Emily Johnson / 6 Mins Read
Updated: February 23, 2023
It could be about – creating chatbots, rectifying customer issues, or simply speeding up your response time, AI helps you get ahead of the curve. Before your competitor starts using this technology, you’ll be equipped to move on to the more radical functionality of AI that’s sure to grow over the coming years.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly redefining brand loyalty. It is shifting the way in which companies engage with their customers. Regardless of your business type, be it B2B or B2C, embracing the latest AI tools to deliver an outstanding customer experience is the modern recipe for winning.
In fact, if your business model to succeed is based solely on the notion of marketing the product, you’re most likely on your way to losing.
As per the Future of Customer Experience Survey by PwC, customers are happy to pay over a 16 percent premium on products for excellent customer experience.
When customers feel appreciated, you can gain measurable benefits—including the chance to reap higher revenues. According to a recent report by Qualtrics and Temkin Group, customer experience is a golden key that can upsurge ROI by 75 percent in just 36 months.
Now, we know that customer experiences can be the differentiator between business success and failure. So, the next question is − how will Artificial Intelligence help any business redefine its customer experience? How will it help them maintain market share in today’s Omni-channel internet world?
Let us look at ways AI will improve the customer experience without delay.
New Epsilon research reveals that almost 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy from you if you provide them with a more personalized experience. And artificial intelligence tools are the finest way to deliver such experiences to clients.
With access to complete customer details such as –individual preferences, demographic data, and buying patterns, AI tools can quickly segment the messages and offer personalized products to the customers.
Using AI, one can segment and address customer needs without being a data scientist. It automatically analyzes customer behavior and provides recommendations for their next purchase.
Consider this example by UK-based fashion company Thread. It uses AI to send personalized emails to clients. Their introduction email includes a personalized message and informs the recipient that they have been assigned a personal stylist, Kasia.
Besides, it provides personalized clothing recommendations for its users every week. It uses style quizzes, where customers can easily provide data about their personal style. Thread’s AI algorithm uses this quiz data to identify patterns of customers’ likes and tailor its recommendations accordingly.
People are more likely to buy from a brand that has taken the time and effort to know them.
AI lets organizations interact with their customers in real-time through advanced chatbots. This smart tool enables enterprises to have human-level interactions without hiring or managing staff. From fashion to insurance to health, chatbots are used in almost every segment as it offers smart customer support.
And in most cases, they’re better at curating personalized content than humans. With natural language programming, they’re becoming intuitive and understanding the context of interactions like the human brain. Chatbots have access to numerous customer-centered data points, which enables it to identify patterns and collective issues, and forecast the problems of the clients.
These features make chatbots more knowledgeable than any human customer service representatives.
Satisfi teamed up with IBM and Macy’s to release the pilot of Macy’s On Call, an in-store shopping assistant powered by AI. Using Watson’s Natural Language Classifier (NLC) and Language Translation Application Programming Interfaces, this tool helps shoppers quickly get the required details while checking different products or navigating the various tabs in the store.
Customers can start chatting with this digital assistant on their phones when they enter the online store. Here, the consumers can ask questions in natural language and seek out information in-store. Furthermore, this bot provides recommendations and directions to items around the store.
Surprisingly, if the chatbot senses the customer is frustrated, it immediately alerts a human associate to intercept the customer as the earliest.
Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence tools can work around the clock without making any mistakes resulting in improved productivity. It can proactively communicate with the customers, helping them with purchases, and providing them with the necessary information. It can solve most queries, saving time and thereby increasing productivity.
Employees can utilize AI to deliver highly personalized suggestions to customers, profiting from the ability of the tool to decide what a customer wants at a particular time. Machine-based neural networks can learn over a million pieces of data in seconds, offering the perfect solution to companies.
For instance, integrating AI into legacy information and communications systems of manufacturing industries will save time and cost. By analyzing real-time incidents, AI warns about potential problems and proposes solutions in the earlier stage. According to Accenture, these benefits of AI-based predictive maintenance solutions can boost profitability by 38 percent by 2035.
Organizations are slowly realizing the importance of investing in predictive maintenance solutions, as it’s a proven approach to advancing operating efficiency and productivity.
Companies gather data for all the possible domains and aspects, such as customer behavior, customer journey, marketing, operations, and many more. Prior to the internet age, a lot of those company data used to be dumped. However, with the emergence of AI, you can use this data to gain a 360-degree view of any particular customer.
AI algorithms employ numerous data points to develop customer personas in a systematic manner. Some of these data points are given below:
With the more advanced analysis of these data points, experts believe that it will help companies more precisely recognize their customer’s requirements. As it gives you insights into each customer, you can target them with the offer they would most likely be interested in.
If you have data of thousands of customers and the items they purchased, you’ll see a bunch of complex data placed in hundreds of rows. Without AI, it will be highly challenging to interpret the table, and it leads you nowhere. Consider this example - most of the customers bought product A along with product B, and 80 percent of them purchased a product C along with it.
With this interpretation, you can target the remaining 20 percent of the customers and provide them an offer to purchase product C. With this analysis, you can recommend a valuable product that has been found useful by similar-minded buyers. This level of personalization ensures higher conversions.
A more flexible and intricate data visualization tools like Tableau dashboards use AI to make it easier to learn and interconnect the value uncovered by the model and thereby drives better business decision-making. Its AI-powered explanations based on cutting-edge statistical models save time and offer higher-quality insights.
Providing quick customer service has become the need of the hour. Customers expect immediate resolutions for their issues and instant responses to their queries. To satisfy the demands of the customers in a short time, some companies aim to work round the clock. However, with AI, this task becomes seamless. It can be operational 24X7, unlike human counterparts.
This technology offers a level of automation that aids companies in providing faster and more reliable solutions without the need to add more staff to account for overflow. It eliminates the customer’s wait time by guiding them to troubleshoot the issues by themselves, thereby saving a lot of time.
In case of a specific issue, it prioritizes the customers and routes them to the best-suited agent. This way, customers don’t have to wait long. AI tools use Natural Language Processing to read any of the ‘ticket’ and direct it to the team. Tagging tickets solves those issues that can otherwise get out of hand if not addressed immediately.
Some AI tools also identify customer’s sentiments and tags tickets with priority numbers. This procedure saves a lot of time, which can be utilized by a customer support representative for other crucial tasks.
A new report by Juniper Research on the healthcare and banking industry has found that AI-enabled chatbots can save over 4 minutes per inquiry, which is equal to the average cost savings of $0.50-$0.70 per interaction.
The same report forecasts that chatbots will save the business cost over $8 billion per year by 2022, which is up from $20 million since 2017.
AI is here to stay. Although it is still in its budding stage, it has got all the potential to shape how businesses work together with the clients. Hence, if you’re here to revolutionize your existing customer service, it’s certainly worth looking into artificial intelligence.
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Emily Johnson is a marketing consultant with 10 years of experience in the execution of marketing strategies. Currently, she heads the marketing department at Blue Mail Media, a renowned B2B data solution company based out of Irving, Texas.
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