10 Ways How AI Improves Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is often conflated with customer service, but these are distinct concepts. Customer service is all about making sure your customers are satisfied, answering their questions, resolving their problems, and giving them support when they need it. Customer experience refers to all the offline and digital experiences a customer has with your brand, from when they first learn of your brand’s existence to when they stop using your products and services.

Customer experience strategies are focused on improving customer interactions at every stage of the customer journey. From initial lead generation to onboarding and, eventually, to customer support and ongoing interactions, you need to ensure your customers have positive and memorable engagements with your brand.

AI customer experience tools use the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide deeper, more meaningful user experiences to customers. They gather vast amounts of data in real-time to personalize messages and offer recommendations. They can communicate with customers directly in the form of AI-driven chatbots (that use natural language processing and understanding). They can even tap into the power of predictive analytics to estimate and evaluate customer behavior.

So how can these AI technologies improve customer experience?

1. Immediate availability. For starters, most AI tools are immediately available for customer use. Instead of having to wait for the contact center’s operating hours to connect a customer service agent, a customer can immediately begin a chat conversation with a bot on standby. Most customers want to get a response as quickly as possible and start resolving their issues immediately; AI chatbots solve this problem resolutely.

2. Consistent service. Human beings can be skilled conversationalists, but we’re also inconsistent and imperfect. Human customer service agents and salespeople have good days and bad days, offering inconsistent experiences across the course of a given week or month. AI tools typically don’t suffer from this drawback; they function according to their programming, serving customers consistently in all contexts and at all times.

3. Proactive help. Predictive elements of AI solutions allow those tools to offer some kinds of proactive help. When a customer is browsing your website, gathering more information for a purchasing decision, an automated agent can pop up to offer assistance after a certain amount of time has elapsed, this is a perfect example where AI enhances the CX. When a customer abandons a shopping cart or leaves your website prematurely, you might be able to automate a follow-up with them.

4. Personalized service. It’s estimated that more than 85 percent of businesses are now offering personalized services and experiences for their customers. If you don’t follow suit, you could quickly fall behind the competition. One of the greatest strengths of AI is that it has the potential to personalize experiences by tapping into customer data. When your chatbot or other tool understands that this customer has engaged in certain behaviors in the past, or that this customer belongs to a certain audience segment, it might respond somewhat differently.

5. Smarter lead generation. AI is also useful for better lead generation. With the right tools and systems in place, you stand a much better chance of reaching the right people at the right moment. This is obviously beneficial for your sales strategy, maximizing your chances of closing more deals. But it’s also important from a customer experience standpoint, to ensure that only the most relevant people are the targets of your outreach.

6. Predictive behavioral analysis. Do you know what your customers are going to do next? A sufficiently powerful AI algorithm might. Thanks to the power of predictive behavioral analysis, certain AI tools are capable of accurately predicting audience behavior, and calculating the probability of a satisfying outcome or a closed sale.

7. Content customization. AI-powered tools can also customize content for your customers, giving them exactly what they need when they need it. If a customer asks a question, an AI chatbot can respond with the most appropriate answer it can find.

8. Workflow streamlining. Workflows are much more streamlined and much more consistent when you have powerful technologies coordinating different departments and automating various steps within those workflows. You won’t have to rely on manual effort as much and you can rest assured that your processes are being followed accurately and consistently. This leads to greater organizational efficiency overall.

9. Employee morale improvement. Customer service and sales are challenging for most people. But with the help of AI, these rules are much easier and more streamlined. Accordingly, incorporating better tools can lead to improvements in employee morale.

10. Customer data, research, and development. Don’t forget that AI is constantly gathering new information, giving you more customer data that you can use for research and development in the future. Eventually, you’ll be able to create much more sophisticated products and services for your customers – and market and sell them better as well.