Three ways AI can improve the customer experience

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be a leading trend for businesses as it proves itself as a way to improve employee experience, drive profit and increase efficiency. On top of this, AI is often adopted in business to improve the way customers interact with the company, ultimately improving the customer experience.

Here, we look at three different ways AI improves the customer journey when implemented correctly. 

Facilitating a better understanding of the customer with AI

By combining AI with machine learning (ML) to gather and analyse social, historical and behavioural data, companies can gain an accurate understanding of their customers. As it continuously learns and improves from the data it analyses, AI enables businesses to provide highly relevant content, increase sales opportunities, and improve the customer journey.

This is already being used effectively by Salesforce which has integrated AI into their Einstein CRM platform. This AI functionality offers real-time decisioning, predictive analysis and conversational assistants that help sales teams as they look to understand their customers better to make informed engagements. 

Using AI to make real-time decisions

When marketing to customers, real-time decisioning is important as it enables brands to make a decision based on the most recent data that is available. For example, real-time decisioning can help identify customers that are using ad blockers, and provide them with alternative user interface (UI) components to keep them engaged.

Through AI and real-time decisioning, businesses can recognise and understand a customer’s intent through the data that they produce, in real-time. From this, brands are then able to present hyper-personalised, relevant content and offers to customers.

Looking at predictive analytics, businesses can also use this to find deeper insights into what has already occurred, and what can be done to facilitate a sale through suggestions for related products and accessories. In doing so, it makes the customer experience more relevant and more likely to generate a sale. On top of this, it could provide the customer with a greater sense of emotional connection with a brand.

Empowering human interactions with AI

When using AI in customer journeys and interactions, it is important that the AI is trained to understand its own limitations. At times, human-to-human interaction is needed - looking at customer service as an example, sometimes a query is too complex for a chatbot and needs a human agent to solve it.

Accenture’s Advanced Customer Engagement platform includes capabilities for behavioural pairing (identifying the need for human interaction) and AI-powered agent assist - which deploys AI to make workers even more effective when interacting with customers.