62% of business leaders across various industries have invested in artificial intelligence to assist their employees. Among them, 71% saw a positive return on investment, and 72% reported an increase in employee productivity.
But how does artificial intelligence excel specifically when it comes to customer experience?
How AI Affects Customer Experience
Using AI-driven data, we will demonstrate how artificial intelligence can impact customer experience through support, marketing, sales, and more.
We also share expert insights on potential drawbacks so you can implement AI solutions the right way.
How You Can Leverage AI to Enhance Customer Experience
We will share 8 tips for starting to use AI to improve customer experience.
The Impact of AI on Customer Experience
One of the significant advantages of using AI in customer service is the ability to provide assistance around the clock. In fact, this is the most important benefit, according to customer service professionals surveyed for the AI industry report.
The third most common use case for AI/automation in service is the use of chatbots and self-service tools to facilitate support around the clock. The use of AI to route inquiries to representatives is the most common case referenced by customer service professionals.
Furthermore, 84% of customer service representatives say these solutions make it easier to respond to support tickets. Meanwhile, 64% say AI helps make interactions with customers more personalized.
Impact: Chatbots provide the infrastructure for delivering support around the clock, and smart solutions help representatives respond to inquiries faster. This means customers typically experience shorter wait times.
Additionally, they may also receive more personalized responses than from service agents.
Overall, this reduces frustration – and thus friction – across the support journey. This leads to a smoother customer experience.
Potential Drawback: Risk of Losing High-Level Customers
“One of the main drawbacks of using AI in customer service is losing high-level customers due to a lack of ‘sufficient’ support,” says Kath Brands, CEO of Flintfox.
“While people today generally agree to talk to intelligent chatbots, high-level customers usually expect tailored support run by humans, and they become frustrated when they encounter AI bots.
“I really believe this is a significant drawback of using AI in customer service, and I don’t think many companies can afford to lose their high-level customers because of such situations,” warns Kath.
Marketing and Sales Journeys
More and more people prefer to search for products and services independently online. For B2B sales representatives, this means they only have about 5% of the customer’s time during their buying journey.
With less “face-to-face interaction,” representatives must seize every opportunity to influence customer decisions.
It is also critical to offer targeted, multi-channel assistance to customers throughout their online marketing and sales journeys. Short-term? Smart solutions can be your greatest allies here.
According to 89% of marketing professionals surveyed, artificial intelligence improves the quality of their content. Then, 84% of bloggers believe that AI/automation helps them achieve better alignment of web content with search intent. → Download now: The State of AI in Marketing [Free Report]
As for the…
relates to sales, the most common use case for artificial intelligence is content creation, followed closely by aiding sales prospects. 86% of sales professionals say that using generative AI to craft messages for prospects is effective.
72% say it helps them build a good relationship with prospects faster.
The impact: Improved content quality and more personalization enhances the user experience. It also gives people everything they need to know to independently research your product or service.
This creates more positive experiences when customers interact with your brand across marketing channels (i.e., social media or your website).
Effective ad messaging can then influence the sales journey of the potential customer. That, along with rapid communication between the customer and the company, can help your sales representatives make all interactions truly meaningful. A potential drawback: it can be hard to find relevant use cases.
“One of the barriers to creating AI content is that robots struggle to find real-life examples that are actually effective,” says Wil Rice, Marketing and SEO Director at MeasureMinds.
“Everyone knows that explaining the theory of something isn’t enough. Showing a practical example of how this works in the real world helps users visualize how they can implement the point you’re making,” says Wil.
For Wil, these actionable practical examples separate good content from great content. But “AI can’t do that well. Especially for relatively new problems, where the innovation lies.”
Personal Experiences
Among consumers, 56% want to make another purchase after a personalized shopping experience. 62% of business leaders report improved customer retention thanks to personalization.
However, creating comprehensive personalized experiences for customers not only boosts sales and retention. It also helps small brands compete against industry giants.
The focal point? Most companies don’t have the foundations in place to paint a detailed customer picture that makes personalization possible.
Nevertheless, AI/automation tools can help build personalized experiences at scale and across channels.
There are three main ways AI can assist your brand in creating more personalized customer experiences:
- Advanced customer segmentation. AI-powered algorithms analyze customer data and find distinct categories based on behavior, preferences, and purchasing history.
- Real-time personalization. AI-driven systems process real-time data such as browsing behavior, past purchases, and location to deliver instant personalization.
- Predictive customer insights. AI analytics predict customer behavior based on historical data and current trends, allowing brands to foresee needs and preferences.
Potential drawback: lacks creativity
“One of the main drawbacks of using AI in customer service is its inability to be creative,” says Tobias Liebsch, co-founder at Fintalent.io.
“AI systems operate based on predefined rules and algorithms, which means they lack the flexibility to think outside the box.”
Although AI excels at following specific guidelines, it may “struggle to handle complex or convoluted situations that require creative solutions and problem-solving on the fly,” warns Tobias.
Data Analysis
AI tools can collect, analyze, and uncover trends in large volumes of data. Accessing this data means you can discover (and celebrate!) your successes.
Also
This also means that you can identify areas that need improvement – including how to deliver better customer experiences overall.
The results of the AI State of Play report show that AI/automation has helped professionals analyze data across various departments/functions.
For example, collecting and analyzing customer feedback is the second most common use of AI among customer service professionals. Then, data/report analysis is a common use case among sales professionals.
The impact: Trends derived from customer feedback and sales data can give you deep insights into how to enhance customer experience. Such as implementing a recurring suggestion from customer surveys that improves purchasing experiences.
Or finding common reasons for customer churn so that you can improve your offering and reduce conversion.
Potential downside: Fewer interactions with customers
Merchynt uses AI “for every step in our customer journey,” says founder and CEO Justin Silverman.
AI may have contributed to enhancing customer satisfaction through “an almost instant personalized strategic plan based on the information we collect during their sign-up process.” But Justin warns that the trade-off is fewer human interactions with customers.
Therefore, Merchynt “lacks valuable opportunities to gather feedback on how to continue improving our offerings.”
How You Can Leverage AI to Enhance Customer Experience
From account management to content creation, here are 10 ways your company can leverage AI to enhance customer experience.
Account Management
Good account management makes customers feel valued, leading to better customer experiences. Better customer experiences increase customer retention and make cross-selling and upselling more viable.
But account management can be challenging. There are many details to pay attention to and to maintain customer satisfaction – especially with a large customer base. AI solutions can help sales, marketing, and service professionals complete tasks more quickly.
This means they have more time to build better relationships between the customer and the company.
An AI-powered tool like ChatSpot can respond to chat commands. You can ask it to help you draft follow-up messages for prospects or thank-you notes for existing customers.
The tool can also generate reports based on your company’s CRM data and add contacts with notes to the HubSpot CRM.
Start Using ChatSpot to Answer Customer Questions Around the Clock
Hovia uses AI to deliver amazing experiences for its B2B and B2C segments. The brand also uses technology to assist in calculating product results, including specific wallcovering requirements.
Jack Gibson, Chief Growth Officer, says, “We have a help desk provider with the first AI solution on the market that allows us to answer complex inquiries with minimal human input.”
With AI, Hovia can accurately answer customer inquiries at scale – ensuring the best results for both audiences. “While we answer these questions on our FAQ pages, it’s nice to know we can handle these queries in real time,” Jack explains.
Routing Tickets to Representatives
Routing tickets to representatives is a common use case for AI in customer support. You can leave basic tickets, such as questions about your services or even customer returns, to chatbots.
(Regarding the latter point, SurveyMonkey found that 59% of customers “would use AI to return a purchase.”)
But if chatbots cannot handle the request, they can route the ticket to the appropriate department or representative. AI tools may also suggest a support ticket if the customer wishes to speak with a human agent.
Identifying
Ticket and Inquiry Prioritization
AI can not only route tickets to representatives, but it can also determine the priority of an inquiry based on the level of urgency. To do this, AI tools analyze tickets based on sentiment, intent, and the language used. Representatives can then address the most dissatisfied customers first.
Determining the priority of inquiries faster is one of the biggest benefits of AI in customer service. Quicker prioritization can prevent emotionally charged interactions from escalating and enhance every customer interaction.
Both help create better customer experiences.
Content Creation
Generative AI can help you streamline and expand your content creation efforts. When paired with human expertise, it can provide your customers with a more personalized marketing/sales experience.
This creates a better customer experience across your sales, marketing, and support channels.
A generative AI tool like Content Assistant makes it easy for you to write customer emails, including prospecting and marketing, or responding to service tickets. It can also help you gather information, generate ideas, and organize blog content.
Get Started with HubSpot’s Content Assistant
Breaking Language Barriers
The translation capabilities of AI tools can help eliminate language barriers while using limited resources. For example, you can use ChatGPT to translate customer service inquiries and provide more personalized support.
You can also use AI to automatically translate articles from your knowledge base into multiple languages. This will help your website visitors access knowledge in their native language.
Delivering Relevant Messages to Customer Segments
“AI can analyze customer data to identify distinct segments based on behavior, preferences, and engagement history,” says Matthew Smith, Operations Manager at Ticket Squeeze.
The Ticket Squeeze team uses this data to “deliver more relevant and engaging messages” to different segments.
For example, they used AI to segment their email lists into categories like “sports enthusiasts” and “concert lovers.” Now each segment receives content tailored to their interests.
Matthew cites “higher open and click rates” and “deeper customer engagement” and “reduced email fatigue” as benefits of the more personalized approach.
Proactively Solving Problems
AI analytics can help your brand deliver proactive solutions before potential issues arise. Proactive solutions can be as simple as restocking popular items to ensure a smooth shopping experience.
You can also use AI analytics to identify demand for future products or services or improvements.
Personalized Deals and Recommendations
According to SurveyMonkey, 47% of customers are interested in receiving personalized deals from AI. This number rises to 63% in the Gen Z category.
Deals and recommendations are ways to create more personalized customer experiences. As mentioned earlier, this can help compete with industry-leading companies.
AI-powered systems/algorithms can help you provide personalized product recommendations and discounts before customers express their needs. The result? Your customers will feel valued.
Additionally, it will save them time in searching for required products or services, creating more enjoyable shopping experiences.
Employee Training
AI can assist you in training your customer service and sales team by analyzing sentiment and integrating your knowledge base. Sentiment analysis provides your team insight into the intent or emotions behind customer messages. Then, if AI can access your knowledge base (such as blog content or company manuals), it will deliver relevant training scenarios for your team.
Finally,
Artificial intelligence can analyze your team’s performance while considering sentiment analysis and your knowledge base.
8 Tips to Get Started
We spoke to eight professionals who are already using artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience journey. They share their top advice for those just starting out in AI technology.
- Automate small tasks first.
- Optimize AI content in stages.
- Start with basic data analysis.
- Upload data upfront.
- Experiment with existing tools.
- Adopt a customer-centric approach.
- Use AI to help you develop suggestions.
- Maintain the human touch.
Leveraging AI for Exceptional Customer Experiences
From browsing to purchasing and beyond care, AI, when implemented carefully, can positively impact the entire customer experience, from browsing to buying and post-care.
For example, AI tools like chatbots can help you provide customer support around the clock. This means people can get quick answers to inquiries regardless of time zones or team availability, creating frictionless support experiences.
AI technology can also help you provide tailored marketing/sales journeys for both new and existing customers. This reduces churn, enhances your brand reputation, and encourages repeat purchases.
You can start experiencing AI-enhanced customer experiences by automating small tasks first, uploading data upfront, or experimenting with existing tools.
But whatever approach you take, remember to remain customer-focused and maintain the human touch for the best results.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-ai-can-improve-your-customer-experience
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