There is a lot more buzz around the need to improve customer experience than guidance on doing that. Major blame for the issues goes to the insatiable expectations of the customers. No matter how exceptional your customer service experience is, customers will get used to it within some time, and it won’t feel exceptional. Hence, innovation is the fundamental driving force of exceptional customer service experience.
Going back a few years in the time, a cab’s arrival within minutes of booking made me feel special. Today, I judge the same cab service based on the music the driver plays, how shiny the car seats, and whatnot. Interestingly, my favorite cab service has been keeping up well on these factors and has created a separate rating option for them. I have remained a loyal customer for years; I have always believed that I am just one bad experience away from trying their competitor.
I hope not every customer is as ungrateful as I am. However, there are many more like me, and brands have to maintain a headstart to deliver exceptional customer service experience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the headstart you need. Here is how:
1. Personalization
Great customer service experience comes with fine-tuning every touchpoint that engages users – even before they become your customer. One of the most important advantages of AI is that it learns and improves. This advantage enables you to learn and customize your customer service experience as per the customers’ behavior and preferences. Their interaction over call, chat, or video can be utilized to build more of what-customer-enjoys and less of what-customer-dislikes.
To a great extent, it can be automated and can be delivered without a human’s intervention. Hence, maintaining privacy with personalization.
2. Bots
Proper utilization of resources will need you to have your agents always occupied with chats or calls. In the process, you will have some customers waiting in the queue. Nobody loves being in a queue. Call in AI-based bots to entertain those users. They can verify the users using various verification methods and provide relevant guidance to the customer.
Regardless of what nature of business you are in, certain queries will be common among most users. With bots assisting the users, not only do you gain chances of resolving customer’s issues faster, but you also enhance their experience – not to mention the reduction of expenses with lesser dependency on the users.
3. Scope of improvisation
Imagine a loan process that involves face-to-face screening of the customer. Unless there is a massive issue and the customer reports it, everything will seem to be going well if you replace it with a video contact center that maintains secured recordings of the call and gives the customer an instantaneous rating choice. Enabling an AI-based learning algorithm to pick the customer’s concern from their choice of words or other interaction, you can improve the process, which would have remained consistent over the years.
4. Uninterrupted and undistracted focus
The human mind has a limited attention span and reducing quite fast. When your agents serve multiple customers over chat or phone, it is easy for them to distract and err in the process. AI, on the other hand, maintains a consistent focus on each user even when interacting with multiple ones of them. At least for the common queries and frequently asked questions, you can have an AI-based setup to boost the customer experience.