Leveraging AI for customer experience
AI has very quickly become a confusing landscape with terms such as machine learning (ML), deep learning, supervised learning, text analytics, image recognition, robotics, face recognition, natural language processing (NLP) emerging every day.
As a marketeer, where do I start? My focus is to improve customer experience and engagement for my brand – how do I leverage a seemingly powerful tool, i.e. AI, to do that?
One of the places to start is the big picture. What is the core objective? – Retention, making customers happier (NPS), enhancing contact centre experience specifically, acquiring more customers or a combination of these?
For example, if you are a pizza house, your objective may be to provide a superfast ability to take pizza orders. To facilitate this, you may implement a simple chatbot which can place orders based on key words (like “Pizza”), knowledge of customers past preferences and their locations. The self-learning chatbot could also learn about new customer choices and overtime predict, with high accuracy, what the customer may want to order at a particular time of the day.
All this can usually be implemented within 6-8 weeks and suddenly you have made a step change in improving your customer experience, whilst improving operational efficiency for the business.
AI initiatives, when combined with high performance digital teams, can result in compounding the impact of positive customer experience in a very real way. However, its critical to prioritise the low effort high impact areas first, get confidence, win exec support and set up the roadmap accordingly.
Here are some interesting claims:
IDC predicts that by 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by some sort of cognitive computing or AI effort*
According to Gartner, by 2020, 20% of citizens in developed nations will use AI assistants to help them with an array of everyday, operational tasks.
By 2021, AI augmentation is set to generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.
Juniper Research predicts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per year by 2022, up from $20 million in 2017.*
Servion predicts that AI will power 95 percent of all customer interactions by 2025, and it will do it so effectively that customers will not be able to “spot the bot.”*
So, AI is here to stay, expand & help.
As a marketeer, the key is to ensure that you are leveraging the appropriate AI technology to make your customers happier, keeping the organisational constraints and people change in mind all the time.
Both humans and machines need to work in tandem for best business outcomes.
*https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/the-future-of-customer-experience-is-ai-are-you-ready/
