Arun ShankarBetter customer experience, which leads to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, is a goal across many organisations. A good understanding of customers is the first step toward an excellent customer experience, and leveraging artificial intelligence can help accelerate this understanding.
The areas where artificial intelligence can help include sales and marketing. Artificial intelligence tools offer white-space analysis for sales and can recommend immediate action on opportunities. In marketing, artificial intelligence-powered solutions enable organisations to generate highly personalised messages at a scale that could not have been achieved using humans alone.
Additionally, virtual customer assistants powered by artificial intelligence can be used to improve the customer experience by reducing time to response.
Among the many technology trends shaping 2019 and beyond, the adoption of artificial intelligence when it comes to customer experience is one of the most exciting. The use of artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning, natural-language understanding and natural-language processing can help analyse customer sentiment and customer feedback at scale, precision and speed not achievable through humans.
A five-step methodology for how application leaders can use artificial intelligence to get faster, real-time understanding of customers.
#1 Customer experience strategy
Before looking into what artificial intelligence can do, you must have a customer experience vision and strategy in place. If there is not one already, take an active part in crafting one. Application leaders should lead the customer experience initiative together with a dedicated customer experience leader, or a customer service or customer relations lead, or the chief marketing officer.
#2 Map customer journeys
Map and analyse current customer journeys to understand the touchpoints and experiences that customers have with your brand — from discovery, presales, sales, customer service and beyond. A better understanding of how customers experience a brand provides the foundation on which artificial intelligence can be used to improve customer journeys and benefit the business.
#3 Get familiar with AI solutions
Your organisation may already have a wealth of valuable data from current customer experience tools, customer service and sales reps, social media, Net Promoter Scores and Customer Effort Scores. However, most of this data fails to reveal rich real-time customer insights.
By using artificial intelligence technologies, it is possible to categorise, organise and analyse customer data in real time, whether to analyse the written or spoken word, and ultimately understand customer sentiment.
#4 Build or buy
Application leaders must decide whether to build or buy an artificial intelligence solution. Decide if there is enough skills and budget to create it in-house or if your organisation is better off buying a customer experience AI solution.
When buying a solution, focus on how well the vendor prioritises and how well they handle critical customer-understanding issues. Ensure the vendor will focus on this area through proofs of concepts or pilots.
#5 Track and measure success
Measurement is the only way to answer the question – is it working? Find the metrics and key performance indicators to track the success of an AI customer experience initiative. Aim for early quick wins, initiatives that can be tracked easily and have the ability to show success or failure fast, to build momentum for future initiatives.
Key takeaways
- Before looking into what AI can do, you must have a CX vision and strategy in place.
- Aim for early quick wins, that can be tracked easily.
- By using AI, it is possible to analyse customer data in real time.
- An understanding of how customers experience a brand, can be used to improve customer journeys.
Gartner’s Jessica Ekholm gives five tips on how to introduce artificial intelligence technologies to enhance customer experience.
