few key areas and then identifying where an AI solution can help extract the most value.

1. Encouraging Sales

Over half (58.6 percent) of online shoppers abandon a site because they are initially just browsing. While a company may successfully drive prospects to its website through Marketing efforts and see good metrics on average time the customer spends browsing, this doesn’t necessarily translate into customers making purchases.

AI can help businesses capitalize on that initial customer interest and strike while the iron is hot. Intelligent chatbots, for example, can gather data about the customer journey and, based on the knowledge about what’s worked for similar situations in the past, predict the right offering to suggest and the right time to suggest it.2. Extracting the Full Value from Their Customer Base

2. Extracting the Full Value from Their Customer Base

Every customer is important for a business, but loyal customers are the ones who carry the most value. Besides making repeat purchases, they tend to spend more per transaction as they already know they like the company’s products or services. Plus, they help companies acquire new customers through referrals. The value of customer loyalty truly translates into bigger profits for the company while helping minimize costs and strengthening overall position in a turbulent market.

By using AI, businesses can build and maintain relationships with their customers in an easier and more effective way. AI enables companies to provide a modern, personalized, digital experience that ensures customers have continuous support throughout their shopping journey, from the first interaction to post-sale support. With AI-powered proactive engagement tools, such as chatbots, companies can ensure each customer is prioritized, helped right away and pointed to the products, services or solutions that best match their needs.

3. Supporting Increasing Call Volume

For many customer service teams, the struggle is real. Providing round-the-clock personalized support is very challenging as agents are drowning in growing support queues coming from all channels, including phone, email, and chat. Resolution times are getting slower, both customers and agents are getting more frustrated, and only 49 percent of customer problems are solved on the first interaction.

AI-powered chatbots and search bars help customer service teams scale quickly by taking frequently asked questions off the agent’s plate. Modern chatbots deftly handle customer queries in a natural, conversational way, and free up the agent’s time to focus on resolving more complicated, high-value customer issues.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything AI and bots can do – it’s a lot. By taking a phased approach, however, companies can implement AI for one use case and see the success it brings to the business before moving on to the next area of need.