The current challenges

Customer expectations are always multiplying. Enterprises struggle to improve customer experience and are making huge investments to meet their expectations. Regardless of the industry, the customers today expect that they will get best-of-breed experience and contextually relevant customer service. The real world is becoming digital and many more people have access to smart devices and objects. There is a need for rapid and relevant customer to company interactions on new networks and platforms. Automating the mundane tasks is not sufficient to provide superior customer experience.

Leaders always struggle to provide quality customer care in a pocket-friendly manner. Enterprises must think of a new approach to manage customer servicing. Deep customer knowledge and wholistic customer experience are the new-age mantra to develop a new way to servicing.

If I must put these customer challenges in bullet points, the customer services challenges are listed below.

• Digital and physical marketing lines are getting blurred and it is giving rise to multiple touchpoints
• Liquid expectations are a reality
• Customer expectations are rising for more personalized, quick and relevant customer interactions
• Traditional marketing techniques have failed

Image Source: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2018/03/19/11/33/feedback-3239758_960_720.jpg

Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reinvent customer services

By 2020, experts predict, more than 85% of customer interactions will be automated. It is expected to impact every industry.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide new capabilities to reduce costs with integrated, improved and wholistic customer experience. Some of the areas where AI is expected to help enterprises are improved automated servicing, increased quality and speed of customer interaction, and creating best-of-breed and complete customer engagement.

I will elaborate on each of the points one by one.

For example, for improved automated customer servicing, a data-driven approach and analysis of customer interactions can be useful to understand customer intent. AI will be useful to find new customer gateway for best and most effective marketing channels. Use cases, which can be completely automated, can be identified (for example, the interactions that can benefit the most from intelligent chatbots). You can free up your employees to focus on new, strategic and innovative areas as the repetitive work can be managed with next gen technologies.

Hyper-personalized customer interactions

Customer can benefit most if they get relevant information quickly. Hyper-personalized interactions can be made more relevant as contextual information that contains images, text, videos and audio is made available for customers. Brand will also be able to differentiate themselves as they use voice interfaces like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Addressing customer concerns proactively

AI can enable more contextually relevant and proactive ways to resolve customer concerns in a predictable and proactive way. Ensure customer engagement in a timely and frictionless manner across multiple touch-points for a complete customer journey.

Round-the-clock customer services at a reasonable price

If you service customers in multiple geographies, servicing them at all locations will be expensive and complex. However, AI-enabled system can manage round-the-clock intelligent web chats, mails and conversations with your customers without any real human intervention.

AI-enabled contact centers

AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) listens to customer intently. Based on customer interactions, it builds the best ways to address customer concerns and provides valuable ways to resolve the issues of customers. Specialized service representatives won’t have to be trained in all areas. It will be easy to shuffle service representatives.

Instantaneous responses

Experts believe that one of the most important factors that drives customer satisfaction is instant response. With the help of AI-enabled self-service portals, such instant real-time exchange of information can be made possible. Issues can be resolved quickly, and information can be made available to them instantly (what they really need and not just dumping all the information). AI gives the ability to quickly scan across multiple sources of information and display it as required.

Can AI transform customer services overnight?

Artificial Intelligent doesn’t offer a magic potion. The AI model must be tuned to the customer data. The AI model must be trained and tuned and trained from data repositories, processes, and mechanisms. The ability to train AI models is critical to the success of customer services.

Will AI transform your customers to become brand loyalists? Definitely. AI will add intelligence and automation to customer services, something that is critical to meet the expectations of the customers today.

If you wish to discuss how AI can help to improve your customer services or impact your industry, you can speak to one of our professionals who is equipped with everything related to AI.