By 2020, 85% of a client’s relationship with a business will be managed without interacting with a human, according to Gartner research. That doesn’t mean we’ll all be rushing out to buy thousands of robots, but it does mean there are plenty of things that AI can help with right now to make your CX better – for customers and for your business.
5 ways AI and machine learning can improve CX
- Helps customers find exactly what they want, even if they don’t know what they want: Image recognition is one of the most rapidly improving areas of AI. The ability to look at pictures and work out what they are powers Neiman Marcus’s Snap.Find.Shop app. A customer sees something they like, takes a picture, and the app’s image recognition software will find something similar from the company’s inventory.
- Gets your data organized and tells you what it means: Too much data? It’s the lifeblood of marketing decisions, but as the volume grows, analyzing it becomes tougher. AI and machine learning can deal with vast amounts of data, sorting, analyzing, and extracting patterns far more quickly than humans can. It can analyze customer sentiment during calls, transcribe them, and present you with a text file so you can read what people are saying. It can look at social channels and give feedback on what customers think. This is intelligence gained from your data, to give you an accurate picture of what your customers think about you.
- Never lets you run out of stock: Not having what people want is more than a supply-chain issue – it’s a customer experience issue, and can lead to shoppers going elsewhere. AI’s ability to consume and analyze vast amounts of data means it can accurately and quickly predict customer buying behavior, using information such as weather forecasts and newsfeeds. The analysis allows you to make sure you have the right inventory to match demand created by events beyond your control, such as the weather.
- Always on, 24-hour customer service: You need a lot of people and space to run a 24-hour customer service operation. For many companies, that’s just not feasible. But chatbots don’t need offices, food, or sleep. So while your humans are in bed, chatbots keep your call centers open.
- Allows humans to do what they do best: If chatbots can deal with routine queries such as ‘how do I reset my password’ and ‘can I get these shoes in black,’ your people don’t have to – freeing up their time to deal with issues that require a human touch to solve. Customers win both ways. They don’t have to queue for an answer that could be provided in seconds by a bot, and when they need human contact, they get it faster and for longer. Remember: AI and machine learning can improve CX, but the human factor cannot be ignored.
