Artificial intelligence can effectively provide an accessible, intellectual, and informed customer experience during any situation in the customer journey. Along with artificial intelligence, end-to-end customer journeys can be integrated and made more personal, which is why they are more personal to the customers.
Artificial Intelligence enables bots that are anonymous at times but also useful at times, understanding and conversing to help customers achieve their goals, but it is not necessarily connecting with them at a human level.
Demand for AI in customer experience
The complex situation is the reason why AI can set free the value and loyalty across the customer experience. Call centers, employees, salespeople, and agents in customer-facing roles cannot completely understand customer history and know their insights in real-time.
The rapid change in the digital world has made customers expect brands to treat them like humans. This means that the customer expects brands with which they interact must have human qualities with transparency, consistent with their actions and intentions. The more AI experience feels artificial the less likely customer will trust it or come back to it.
According to Gartner’s report on how to improve customer experience through AI, “By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI”. In another Gartner's report, it says, “the customer experience gets better, it translates to improved loyalty, customer satisfaction, and advocacy, as an aim to achieve across many organizations. A good understanding of customers is the first step toward excellent customer experience and leveraging artificial intelligence can help accelerate this understanding. Artificial Intelligence or AI can never be one solution to all at this stage but it may lead to that path where menial and complex tasks can now be taken care of through AI”.
Brands always look to have the consumers complete attention, this requires a combination of technology and making the customers experience an operational discipline. The company's foundation has to be built with embedded emotional and intelligent capabilities into its very fiber.
Technology like Emotion Artificial Intelligence can bring a rapid shift in experience by combining the data-driven experiences embodying the latest techniques in Human-centered design that has deep emotional connections with products and brands, which increases the loyalty of the brands and business growth.
The customer experience at scale requires contextual relevant content, which is the key touchpoint for the brands to engage with their customers. Brands earn high value by providing unique moments to their customers through relevant content. Marketers who use AI to influence the consumer for a better experience, having responses that simplify a complex answer helps with strengthening the emotional bond with those brands. AI-backed marketing allows the organization to have a broader spectrum and minimize the “human error” part of the problem.
AI also helps in sales and marketing. AI tools offer white-space analysis for sales and can recommend immediate action on opportunities. In marketing, AI-powered solutions allow organizations to generate highly personalized messages at a scale that could not have been achieved using humans alone. Additionally, virtual assistants empowered by AI can be used to improve the customer experience by reducing time to response. Virtual customer service has always been at the base of every successful product, having AI give timely replies and prompt answers to customers' questions can help deal with multiple small queries.
AI chatbots
AI-enabled chatbots are becoming very popular due to the positive impact of many types of industries. These chatbots are designed to start a conversation with the customers, find relevant answers to their queries, and build a relationship through the whole cycle of their purchasing experience. By making these responses more human the AI chatbots make the customer feel comfortable in their conversation.
According to an article by Chatbots Magazine, “A chatbot can handle dozens of messages at the same time and chatbots could save upto 30% on customer support services”. In another article on Freshworks on how Chatbots are Revolutionizing Customer Service explains, “chatbot can answer customer questions directly, streamlining the online sales process, and resolving problems. These chatbots unlike human agents are available 24/7 and can always answer the queries at the customer's convenience. This translates to reduced wait time in getting answers. Also, chatbots can be set up to transfer customers to human agents if the customer has a more complex question. This helps speed up the customer support process. Taking care of most of the traffic AI chatbots help comb through smaller queries and only the complex will reach the human agent which reduces the workforce required.
AI with human face and emotions
For example, AI-driven mechanical arms can now make your food for you, Samsung Bot Chef knows what makes it human-like as the arms help you around the kitchen doing menial tasks such as mixing ingredients as per the chefs instructions and chopping vegetables and so on. This is the first step towards a fully automated kitchen or a bar counter. As humans have complex emotions, so the AI inherent the challenges to differentiate between conscious demonstrated emotions and unconscious hidden sentiments. Many cognitive bots these days are getting closer to human-like interactions thanks to a combination of voice and tone recognition, emotion detection, and subsequent action.
Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible to send highly personalized emails to every customer by analyzing a customer’s topics of interest and reading patterns to recommend the most relevant content.
Recently, Samsung unveiled the Neon Project in Consumer Electronic Show(CES), where a humanoid AI chatbot, a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human with the ability to show emotion and intelligence. "There are millions of species on our planet, and we hope to add one more," Pranav Mistry, Neon CEO and head of STAR Labs.
Today, major companies are integrating with effective AI and computing to drive their customer experience. Very soon, the emotional artificial intelligence and technologies will start delivering new models and new ways of working to the organizations.
