AI is Driving a Customer Experience Revolution.

How Companies are Using AI to Adapt to an Unprecedented Shift in Customer Behavior and Ultimately, Deliver a More Personalized CX for the Customers.

As the pandemic continues to drive change in consumer behavior, brands across the business landscape are preparing themselves for the rising demand for a more personalized customer experience (CX). One way that many companies are meeting this demand is by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), which thanks to its ability to help businesses create a more personalized user experience, has the power to deliver the CX needed to thrive in this ever-changing digital world.

Exceptional CX is Now the Norm

According to research from Accenture, 87% of organizations agree that traditional experiences are longer enough to satisfy customers. Simply put, the unified CX across touchpoints (interactions) that customers once considered to be “above and beyond” service is now a cornerstone for survival in the marketplace.

This shift in customer behavior and expectations unquestionably presents challenges for organizations. However, those who have caught onto the problem early have also been the first to work out its solution — AI.

A recent survey conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights found that customer service is the most active department for AI deployment. In fact, 60% of the business leaders who responded to the survey said that customer service was the department in which AI technologies were being used most actively, and 73% said it would be the most active by 2022.

Such high rates of AI adoption in customer service departments in organizations are strong indicators of what the future holds and, perhaps more importantly, of two key benefits AI can deliver to brands looking to deliver an optimized CX and guarantee future success — seamless customer touch points and the ability to predict user actions through propensity modelling.

Unifying Customer Touchpoints

Collecting unified and actionable data based on customer touchpoints can be a tricky business for any company. Indeed, as the number of communications channels within a company rises, it can paralyze already overburdened and time-constrained customer service departments and sales forces.

Thanks to AI, many companies, such as Indian oil giant Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL), are using AI to create integrated communications platforms to connect all the companies communication channels, unifying customer touchpoints across their organizations. According to Rahul Tandon, BPCL’s Head of Digital Transformation, the company has already received 17,000 B2B and B2C leads from their own platform, Urja.

As such, using AI to unify customers touchpoints across numerous communications is not only clearly beneficial for brands looking to improve the CX of their existing customers, but also has the potential to help them extract value from incoming leads.

However, the success of companies’ attempts to retain and win new customers will often depend on their ability to deliver their services in a predictive way. This leads us to the second benefit AI can deliver to CX — the ability to predict user actions through propensity modeling.

AI Propensity Modeling

AI propensity modeling is, as Billy Aldea-Martinez Regional Director at Piano Software Inc., a fast growing Enterprise data and AI SaaS Company puts it, “propensity modeling is a powerful tool for marketers as it allows them to identify users with a high willingness to convert based on a customer’s historical data — and therefore present an experience with the right time with the right offer.”

Market leaders Amazon have created a multi-label classification model in Apache MXnet (an open-source deeping learning software framework) to better understand customer propensity across thousands of product categories, creating a highly personalized experience for their customers. This focus on using AI and ML to deliver tailored CXs has undoubtedly helped Amazon to move against market forces and post record earnings throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately, placed the company in a position to continue thriving in the years to come.

The use of AI propensity modeling for CX personalization has unsurprisingly generated concerns around the users’ privacy and potential backlash from consumers. However, as Leslie K. John, Tami Kim and Kate Barasz highlight in an article for Harvard Business Review, if brands use data judiciously, focus on trust and transparency and offer user’s better control over their data, they can increase engagement and interaction with their products.

A Better Experience for All

There remains little doubt of the tremendous role that AI will play in the future of CX. As the world adapts step-by-step to the “new normal”, brands will need to turn to new technologies to help them address the permanent shift in their customers’ behaviors and demand. As such, for both brands and consumers, AI will probably hold the key to a better business landscape for all.