Customer experience (CX) is a competitive driver of growth, and a business can deliver optimal customer experience if it remembers and treats them with attention, consideration and respect throughout their unique journeys. However, CX datasets are messy, customer behaviors are chaotic, and mining insights across billions of unique customer journeys tend the traditional analytics methods laborious, confining their usage to a small set of pre-defined problems, and success criteria ambiguous. This complexity of customer CX datasets makes for primary stomping ground for artificial intelligence (AI) that can effectively be used to deliver coherent customer experiences across all enterprise touch points.

Artificial intelligence can be successfully integrated at any point along the customer journey to reimagine customer experience that feel more natural. AI enabled customer journey analytics can uncover many business opportunities that you even didn’t realize that you should look for.

Customers’ digital activities and interactions produce tons of data for machine learning algorithm, which serves as fuel AI’s predictive proficiency. By assessing the details of previous customer support ticket, an AI tool can be used for customer satisfaction (CSAT) prediction about whether the current support interaction will result in positive or negative experience for the customers.

AI-augmented contextual analytics

Voice, text, sentiment analysis and visual engagement technologies can parse facial expressions, analyze written communication to determine true emotion and intent, while augmented natural language processing can be used to understand customer emotions and authenticate voices. These technologies allow businesses to foster positive experiences and sentiment with the customers for repeat and profitable orders.

Going from one click to zero click

AI is being used for predictive personalization to improve CX wherein the actions of users are predicted based on their previous behaviors and naturally integrate with the customers’ everyday lives. This makes consumers feel as if the brand experience were tailored just for them. Companies will be able to assess individual customer’s inventory and provide them goods even before they realize that they are running low. AI infused with emotions will make CX interactions smoother and streamlined across multiple channels.

AI to fill the gap in customer satisfaction

Most of the leading SaaS platforms utilized by an artificial intelligence application development company have APIs that are critical component of their value proposition. However, to utilize these SaaS data streams, enterprises have to rely on product interfaces, PoS systems and other home-grown and legacy touch point data sources. This creates a challenge for business managers and marketers to deliver real-time insights. AI is now filling this gap with multiple API options with real time touch point integration with its customer journey analytics platform.

For AI to deliver value, it must be given some context and the awareness of customer lifetime value, profitability, satisfaction level and other touch points of their journey to drive high value business performance. With such information, AI can actually help shape the customer behaviors behind an enterprise’s goals of its performance and customer value.

Customer support agents who are more efficient

Sales people, call center executives and employees in customer facing roles cannot be expected to ingest a customer’s entire history prior to conversation, however, AI can provide customer service a complete makeover with chatbots and virtual assistants to simulate human interactions, eliminating frustrating delays and errors in customer service, and helping the customers in finding what they are looking for by engaging them in conversations. Modern chatbots appear like a customer service agent, providing answers to complex questions and taking actions to resolve your issues like changing shipping location and cancelling orders, instead of the earlier choppy, machine evident interactions.

Enabling high impact efforts

AI thrives on information, the more the better. New generation of AI enabled data unification tools have made data pulling from multifarious structured and unstructured data sources just a background noise, and you need not be worried of your expansive data engineering initiatives. The businesses can provide services at a fraction of the cost of dedicated data services providers with integrated AI solutions. AI enabled automation frees up the human resources in a business to focus their initiatives on other high impact efforts and cognitive tasks.

Embracing the transformative adoption

It is widely felt among the business managers and top decision makers that decision making cannot be made entirely on guts and intuition, rather it should be based on the power of big data. The success of AI will be measured in more practical ways like new marketing avenues and return on investment. For this, AI will be used in combination with machine learning to pave the way for decision making metrics. Leading companies in the industries like finance, health, telecommunications, automotive and other sectors have already embraced AI in their decision making process with Nordea, Black Diamond and Sephora already getting AI in CX the right way.

Automated customer experience efforts

There are competitive advantages of combining AI and human intuitiveness as humans and machines working together perform better than both of them doing it all alone. Organizations with highly developed workplaces are automating their CX efforts using AI for customer communication. AI-enabled machines with their unlimited energy can do our mundane and repetitive tasks that humans find boring, while humans can do tasks that require creativity and cognitive thinking.

The technology allows humans to concentrate on tasks that only require not only human intelligence but human empathy as well. Like, AI can offer a host of options for the customer’s problems, such as why there is a problem in order refund, and forward the issue to a live human agent along with the context what the customer has already tried, thus helping the human agent provide a more customized customer experience.

Delivering customized experiences to evolved customers

AI-driven customer experiences help build satisfaction, loyalty and trust for customers while improving lifetime value for a business. Brands need to cut through the hype and figure out where to safely place their bets. Today’s customers live in an omni-channel world but some companies confine these digitally connected and highly evolved customers into the engagement paths that are steeped in legacy and instantly appear outdated.

So, the business in need of 360-customer view or the ones living with aging applications need to address their infrastructure issues first to leverage the full potential of AI enabled customer experiences. AI is at the center of customer experience transformation and in coming months and years, it will become all the more pervasive, offering the enterprises collective promise of automation, delivering high impact customer experiences rapidly and effectively, and gathering intelligence and business insights derived from this powerful technology.