What is AI in customer experience?
Artificial Intelligence is not just a bouncy icon asking how it can help. (Remember “Clippy” from Microsoft Office?) The purpose of AI is a technology that offers enhanced and personalized user experiences. This can be anything from pre-filling forms or recalling stored information, to presenting images, text or content that enables responses without unnecessary file hunting or delays.
Case in point, using a chatbot to buy movie tickets. The chatbot might offer a search for movie theaters in your area (based on geolocation), the films playing at those theaters and their showtimes, help you select tickets, and pay for them. Or you can ask the chatbot to search for films based on a specific genre, a film’s title, or simply one that has great reviews and plays at a theater located near your favorite restaurant. The AI behind the chatbot does the work in the chat window.
Ways AI helps companies improve their customer experience
Organizations can take advantage of AI to do more for their customers. Using AI, companies can gain a better grasp of individual customer needs and learn from each interaction. Consider a bank’s ATMs. Once the bank builds a customer’s profile on their ATM usage (language preferences, account preferences, etc.), those preferences can be referenced upon the customer’s return to the ATM.
At this point in time when consumers want more control over their data privacy, AI can provide real-time, data-driven decision-making for more effective marketing. Content-driven sites such as news, personal interest, vocational interest, travel, etc., can benefit from using AI to interact with or react alongside users as they visit sites or use apps to present new marketing opportunities.
With personalization, AI can deliver relevant content, provide recommendations, and eliminate pain points. A financial news site can react to a user’s story choices by presenting related content, and specific ads, making recommendations, and making site searches more effective.
AI also improves accuracy and reduces human errors. How many times have you been challenged by a shopping cart checkout process that not only asks for your billing and shipping address, your payment information, and your customer loyalty number, and then asks for possible coupon codes at the very end of the order submission process? Entering so much information can result in errors—even a mistyped zip code can result in a shipping error and a bungled shopping experience.
Increase efficiency and customer satisfaction using AI chatbots
Chatbots are proving successful as cooperative assistants in customer service applications. Instead of forcing customers to wait what feels like an eternity on an IVR phone menu system, chatbots can provide immediate, tailored answers to specific questions or solutions based on a customer’s profile and account information.
Consider a return of merchandise handled entirely via AI chatbot: retrieving the customer’s order number, locating the specific item the customer wants to return from the sales receipt, obtaining a mailing label and return authorization for the customer to print off, and instructions for shipping the returned item. An AI chatbot can not only match customer requests to the right process but also increase efficiency.
The challenges of using AI
Before all this magic can happen, though, your business must be prepared. Customer data must be unified; data tends to be spread out and siloed. There may be budgetary restrictions. Incorporating AI in your organization should be validated through process research, cost analysis, and sales analytics. Also, AI will never replace human interaction, and a link or connection to talk to a person should always be made available to the customer.
How Terazo and Twilio can help incorporate AI into your company’s customer experience
Twilio offers communications and customer experience software, and Terazo is here to help. Terazo can add custom-tailored experiences, develop AI in chatbots and servicing, sort and organize tickets, connect your customers to the right agent, shorten the ticketing lifecycle, and help users resolve issues. Talk to us and take advantage of our experience and intelligent customer engagement at scale at twilio@terazo.com.
