How AI Is Transforming Customer Service And Customer Experience?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised the digital landscape. The automation of manual processes, with the help of AI and machine learning, has a tremendous advantage in terms of efficiency, cost, and time management. AI is transforming the way we work, with its ability to provide more data-driven insights, which is helping businesses make better-informed decisions. The role of AI in digital marketing is expanding, as more organisations continue to tap into the full potential of automation to drive greater profits and ROI. We are seeing a new trend where more companies are incorporating AI to drive their customer experience initiatives and customer service. Customer-centric brands are using AI to design, manage, and support their dynamic customer journeys, as part of their customer experience management.

Customer experience management (CEM) is a top priority for most businesses today. In fact, customer experience (CX) has been termed as the most exciting business opportunity of 2020. Great customer service drives meaningful brand experience, which has a long term impact on a company’s bottom line. As more companies place emphasis on creating a better customer experience, AI is helping them analyse real-time customer data and interactions, to develop intricate CX strategies, which contributes to higher customer retention and customer loyalty. 

Businesses are recognising the insurmountable opportunities bestowed by AI, and using it to drive customer journey analytics, to deliver high impact customer experience.

The ways AI is transforming customer service

Faster response
Customers hate waiting or being put on hold. It’s one of the most frustrating parts of the customer service journey. However, AI-powered chatbots are changing that. They can accurately respond to frequently asked questions through live chat and direct customers to helpful self-service articles. Chatbots and virtual assistants can give customers the solutions they need promptly, without any wait time. This helps to reduce customer frustrations, and enhance the customer experience. Additionally, these AI-powered chatbots are available 24/7, so that customers can get any help they need whenever they want.

Better data analysis
Companies are collecting more customer data than ever before. They use a myriad of tools like surveys, product usage history, and customer feedback to understand consumer behaviour and predict future trends. AI is helping businesses accurately analyse vast amounts of unstructured data within a fraction of time, compared to humans. They can identify behavioural patterns, as well as anomalies within data sets. AI can store answers and recognise patterns among frequently asked questions. They can provide customer support teams with a selection of common answers to be automatically inserted into the conversation, depending on the nature of the ticket. 

Better customer engagement
AI is driving better customer engagement. While it could be frustrating for humans to deal with repetitive tasks/questions, the benefit of AI is that it never gets annoyed. AI-powered assistance can provide lengthy and engaging conversations with customers. AI is easing the pressure on customer support agents by aptly providing them with vital customer information for more personal and intelligent customer interactions. AI is facilitating intuitive customer interaction leading to more lead generation and increased profitability.

Predictive personalisation
With its tremendous capacity to crunch data, both structured and unstructured, with laser precision, AI is increasingly being used by businesses for predictive analysis to deliver more personalisation. Predictive personalisation is enabling companies to predict customer actions based on their past behaviour. AI-powered personalisation tailors customised experiences and recommendations for customers, thereby enhancing the brand experience. Predictive personalisation is particularly crucial for e-commerce businesses like Amazon, as AI analytics helps to create smooth and seamless customer experiences across various channels.

Sentiment analysis
AI-powered customer sentiment analysis is steering businesses and marketers to higher revenues, using positive customer interactions. Customer sentiment analysis helps businesses to gather deep audience insights, which facilitates better marketing decisions and ultimately contributes to better ROI. AI technology has the ability to use sentiment analysis to categorise tickets into different classifications such as excited, happy, or frustrated and help support teams to prioritise escalated issues. AI is helping support teams to effectively manage customer communications and issues.

Final Thoughts

AI is transforming the customer experience by enabling business leaders to create sophisticated customer journey analytics and meaningful interactions, to enhance their customer engagement across all channels. At Alkye, we help clients to build a customer-centric business model and become a brand that’s synonymous with great customer experience.