Customer services are increasingly beginning to define the meaning of success for every business organization today. Statistics from PwC reveal customers would be ready to pay a 16% price premium for a great customer experience. What then constitutes a great customer experience?
Great customer service can be seen as providing a smooth transition for your customers from query to the desired result without any challenge. If your customers can trust your services in times of crisis, they will choose to stick with your brand and even promote it in their own way. To continue growing your business, you need to meet all your customers’ expectations.
Gone are the days when customers had the patience to listen to some distracting music while agents could put them on hold to go back and look for the information. Customers today expect the support agents to have every knowledge at their fingertips and give them answers at the drop of a hat.
While agents must focus on delivering quick resolutions to customers, the quality of their service is equally essential to building lasting customer relationships. To meet the rising customer expectations, you need a robust CX strategy that can utilize technology that assists human potential to bring out the best results for your business.
The worldwide availability of the Internet has made it possible for brands to communicate with their customers through multiple digital channels and expand their reach. Consumers, too, are more comfortable when they have the option to avail a brand’s services online.
Artificial Intelligence is rising to meet the ever-growing expectations that business organizations continue to encounter. AI is making it possible for brands to provide instant support to their customers all the time, which otherwise is practically impossible with human support alone. Business organizations are increasingly adopting AI to maximize employee efficiency, and over 50% of executives share their business productivity has increased by adopting AI solutions.
Four key ways to improve customer experiences by adopting AI
1. Fast Response Times
Using AI for Customer experience introduces automation in processes that resolve customer problems. While resolving customer queries, customer support representatives must understand customer challenges well and find the right solution at the right time.
AI can streamline your organizational workflows by integrating with systems like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms that provide insights into customer history and past interactions. The availability of this primary customer data guides agents with the next best action and speeds up the troubleshooting process.
Responding faster to customers should be prioritized if you want to retain your customers. An AI-powered Knowledge base for customer support can do that for you. With semantic search capabilities, it can make knowledge readily available for your employees and customers alike. Semantic search can grasp the meaning of search and unearths the relevant information from different sources.
Making Knowledge base articles and FAQs accessible can take care of your routine business queries while your agents can focus on the complex ones. Leveraging AI in customer service tools can thus help you reach faster to your customers and improve their experiences with your brand.
2. Personalized experiences
Being proactive in conversations with your customers is crucial. More than 65% of consumers agree that their perception of a brand increases when they receive proactive customer service notifications from companies. AI can track vast customer data and continually analyze it to identify customer patterns, behaviors, and pain points.
It can help you with content suggestions based on how users engage with your brand. Understanding your customers better can help you share relevant content with them and increase customer engagement with your brand.
Using AI chatbots is another meaningful way to customize content for your customers. These bots can leverage customer data from CRM databases and provide personalized experiences to customers. With the help of AI bots, you can engage with customers on their preferable channels and pitch personalized sales opportunities. Making chatbots visible on your website and other digital media can help you elevate your customers’ experiences and improve CSAT scores.
3. Improved real-time decision making
Real-time decision-making is crucial for long-term business growth and development. It involves the ability to derive insights from the available data and make informed decisions. This data can include your customers’ information, the information contained in your organizational Knowledge base, employee engagement with customer service tools, and more. AI can simultaneously process vast amounts of data and provide actionable insights for improved customer experiences.
AI is constantly learning from customer data and analyzing it to provide organizations with valuable insights for the next interactions with their customers. AI-powered Knowledge base management utilizes micro-segmented analytics to track employee engagement with different customer service tools like visual guides, articles, and FAQs. Agents can also share their feedback if the information in the knowledge base is relevant and helpful for them.
The data provided by micro-segmented analytics can help Knowledge Managers to focus on increasing visibility for content that engages most customers and let go of obsolete information. Adding AI in the Knowledge base can thus help your organization reap the benefits that data provides for improved CX.
4. Self-service support
More than 75% of customers report having used a self-service support channel. Many customers prefer not to get on a call with agents and instead like to help themselves. Therefore, it is essential that information is available online and is consistent across all channels for customers.
If your knowledge base articles and FAQs can resolve primary customer queries, your customers’ satisfaction increases, and your agents can also perform better at handling complex challenges. Leveraging AI for self-service customer support can boost employee productivity and increase customer satisfaction across various touchpoints.
AI chatbots can converse with your customers the way you would want your agents to do. With the help of natural language processing (NLP), these bots can understand your customers’ language preferences, patterns, and behaviors to resolve their challenges accordingly. If a non-routine query comes up, bots can direct it for agent assistance.
To strengthen your organization’s self-service support capabilities, all the information that your customers need must be available on your website and across all digital touchpoints. Also, deploying chatbots in high-traffic areas can significantly improve customer experiences. Therefore, a great CX strategy would require chatbots and agents to work in conjunction to support all kinds of customers.
“Customer service should not be a department. It should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.
To be available for your customers all the time, understand them well, and predict their needs, you should take advantage of the vast opportunities that AI holds today. AI can elevate customer experiences by providing technical support that augments the human workforce to meet ever-rising customer expectations.
