AI-driven technologies (e.g., natural language processing and machine learning) are now used in many customer service applications to help brands deliver an outstanding customer experience that will drive sales and increase customer retention.
In fact, 78% of contact center professionals believe that AI will have a positive impact on call center applications and 77% are investing in AI-driven initiatives.
Here’s how you can use AI-driven technologies to leverage the power of data and improve customer experience:
1. Support Real-Time Data-Drive Decision-Making
With all the consumer data and customer information available, you need the ability to analyze and extract actionable insights in real-time to inform accurate decision-making.
For example, AI-driven technology can organize and analyze a tremendous amount of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources to identify market trends, understand consumer expectations, and gauge customer sentiment. This can help you select the right products, offer relevant services, and design effective messaging to improve the brand experience.
2. Improve Marketing Personalization
Consumers expect a highly personalized experience when they interact with brands. As such, you need to combine customer information in your database (e.g., purchase history, demographic data, preferences) with real-time browsing behaviors. This will allow you to deliver the most relevant content that helps build relationships and accelerate the sales cycle.
AI-driven technologies can leverage real-time customer data and use predictive analytics to drive better engagement. They enable you to deliver a personalized experience in the right place and at the right time to each customer.
3. Improve Product Recommendations
You can use AI-driven recommender systems that combine consumer data with contextual information (e.g., a website visitor’s search queries, browsing patterns, or purchasing behaviors) to provide the most relevant product recommendations that will increase sales.
These product recommendations can be used to create a personalized shopping experience, e.g., with a dynamic homepage or product pages that present the most relevant product attributes and information based on context. They can also be used to improve customer experience through personalized email and social media marketing campaigns.
4. Streamline Customer Interactions
AI-driven technologies can help you automate various customer-facing workflows to improve productivity and increase efficiency while making sure that customers can get the help they need expediently to reduce hold time and increase satisfaction.
Chatbots can be used to answer routine questions via live chat to eliminate wait time or route customers to the right agents to resolve complex queries efficiently. The technology can also support conversational selling strategies by presenting the most relevant information based on context to improve the customer experience while progressing prospects down the sales funnel.
AI-based virtual agents can predict what a customer’s query may be based on CRM data and provide relevant options. Based on voice responses, the virtual agent can then retrieve the appropriate information from a curated knowledgebase and present it to the caller. This ability to provide answers to customer queries quickly is the key to improving customer satisfaction and NPI scores.
5. Assist Customer Support Agents
Customers expect support agents to be knowledgeable and have the ability to resolve their issues immediately so they don’t get put on long holds or transferred to multiple agents.
AI-powered contact center software can be set up to provide agents with the appropriate assistance that will help improve their performance, e.g., by pre-populating an agent’s GUI with relevant articles, documents, manuals, etc. based on information collected by the virtual agent.
Machine learning technology will then analyze the customer interactions to determine what content is most useful in each specific situation and refine the algorithm. As a result, agents can access the most helpful information to reduce call-handling time, improve first contact resolution, and increase a call center’s operational efficiency.
Conclusion
AI is the key to leveraging big data and customer information to deliver an outstanding customer experience. The good news is that there are many AI-powered contact center software you can use so you don’t have to start from scratch.
To successfully leverage these technologies, you need to have a mature dataset and regularly test the algorithms to ensure their effectiveness. After all, a data-driven decision is only as good as the quality of your datasets and the software’s ability to derive accurate insights!