The customer experience is crucial if you want to retain loyal customers and keep building your business. Companies should always be looking to find ways to improve the customer experience so that they continue giving the end-user exactly what they want while beating their competition.
This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in. AI has changed the dynamics of the way the business world is run, giving companies who adopt it an edge ”allowing them to both scale and solve their customer’s pain points.
But how important is AI in customer experience? Is it essential, and will it work for your business or against it?
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the role AI plays in customer experience while picking apart its pros and cons.
Let’s dive in.
Pros of AI in Customer Experience
Personalized Content and Messaging
In a nutshell, personalization is a contextual customer experience that is tailored to each specific individual’s needs. Instead of displaying the same content to every single customer, you only show content that they are interested in.
And research has shown that one of the main things your customers want more of is personalization. In 2020, 36% of customers said they felt that businesses weren’t doing enough on this front and could offer more.
The thing is that personalization is very hard to get right by yourself. Understanding the behaviors and needs of each individual customer is almost impossible ”unless, of course, you leverage the power of AI, which is able to crunch data on each customer and deliver tailored content based on the data.
Reduced Costs
have traditionally relied on lots of manual manpower to provide the perfect customer experience. From marketing efforts to customer service, customer experience can be a costly endeavor.
AI, however, can be a great way to reduce costs, simply because it can remove the need to hire workers. For instance, you can use a chat API to build chatbots that interact with your customers in real-time and provide immediate responses.
Moreover, AI-driven chatbots learn more about your customers with each interaction, and thereby are able to quickly understand their individual needs before solving their problems so that they can give a more accurate answer.
AI can also act as a virtual assistant and fulfill other roles.
AI Can Put Your Ahead of Your Competitors
As mentioned, businesses need to do all that they can when it comes to having an advantage over their rivals.
For many, AI can be this.
AI opens up a treasure trove of opportunities when it comes to the customer experience when used correctly. You can use it to deliver a personalized, streamlined and data-driven experience that gives the customers exactly what they want while increasing customer satisfaction and the customer experience.
Not only that, but by reducing costs, AI lets you apportion money elsewhere in your business to improve other processes, thus giving you an even bigger advantage over your competitors.
Top tip: If you want to take your AI operations a step further, utilize AIOps. The unification of AI and IT operations ”AIOps is the application of various AI technologies, including ML, deep learning, and robotic process automation. It helps ops teams tame the immense complexity and quantity of data that is generated by their modern IT environments.
Cons of AI in Customer Experience
You Risk Losing the Human Touch
A chatbot is pretty good at mimicking human speech. However, while an AI-driven chatbot can certainly replace (and even surpass) a human worker in terms of efficiency and solving a customers problems, if the software has not been built to a high standard, it may not be able to replicate the human touch.
Customers want personalization ”but they also don’t want to feel like their communicating with a robot. This is especially true of older customers who perhaps aren’t accustomed to technology, and who have always been used to engaging with humans, whether online or offline.
A solution here is to employ chatbots to assist with more basic queries, but to direct the customer to a human operator for more complex problems.
AI Can Get Things Wrong
Data cleaning exists for a reason ”it helps an algorithm to eliminate harmful data that could skew results and present a wrong solution.
But not all businesses use data cleaning. And without it, AI can still get things wrong. When it comes to the customer experience, the last thing you want is to give bad advice or put the wrong content in front of them.
Again, there is a solution to this and you can employ data cleaning to improve results.
AI Can Lack Ingenuity
58% of businesses have started to be more innovative in the way they use technology to improve the customer experience. They’re also starting to be more creative with the customer experience.
And while leveraging AI is certainly innovative, AI right now cannot be as creative as a human being.
Despite its seemingly infinite possibilities, AI is still limited by what it can offer. And it can’t guarantee as much creativity.
Security Issues
Cybersecurity should be one of online businesses’ top priorities. Each year, there are millions of cyberattacks around the world on businesses and they take numerous forms.
One of the problems with AI is that it’s a program which, unless properly secured, can be hacked.
Whatever program you use, make sure to cover all loopholes. If you’re working with a third-party vendor, find out their security policies and do what you can to reduce the risk of an attack.
Final Thoughts
Should you use AI in the customer experience?
AI can be a powerful resource that allows you to do things that you simply can’t do manually. When used thoughtfully and in the right way, it can help your business build powerful relationships with your customers and give them the experience they want and need.
And while there are disadvantages, these can be rectified. For businesses now and going forward, the aim should be to create a business that leverages technology and a human factor to create an engaging and seamless customer experience.
