The Role Of AI In Customer Experience
AI is fostering advancements in customer service experience technology by enabling analysis and extraction of emotions behind each customer interaction. These insights are being used by customer relationship management (CRM) tools, supply chain management, the digital entertainment industry, marketing and advertising, healthcare agencies, and numerous others for better B2B and B2C customer journeys. In this article, we read about what is customer service experience, and how AI is being used to transform it.
What is Customer Service Experience?
Customer service experience or CX is the feelings and responses that customers have in regard to their experience of your company or brand. This starts right from the moment they first decide to purchase a product/service from you, to the post-purchase stage of the customer journey. Customers often tell companies what they think of them through different voice of the customer channels. All companies have to do is harness this valuable data and take steps to ensure that customers are happy. This process itself is what goes on behind the scene of what is customer service experience is its most insightful form.
What is AI-enabled Customer Experience?
AI-enabled Customer Service Experience is when artificial intelligence (AI)-powered algorithms are used to synthesize different aspects of sales, marketing and customer service, to deliver a truly exceptional experience to the customer. Through sentiment analysis of what is on customers’ minds, expressed on surveys, emails, chatbots, search engines, interactive entertainment consoles, review forums, etc, companies know what motivates, excites, or infuriates customers. In this way, AI platforms help brands give customers a more personalized experience of themselves, thus not only ultimately increasing their brand value but also building customer loyalty.
Know more about how companies use customer experience insights.
How is AI Improving Customer Experience?
AI is helping companies build better brand awareness and value through granular customer insights and personalized marketing services, thus improving their customer experience. Let’s look at it in detail.
1. Business intelligence
AI-based platforms give companies important business intelligence through text analytics and video content analysis of publicly available customer and business data. By analyzing brand videos, user-generated videos on TikTok, Douyin, or YouTube of product reviews, video comments, etc, companies can know a lot about their customers through data on competitor brand mentions, customer demographics, user accounts, and other details. These insights can help a company make changes to their efficiency, productivity, product base, store location, and many other aspects. It can help them understand what is customer service experience from the perspective of their customers, and thus help them make better decisions.
2. Personalized service
AI algorithms have made customer service experience extremely personalized. Right from offering you personalized song lists on Spotify or YouTube depending on your choice of music (genre, singer, arrangement, language), to movies that you might like on Netflix, AI algorithms are able to personalize your digital experience to a very granular level.
3. Targeted digital ads
AI has made customer targeting very easy. With the help of algorithms like cookies that can get stored on your digital device, brands are able to give you extremely relevant and targeted ads. Sometimes, it may even feel like your phone is reading your mind, but the reality is that because of the internet of things (IoT), all things digital store information including your phone GPS, notes reader, credit card swipes, or parking app. So if you went to a Starbucks on 5th Avenue, don’t be surprised if the next time you see an advertisement for a sale going on at a retailer on 5th Avenue, or a buy1-get1 offer for Costa Coffee.
4. No-wait customer service
Chatbots and automated tele customer service have made it possible for companies to ensure that no customer is left waiting endlessly to speak to customer service representatives. Often a customer may have a very simple query but has to unnecessarily waste time being on hold. With chatbots and automated tele help services, not only do customers get the assistance they require but the recordings also help companies get consumer experience insights that are very useful in improving CX.
5. Get the best bargains
AI software helps in one of the most note-worthy customer service experience aspects - helping customers get the most economical options when searching for products or services. Whether it’s for flights, restaurants, hotels, spas, or even medical services, algorithms on your digital device understand you because of your previous interaction with different websites and search engines, and thus provide you with the information you need.
6. Protect brand image
What is customer service experience if not the subjective emotional journey that a person goes through when buying a product or service. Sometimes those personal experiences can be less than positive, and in this day and age of social media, many a time, an unhappy customer will take to the internet and lambast the brand. Sentiment analysis platforms help brands to control the narrative and be alert for any negative mentions of their brand. They help companies analyze complaints and understand whether the bad mouthing is a one-off, or whether there is genuinely a lacuna in the brand’s customer service or product offering.
7. Improve sales & marketing
Machine learning has helped integrate AI with customer relationship management (CRM) tools so that sales and marketing teams can be in sync with each other better when responding to a customer outreach function. AI algorithms also help CRMS tools to integrate with other tools like survey apps, electronic direct mailers, customer data platforms for more efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
8. Information auto-fills
One of the pet peeves that people have is when they have to repeat the same information while filling up a form on a website. This could be purchase information, health information on an electronic health monitoring system, payment information, personal details, etc. AI tools save this data on digital devices so that customers do not have to go through the drudgery of repeating mundane information just to have a query answered or to repeat a purchase. Audio recordings are saved as text in many cases, so even if the customer has given the information through a tele-help source, the data is still saved for future reference.
Discover more about the insights a customer experience dashboard delivers.
Customer Experience Strategy
AI-powered technologies can help any company boost its customer service experience with double the efficiency, and at half the cost and time, if the same work were to be done manually. Even as you integrate an AI-based customer insights platform in your new customer service experience strategy, here are steps that will provide you with a good starting point.
1. Set your objectives
Your CX strategy should be discussed at all levels of management so that everyone - from sales, to marketing, to customer service staff - all are on the same page.
2. Targeted marketing
Try to get to know your customer-base well enough to develop buyer personas so that you can have more targeted marketing campaigns.
3. Smart customer service
Empower your customer service team to understand what is customer service experience keeping in mind the customers’ needs. For this, you need to provide them with the necessary training and tools to upskill, have detailed product knowledge, and interact with customers in a more engaging way.
4. Employ AI-powered tech
Use AI for a more enhanced and personalized customer experience. For example, sentiment analysis platforms, text analytics, video content analysis, AI-integrated CRM tools, and such.
5. Measure performance
Dig deep and find out the reasons why customers have given you the ratings they have. Analyze the survey responses to see any similarity in grievances or positive comments. Don’t be satisfied with just numerical metrics that don’t give any real insights.
6. Revise your strategy
Study the customer experience insights and then make data-backed decisions to revise your CX strategy.
Learn more about how to develop a great customer service experience strategy.
Repustate IQ For A Better Customer Experience Journey
Repustate’s sentiment analysis and text analytics platform, Repustate IQ, give you the power to harness customer data for powerful insights. The all-in-one platform understands 20+ languages natively, without translations, thus giving you the most accurate information possible. It is available as an on-prem installation as well as a cloud API.