Bots are friends, not enemies, when it comes to CX.
It’s no exaggeration to say that customer expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. Customers want everything on-demand, delivered to their door in record time with a personalised bow on top. When 73% of customers claim that customer experience is one of the most important factors influencing their buying decisions, it’s essential for brands to sit up and notice.
One tool businesses can use to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations is AI. It gives you the power to analyse vast amounts of data within context at superhuman speeds, learn from patterns and make accurate predictions about consumer behaviours. It’s the second brain every marketer needs to optimise their customer experience and gain a technological advantage against competitors.
Let’s explore some of the ways AI can take your CX to the next level.
Tailored recommendations
Anticipating your customers’ needs is a guaranteed way of delighting them. With AI, you can use your customers’ previous searches and orders to serve them recommendations. These recommendations could be based on other customers with similar search and order histories, seasonal trends or any other data that AI engines use to make predictions. Tailored recommendations increase sales while clearly communicating that your brand understands its consumers.
Faster sales
While most people still prefer to seal the deal with a human salesperson, more customers are becoming comfortable with the idea of interfacing with a robot agent. Chatbots don’t have any hold music because of busy lines, so customers can get their questions answered faster and get closer to making a decision. They’re also available around the clock, so you’re always open for business even when your storefront is closed.
24-hour support
Like chatbots help to facilitate 24-hour sales, they can also ensure your support desk is always open. You can train AI chatbots to tend to frequently logged support tickets that don’t require human intervention to resolve. They can also flag tickets with various levels of urgency by analysing keywords and overall sentiment. The support tickets that the bot is unable to resolve are transferred over to human agents with all the appropriate tags to give them context to close them out as soon as possible.
Inventory management
One of today’s most frustrating (and avoidable) online buying experiences is ordering a product only to be informed a day later that it’s out of stock. Integrating AI into your e-commerce and inventory management system eliminates this problem by proactively ordering more stock when inventory is running low. This can also be a way to use urgency to drive purchases (e.g. “ONLY 2 LEFT IN STOCK”). You won’t have to send apologetic emails offering refunds because products are out of stock, and you’ll never go too long without replenishing your inventory when your AI does it all for you.
Personalised human interactions
Sure, AI (specifically natural language processing) can be used to make chatbot conversations more human, but it can also make human-to-human interactions richer. AI engines can gather data based on how users interact with website elements, previously read blogs and order histories to arm human salespeople with intel to help them personalise sales conversations. Customers won’t have to repeat their needs to every salesperson they talk to, which ultimately speeds up sales.
Crafting the best customer experience is the brand differentiator you can’t afford to take any chances with and AI can help you perfect yours. We don’t shy away from enlisting the bots to help us delight your customers – learn more about our customer experience solution below.
