Great customer experiences matter, but with global customer bases, providing individualised service can be a tough call. As the number of clients you serve grows and routine tasks proliferate, a little help from AI can go a long way. From making self-service simple to helping you with internal tasks that ultimately affect your customers, this article examines the role of AI in customer experience.
How is AI Used for Customer Experience Enhancement?
Personalisation
Isn’t it a lovely feeling when you do business with companies that seem to know you, your needs, and your preferences inside-out? AI can help your customers by examining their data and behaviour. With this information, it can target content for individual relevance.
For example, AI can gauge preferences and use predictive analytics to recommend products, making it easy for customers to find information that interests them. AI can also synthesise customer data to aid human customer service agents in providing great customer experiences.
Optimising Customer Journeys
Your UX designers have gone all out to create smooth customer journeys. But, there may be sticking points that are causing confusion, moments when customers don’t know what to do next, and navigational issues they struggle to unravel. By analysing customer behaviour, AI can spot these pain points, helping you to streamline your customer-faced features for better user experiences.
Automating Routine Tasks for Efficiency
Some elements of customer experience come from behind-the-scenes activities. From billing to dispatch and delivery, there are multiple routine tasks and workflows to activate and follow. With every step along the way, there’s a chance for human error to slip in, leaving your customers frustrated and you embarrassed and apologetic. AI can reduce the need for manual interventions through automation, improving efficiency and reducing the potential for error.
Guiding Your Customer-Faced Strategies with Data-Driven Evidence
“What do our customers really want?” Whether they’re considering new product introductions or how to refine their brand messaging, it’s a make-or-break question for businesses. AI may not have all the answers, but it is able to process vast data sets and reach important conclusions. Analyse trends; explore the wider market. If there’s data, AI analytics software can provide information that allows you to make evidence-based strategic decisions.
Simplifying Customer Service
Most customers are perfectly willing to engage in self-service activities – as long as it’s easy to achieve their goals. This makes AI-based customer service for routine interactions a viable option.
AI customer experience-related examples include addressing routine needs like the desire to track a delivery or a request for the latest account statement by linking customers to the relevant resources. Thanks to natural language processing, it may even go beyond that, helping with other frequently-asked questions.
Directing customer enquiries to relevant people or departments is another function where AI can help. For example, Integrated Voice Response technology (IVR) can help with call routing, ensuring that customers aren’t directed to agents only to have their calls transferred.
Limitations of AI in Customer Experience
Despite the many ways in which AI can help you to enhance customer experience, it has severe limitations and you ignore them at your peril. Human oversight remains a key ingredient when you implement an AI-driven customer experience. We asked AI what its limitations were, and unsurprisingly, it had the answers!
AI Doesn’t Always Understand People
Natural Language Processing (NLP) learned from large language models gives AI an excellent vocabulary, but there’s more to communication than just words. There will be times when your customers need the type of input that only another human can offer. Understanding customers’ emotions, offering genuine empathy, and responding appropriately are still elements of communication that only human customer service agents do well.
Difficulty With Understanding Context and Complex Queries
Customer experiences rely on their individual context, and AI isn’t yet able to join the dots effectively. Most of us will have had frustrating interactions with AI assistants at one time or another, and this is one of the reasons why talking to AI is often an uphill battle.
The same problem occurs when customer enquiries are complex. A billing enquiry, for instance, may seem like a simple matter that AI can handle. But if the customer refers to several invoices, mentions a return, and ties that to an earlier customer service interaction, AI will be utterly lost.
Misinterpretation and Limited Creativity
Using Integrated Voice Response technology? Your AI might fail to understand a word a customer is saying. Customers often use terms that fall outside its training or have accents it struggles to interpret. Even in textual communication, AI often misinterprets customer intent.
Then, there are often situations that take a dash of creativity to resolve, and here, AI will be out of its depth. When innovative thinking and creative problem solving are a requirement, only a human will do.
Over-Reliance on AI Leads to Negative Customer Experiences
Whether your customers just dislike the idea of talking to a machine, or they are struggling to get relevant answers from AI, human intervention should always be an easily accessible option.
Customers see AI as a self-service feature, and you probably aren’t going to get much customer service kudos even when it gets things right. When they’re frustrated and want to talk to a human, over-reliance on AI will stand in the way of a positive customer experience and is likely to result in a negative one.
Consumer review platforms are full of infuriated comments along the lines of: “Impossible to speak to a human.” Don’t let your company match this description.
AI and Customer Experience: Getting the Balance Right
Yes, AI Can Help
AI tools and AI-based customer communications can improve customer experiences, but AI can’t do it all. When AI is dealing with your customers on your behalf, implement it mindfully and offer human interactions alongside customer-faced AI features like AI assistants.
Double-check and test your customer-faced AI and be open about what is AI-based and what is human. That chatbot presented as if it were a live operator will soon show its true colours, undermining customer trust.
As for IVR, there’s an overwhelming amount of negative feedback from the public. Emotional reactions ranging from fear to frustration have been reported: certainly not the type of feelings that align with a positive customer experience. For the time being, its top use will be call-routing, and a human should be on hand to pick up the call when IVR struggles to comprehend your customers.
Balance is key. If customers can easily help themselves using your AI features, they’re unlikely to give the experience rave reviews, but they won’t be dissatisfied. If AI is your only customer service option, on the other hand, at least some of your customers will have otherwise-avoidable negative experiences.
Yes, You Still Need Efficient Human Customer Service
Human-based customer service has its own limitations when customer experience isn’t carefully considered. If people are left on hold waiting for agents to answer their calls or human operators are unprofessional, you’re sure to suffer reputational harm.
Call centre management is challenging, hence the rise of AI in customer service, but we offer a simple yet effective alternative that allows you to offer high-quality human customer service as an option.
Consider customer service outsourcing with RSVP for a scalable solution that boosts customer experience metrics when AI cannot. Sometimes, your customers will get the answers they need from your AI, but when they can’t, we step into the breach.
RSVP offers a premium service that’s trusted by top brands. Contact our London-based call centre and find out how we can help you save the day by delivering positive customer experiences when AI isn’t equal to the challenge.