2. Today’s consumers inhabit an omnichannel
world. Unfortunately, many companies fail to
realize this and force people who consider
themselves evolved onto paths of customer
engagement that fail to meet their needs and
feel antiquated. These businesses must move
to the next level if they hope to attract
people to their brand and then build a sense
of loyalty to keep them there.
3. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be just the
solution for companies looking for a
convenient, informed, and intelligent way to
connect with customers during any part of
their buying journey. The result of
implementing AI in this manner is an
improved journey for customers that feels
more personal and integrated. The entire
experience will feel more natural and less
forced for them.
4. AI is nothing short of a game-changer for the
entire customer experience (CX). It’s
important for businesses to understand how
AI applies to the CX as well as research
companies already benefiting from
implementing AI into their CX.
5. Why Businesses Need to Include AI as Part of
the Customer Experience
No business can afford to
overlook the importance
of CX. It is what drives
growth during successful
periods as well as the
greatest risk when things
aren’t going as well. To
enhance the CX,
companies should
consider incorporating
data insights as a primary
marketing tool.
6. However, businesses must also realize that
customers often exhibit chaotic behavior and
that datasets are often scattered and
incomplete. Undefined rules makes for
ambiguous criteria to measure success.
Datasets for the CX can truly be a nightmare
for developers of AI.
7. Despite the complexity of customer data sets,
AI can provide critical insights into the CX.
Call center professionals and other sales
personnel who serve customers directly
currently have no way to understand the
entire history of a customer and to glean the
most important insights all while speaking to
the customer in real time.
8. It’s not possible to manually program
automated systems with every potential rule
relating to the history of every customer.
That means that providing a streamlined CX
across every touchpoint requires AI
developers to uncover patterns from
numerous points of data. This is how AI
thrives.
9. How to Implement AI Successfully to Improve
the CX
The ability to implement and apply AI into
the CX requires the use of all three of the
following:
Unification of Data
This concept is essential for any brand that
wishes to analyze customer behavior
effectively. The more information provided to
AI, the richer the insights it can provide.
10. What was once an overwhelming task is now
possible to complete quickly and with
minimal expense.
Customer journey software programs that
offer a platform for analytics makes it
possible to complete the data unification task
for a small percentage of what it would have
cost to obtain services from dedicated data
providers before AI came on the scene.
11. Some data integration even comes to
companies at no cost. The simpler sources
enables companies to put sets of data
together within one to three days. It’s no
longer the dreaded and tedious chore that it
once was.
12. Delivery of Insights in Real Time
Before AI can impact the CX, the insights it
provides need to be available to customers at
every touchpoint of their journey. The ability
to integrate all touchpoints is crucial to
engaging customers in real time.
13. The typical platform offering SaaS includes
APIs as well at the ability to integrate data
from several third parties. In fact, they
consider an essential aspect of proposing
value to their clients. It would make things
easier on marketing teams if all data from
touchpoints was available directly from APIs,
but that is not reality yet.
14. Besides extensive data streams available
through SaaS, most companies depend on
several sources of touchpoint data. This
includes things like customer care, payment
platforms, product interfaces, and point-of-
sale systems. The patchwork of sources
makes it challenging to provide actionable
insights in real time.
15. Analytics platforms for tracking customer
journeys now include multiple API options to
help pull all of this data together. Integrated
touchpoint data in real time is highly valuable
and doesn’t cost as much as businesses might
assume.
16. Business Context
AI delivers results for isolated and simple
interactions by understanding the basic
functions of campaigns and emails.
CallSumo’s CRM platforms and web analytics
use this reality to their advantage. However,
customer journeys across multiple channels
would be an outdated notion when relying
on touchpoints from similar product
categories.
17. The journey of each customer is as unique as
fingerprints. Companies need to understand
their own touchpoint sets as well as the
method they use for implementing these
types of engagement for the CX.
AI requires context before it can deliver any
type of value. Context in this sense refers to
more than labeling interactions such as order
fulfillment and inbound customer calls.
18. AI needs to know why these events are
significant and how they shape the behavior
of the customer. To achieve this, it needs to
know the touchpoints and journey that
shaped KPIs and the impact of behavior by
the customer. The behavior could be related
to customer satisfaction, profitability,
lifetime value of a customer, revenue, or
similar factors.
19. After obtaining this data, AI goes beyond
simply finding the best action to take next or
the preferred customer audience.
Appropriate business context means that AI
locates tactics and touchpoints that help to
determine customer behavior as is relates to
the way that the business primarily measures
its performance.
20. The Application of AI to Improve the
Customer Experience
Once you understand what it requires to
apply AI successfully to the CX, it’s time to
learn more about specific applications and
how AI uses them to disrupt a variety of
aspects of CX by bringing together real-time
insights, unifying all data, and incorporating
context in business.
21. A Big Change to Customer Service
The biggest effect of AI will likely be the
transformation of customer service to a
hassle-free and automated experience. As
mentioned above, call center professionals,
sales personnel, and others who serve
customers directly have no way of knowing,
much less understanding, the entire previous
history of a customer before the current
conversation. The good news is that AI makes
it entirely possible. Here’s how:
22. Chat Bots
Powered by AI, a chat bot is an automated
customer service agent used in a variety of
settings.
23. Chat bots mimic interactions between
humans and offer immediate and
personalized responses to customers 24
hours a day. This capability eliminates the
inevitable and frustrating delay as well as
potential errors when handling customer
concerns and complaints.
24. Virtual Assistants
Virtual assistants operated by AI can answer
questions as well as obey commands. It can
even offer personal shopping assistance to
online customers. It does this by asking
simple questions and directing customer to
the right location.
25. Eliminate Clicks with Predictive
Personalization
Thanks to AI, businesses can create naturally
integrative experiences that coincide with
the everyday lives of customers. It won’t be
necessary for consumers to change the way
they normally communicate when speaking
with a brand representative. Intelligent
customization and prediction will give
customers the impression that the company
tailored every experience solely for them.
26. Thanks to AI, businesses can create naturally
integrative experiences that coincide with
the everyday lives of customers. It won’t be
necessary for consumers to change the way
they normally communicate when speaking
with a brand representative. Intelligent
customization and prediction will give
customers the impression that the company
tailored every experience solely for them.
27. Customer Analytics Powered by AI Offer Rich
Insights
It’s an optimal experience for the customer
when a company remembers him or her and
provides individualized attention,
consideration, and respect from the start to
the end of the journey. This is possible thanks
to the ability to mine insights from more than
a billion individual customer journeys quickly
and efficiently. This task was previously
overwhelming due to its tedious nature.
28. The beauty of customer analytics enabled by
AI is that it can comb through vast and
complex sets of data to uncover new
opportunities for business you didn’t know
existed. This gives you the chance to
prioritize the most useful insights without
having to sift though large volumes of data
yourself.
29. AI in this situation can uncover every
relationship that exists within the data
without anyone needing to program it to do
so. That means it can predict how a customer
might act in the future with a high degree of
accuracy as well as find the inhibitors and
drivers behind performance metrics.
Implementing AI to analyze the customer
journey provides answers to CX questions
such as:
30. • What behavior by customers indicate a churn
or a similar future outcome?
• What actions has your team taken to improve
the CX that have most successful or most
unsuccessful outcomes?
• Who are the ideal customers to spend your
time interacting with to ensure your outreach
sees maximum impact?
31. B2B Companies and AI Implementation
B2B businesses can benefit just as much as
B2C by introducing the concept of AI into the
CX. Tools enabled by AI automate customer-
facing tasks to enhance CX and boost
productivity to unprecedented levels.
32. AI can create new data where none
previously existed and predict future
behavior of customers based on this data. A
good example of this is Einstein, the AI
technology used by Salesforce. Einstein
analyzes conversations with customers as
they occur and applies algorithms from
machine learning to better understand the
customer perspective. The AI technology
alerts sales managers when an opportunity
arises in real time to improve the CX, upsell
or cross-sell, or solve a problem for a
customer.
33. Bringing All the Parts Together
AI gives marketers the opportunity to convert
multi-channel and multi-siloed enterprises
into one persona that understands,
remembers, and responds to achievements
and challenges of the customer in
personalized ways. Using the tool called One
Voice allows for a meaningful, rather than a
purely mechanical, interaction.
34. However, it can present a challenge in
deciding the right way to start development
and processes to collect the most useful
customer data. It also requires the building of
AI models and algorithms. Many businesses
find it nearly impossible to accomplish such a
task without the benefit of outside help. This
is due to the need to create new apps,
capabilities, and systems because some
disparate systems are not ready for AI
implementation.
35. Many business owners are just now realizing
that AI can dramatically improve the CX. The
problem is that they have no idea how to get
started.
Thankfully, our AI-based platform analytics
for the customer journey deliver customer
experiences that will make a quick and
memorable impact.
36. The time has passed to move customer
engagement out of the cost center and
realize that it’s a smart investment in
customer loyalty and behavior. AI can
enhance customer engagement significantly
for those who are willing to invest in it.