In the current climate, a successful business is a company that engages with, supports, and provides a differentiated experience for its customers in a world that’s becoming more digital all the time. Less than 10 years ago, becoming more digital was all about adopting cloud technologies. With most companies now using cloud across a majority of services and applications, the world has shifted.
Today, it’s about putting AI to work to become an even more digital business and improve customer engagement.
An IDC Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending (FERS) survey in January found that of 881 companies surveyed globally, over 40% of respondents were investing significantly in AI, and over 37% were investing in initial models and doing PoC’s.
Why are all of these businesses striving to become more digital and making a cornerstone of that effort adopting AI? Over one-third of the respondents in the same study said that the primary driver to adopt AI is to improve the customer experience. When you look closely, AI in customer experience makes sense.
The likely reasons companies are adopting AI is that AI offers companies the opportunity to easily personalize experiences for customers and unlock the potential of employees to be more creative and productive.
Digital complexity and the modern customer
Most thought digital technologies would make things easier, but it seems the opposite is true as customers have become more difficult to understand. For many companies, the modern customer has become a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” to quote Winston Churchill. Why?
As customers have become more digitally enabled they went from:
- using a few simple channels to multiple channels,
- having very limited options of vendors and products to being able to access to almost unlimited vendors and products,
- and from sharing only a few data points to a single interaction resulting in thousands of data points.
AI in customer experience streamlines engagement
With modern AI, it’s possible for companies to:
- Predict what channels the right customers will use and then optimize those channels to provide the best interaction for the customer.
- Target these customers with specific options based upon a rich catalog of products that they are more likely to buy according to their purchase history and the context of the interaction.
- Make sense of all of the customer data provided both directly and indirectly to provide an experience that the customer actually finds useful, usable, and even enjoyable.
Previously, making changes like this would have required significant investments in human resources and technology. But another application of AI is to take over certain routine and mundane tasks that previously took up employees’ time and energy, such as answering simple questions on a chatbot, crafting a marketing campaign asset and distributing it via email, or even cleansing of customer data.
All of these tasks can be handed off to a trained AI. The benefit of handing off these types of activities is that those employees can then be freed up and redirected to higher value tasks and activities that focus on the customer and improve the customer experience.
AI-driven customer insights
Those higher value tasks can lead to a more personalized experience for customers, but AI can also assist here. If you consider that a modern personalized customer experience is when a company provides an experience that is uniquely and contextually tailored to a customer’s needs based on a customer’s specific and unique interests, preferences, and behaviors.
To accomplish that requires understanding, and understanding comes from data and knowledge. Here’s another area where modern AI can excel in supporting customer experience efforts.
To provide a personalized customer experience requires the ability to bring a large amount of data about and around that customer to bear to create that experience, which is a capability of AI that can be employed both in digital experiences and can support employees in people-to-people experiences.
The evolution of AI and CX
As business and customer engagement continues to digitally evolve, AI is going to be a cornerstone technology for customer experience by using customer and contextual data to derive insights that can be used to personalize experiences.
There will be challenges to bringing this all together such as shifting organizational cultures to embrace this new model of customer engagement, turning unstructured customer data to structured usable customer data, and connecting silos of technology and data to enable a complete orchestrated customer journey.
But the benefits of adopting and employing AI in customer experience far outweigh the efforts to overcome those and other challenges.
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