In the ever-evolving technological advancements, one term has swiftly risen to prominence, promising a transformative potential. That’s Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence has many uses and is already seeing multiple cases of real-world applications. This groundbreaking technology is making waves with its real-world applications. But what does this mean for your business? Can AI enhance your customer experience? The answer is a resounding “yes.”
In this article, we’ll outline how AI can transform customer experiences and provide actionable insights on incorporating AI into your strategies to create remarkable customer interactions.
Use #1: Meeting customer needs and expectations effortlessly
As customer expectations skyrocket, businesses face an unprecedented challenge. According to Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, customer expectations have changed drastically, where
- 40% of the customers expect the company to solve their queries on the channel of their choice
- 38% of customers expect the agent to know who they are and the context of their query immediately
- 42% of customers expect faster customer service
While these soaring customer expectations are converting into customer needs, it’s critical for businesses to look for the future-proof solution to cater to these expectations. This brings us to AI–the solution that uncovers patterns and pinpoints vital customer requirements.
With AI, businesses can automate self-service on every channel—web, social, chat, email, and phone. They can deploy chatbots that can auto-generate answers from solution articles, ultimately delivering faster customer service on the channel of the customer’s choice.
Use #2: Delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences with AI
Each customer is unique, and herein lies a challenge. How do you ensure a remarkable customer journey for a diverse audience? Enter AI, a game-changer in data processing.
Take Netflix’s personalized content recommendations as an example. AI-driven personalization sets them apart, increasing user engagement and loyalty.
With AI, apart from emulating this success story of curating experiences, you can combine conversational and ticketing support in one unified solution for personalized service. You can also harness AI to amplify customer service by deploying gen AI-powered chatbots that understand intent, sentiment, and natural language for personalized service.
Use #3: Automating customer service without compromise
When business owners hear something about AI, one of the common fears is that using it for their business will, in some way, damage the human element of their brand. To a certain degree, this makes sense. If a chatbot is responding to a difficult question, it will not have the same level of thoroughness or attention to detail as a service rep would.
But it’s still possible to automate your customer service using AI without sacrificing personalization or putting you at risk of losing customers. The fact of the matter is that your customers will engage your brand across a wide variety of platforms, and you may not have the workforce to keep up.
Using automated AI services can actually help in these cases, increasing your ability to provide quick responses when and where they’re needed. It also provides another avenue to repurpose old content and re-engage with your audience. One way you can accomplish this is through the use of generative AI-powered chatbots, where chatbots can auto-generate answers from knowledge bases and articles that provide hyper-personalized self-service on a wide variety of communication channels.
Another avenue for automation via AI is the use of virtual assistants. Virtual assistants allow you to outsource basic tasks like administrative tasks, data entry, and other technical work. Essentially, the idea is to save time by eliminating repetitive and time-intensive tasks.
Use #4: Future-ready AI and customer discovery processes
As technology advances, the way we search for knowledge is changing. Today businesses can automate up to 70% of their conversations with the help of gen AI chatbots and knowledge bases. With AI-powered self-service bots across all channels, including web, in-app, and messaging apps, businesses can deflect L0/L1 issues and provide instant and personalized resolutions without the need for customers to engage with agents.
Self-service options and intelligent bots also reduce the workload on support teams by automating resolutions through self-service chatbots, thus allowing support agents to focus on complex cases that require their expertise, creativity, and empathy.
With agent-side AI chatbots, agents receive valuable recommendations and insights to enhance their actions, including suggestions for additional products or services. This ensures a personalized and proactive approach to customer engagement and helps in elevating the overall customer experience.
Delivering exceptional customer experiences with AI
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and it can profoundly impact your customer experience in the coming years. With the ability to process more customer data, you can meet your customers rising expectations in a way that keeps them loyal to your brand. Since AI helps brands provide a personalized experience, you can take your customer experience to the next level.
With new automation techniques like chatbots and virtual assistants already creating an impact, you can save time and money by outsourcing mundane, routine tasks.
AI is beginning to change the way how customers interact with businesses and how they search for solutions, and adopting AI is one of the best ways to cement the success of your customer experiences in the future. With all of these potential use cases, it’s clear to see that using data-backed AI is a solid move for your brand’s future.
Visit Freshworks Customer Service Suite – One Unified Omnichannel Solution Powered by AI to learn more.