Authored by Animesh Samuel, Co-founder & CEO, E42
A report on the Future of Work from RobertHalf indicated that currently, 39% of IT leaders are using artificial intelligence, 33% are expected to adopt it in the next three years and 19% may begin to use it within five years.
Why are companies rushing to adopt AI and how does it help a brand grow?
For brands that want to provide a hyper-personalized experience to their customers, AI has become an extremely popular choice of tech. AI’s machine-learning abilities allow it to process large amounts of data and provide customers with a quick and personalized response.
In today’s digital era, people expect their queries to be answered and resolved swiftly. This is precisely the reason why the use of AI has been leveraged to assure a phenomenal customer experience. With a boom in online engagement over the last few years, companies attend to a large chunk of their customers online and their satisfaction is of utmost importance for their businesses to grow. Over the years, these companies have integrated AI into their customer response systems to keep up with the number of queries on a daily basis.
How does AI improve customer experience?
According to a study by Aberdeen and IBM, 33% of customers experienced more satisfaction due to the personalised experience offered by AI. The study also suggests that companies with AI services are three times more likely to get new customers and 2.5 times more likely to retain customers.
AI understands customers better, creates a smooth, streamlined experience for them, and is capable of making analytical decisions in real-time.
Understanding customers better through AI: Artificial intelligence and machine learning gather a large amount of data about a customer’s social and historical behaviour and analyses it to gain an understanding of the customer. Traditionally, usage patterns were analysed to service the customers; with AI, there’s continuous learning involved.
AI constantly learns and improves from the information it analyses and hence, it is able to anticipate the requirements of the customers better. This element of AI allows companies to share relevant content with their customers and create a personalised experience for them.
Real-time decision-making and predicting behaviour: Apart from the basic analysis of data, AI makes it possible to learn from customer behaviour in real-time and make decisions accordingly to personalize the customer experience to a much higher extent. Based on the search patterns displayed by the customer, AI can make it possible for companies to share personalized notifications or display content accordingly.
The study of data from a large customer base in a short time enables AI to predict the needs and requirements of the users, allowing companies to apprehend the thinking and requirements of a customer and act in accordance with that.
For example, AI can recognize if a customer is using ad blockers in real-time and suggest to them other interfaces that will continue to engage them.
AI and predictive analysis of a customer’s historical and current data gives companies deeper insight into their behaviour. Through that knowledge, AI can make the customer’s experience much more relevant, which makes the sale a lot more likely.
Hyper-personalization: According to a 2020 MIT Technology Review survey, conversational AI agents are the leading application of this industry. Powerful AI agents designed with cutting-edge tech enable businesses to cater to a large number of customers at once and provide adequate attention to each one of them.
AI-enabled interactions, including conversations with digital assistants, along with facial recognition technology, were found to be trustworthy by 49% of customers, according to a recent report from Capgemini.
Today, customers find it much more convenient to interact with an AI agent rather than waiting on calls for executives for the simplest of queries. AI’s processing of the data to gauge the heartbeat of customers allows businesses and customers to function in tandem and take each other forward.
AI to help humans shift to more specialized skills
Initially, people were sceptical of AI, for they believed it was going to cut down the jobs for humans. However, it’s quite the opposite! AI, when made to function in collaboration with humans, can take a load off the human workforce and in turn improve customer experience by a huge margin.
Think about the first level of interaction for a query with an AI customer care executive. The customer first engages with an AI agent to resolve the query and only when an escalation is absolutely necessary, a human customer care executive is required to step in. The process enables the human team to focus on core processes while AI can resolve the basic queries for the customers and still leave them satisfied with the experience. These days, customers want intuitive and immediate responses instead of monotonous query resolution. AI customer care executives are capable of giving customers feedback in a very conversational manner.
Experts believe that as the world moves towards AI integration into the workforce, there will be more jobs created in order to facilitate the transition. As AI will begin to take over the basic and mundane processes, humans will move towards acquiring more specialized skills and move into a more creative and qualitative arena. While the industrial revolution made humans believe that they were born to work hard, the technological revolution on the other hand is making humans realize that they can work smart and leverage the power of AI to boost productivity and get exponential returns on their investments.
Conclusion
AI integration is already quite commonplace in the digital world and it is fast becoming a norm for rapid business scaling. With AI being touted as the future of enterprise growth, it is likely to only move deeper into the customer service domain, allowing humans to invest more in core strategies for operations thus providing them the much-needed space to innovate and achieve the desired business outcomes.
