AI has changed the face of customer service by raising efficiency and customer satisfaction while lowering the overall associated expenses. Even though organizations have made great strides in gaining customer trust with AI interactions, they still struggle with customer satisfaction.
Organizations worldwide have turned to AI, such as chatbots and digital assistants, to improve the customer experience. More businesses are using machine learning algorithms and AI to automate their daily operations and analyze customer data. Even though this leads to better prediction of customer needs and faster delivery of services and solutions, the missing element here is the human touch.
Despite the growing usage of AI technologies, customers are more likely to trust real people to help make decisions. Users rely on only those tools that seek to incorporate empathy and ethical decision making. Empathy is the key element of building trust between technology and humans.
AI Redefining Customer Care
AI, chatbots, virtual assistants, and smart speakers have been around for some time, and their capabilities continue to advance rapidly. But, when it comes to delivering seamless experiences that consumers crave, these technologies sometimes lack the all-important human touch that generates positive outcomes.
Integrating AI with digital customer platforms can help speed up the decision-making process. It makes it easier to provide customers with the most relevant products and services for their needs, enabling a proactive and smooth customer journey that makes consumers feel known and recognized. AI technologies can act as personal assistants to human agents and quickly access the data and knowledge the agents need to respond to customers more efficiently.
Read More: Top B2B Customer Experience Trends to watch out for in 2021
Another bonus of AI is that it never needs to sleep. It helps customers to have access to 24/7 support. 24/7 support is not just good CX anymore; it is table stakes in today’s market. Customers are no longer willing to wait until businesses open their doors to get answers to their biggest account questions. AI makes that possible.
Improving Personalization.
An important way AI is transforming customer experience is by providing personalized content. This is an age where everybody knows everything relevant to their needs and wants. AI technology is also finding its way into the cloud, where organizations are putting their data lakes to achieve faster insights from data and analytics.
Long with personalized recommendations, organizations are now also turning to AI services to help develop customized content. Customers are more likely to buy from a company that has spent time or has used a program to get to know them.
Rehumanizing Customer Experiences
CMOs believe customers can soon manage most of their relationships with companies without any human intervention.
The advanced AI technologies available today are rapidly becoming capable of offering empathy. With natural language processing and advanced machine learning, they can detect keywords in conversations, and a customer’s current mood- and respond accordingly. They are capable of bi-directional, almost human-like communications and pinpoint the exact needs and decision-making drivers of customers.
AI Privacy Concerns
There has been a lot of coverage on data privacy, and AI usage will only increase privacy concerns. Privacy concerns are cropping up as companies feed more and more consumer and vendor data into advanced, AI-fuelled algorithms to create new bits of sensitive information, unbeknownst to affected consumers and employees.
Read More: Marketing strategies in 2021: More Digital than 2020
Organizations need to be steadfast in considering the data they collect and utilize for AI projects and machine learning. There is a rising expectation for companies to be more transparent with customer data collection, usage, storage, and security.
AI for customer experience is here to stay, and the pandemic just acted as a catalyst in moving organizations towards AI implementation. Soon there will be computers that will be able to differentiate between a smile and a smirk. This level of sophistication can make customer interactions with businesses better and more efficiently.
