Using AI in Customer Experience: What You Need to Know About Enhancing CX

Women strategizing about AI in customer experience

Here’s the role of AI in customer experience, the benefits of artificial intelligence in CX, and what the future of the technology looks like for brands.

Brands seeking to get ahead of the competition know that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t going to fade away as a fad of the 2020s. AI is here to stay, and that’s due to the advantages it brings throughout an organization. In business, AI allows a brand to automate processes and analyses — and that’s just the beginning.

AI in customer experience (CX) presents a significant opportunity. Brands and customers interact across a still-growing number of touchpoints, which is why AI needs to be an integral part of any CX strategy. Given the rising volume of customer signals and the high costs of employing a limitless number of employees to analyze data, AI steps out in front.

With AI in customer experience, your brand analyzes data in seconds and obtains immediate, actionable insights.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in CX

Delighting customers isn’t easy, right? Yet doing so is worth every bit of time and resources, and that’s where most brands struggle — lacking time and resources. AI in customer experience, however, lifts the burden off the organization and its employees to quickly provide the direction necessary that empowers a brand to offer unrivaled experiences throughout the customer journey.

Capital One, one of the largest financial services brands in the United States, takes a holistic approach to transform traditional banking and provide an AI-first experience. It applies to almost every aspect of the business — and with great results.

Eno by Capital One, the industry’s first chatbot powered by natural language processing (NLP), acts in real time. Checking account balances, paying bills, and tracking purchases are a few of the activities that Capital One’s chatbot can take on.

Capital One continues to improve upon Eno. A fraud detection engine was recently added, which provides real-time alerts to customers and locks a card if required. Eno even provides customers with added protection when they’re shopping online. Instead of using their own card number to make purchases, Eno offers up the chance to use a unique virtual card number.

By implementing AI as a means of proactively resolving customer issues, Capital One has been able to establish itself as an industry leader. In fact, brands outside the financial services industry are also embracing AI-powered chatbots similar to Capital One’s Eno.

Benefits of AI in Customer Experience

Understanding the value of AI in customer experience doesn’t require all that much explaining. In a handful of points covering the benefits of combining artificial intelligence and CX, it’s easy to realize why the investment is worth prioritizing.

Here are the top benefits of AI in customer experience.

#1. Get to know the customer

Interactions between your brand and its customers are frequent, right? So just imagine needing to analyze every signal — whether it’s direct or indirect customer feedback — manually. It’s impossible; any amount of employees assigned to the task would keep up.

AI in customer experience tackles data analysis with ease. As part of your CX program, artificial intelligence sifts through customer feedback from surveys, online reviews, social media posts, and other channels to ensure it’s capturing the full spectrum of what customers say and how they feel.

Remember that signals, wherever they emerge, should flow seamlessly between your customer experience management (CEM) platform and customer relationship management (CRM) platform to pinpoint who a customer is, what their behaviors and preferences are, and how they interact with a brand.

#2. Provide faster resolutions

Customers aren’t interested in how you achieve a resolution as long as it’s satisfactory and achieved in a timely manner. The longer a customer waits, the more at risk customer satisfaction (CSAT) is.

Artificial intelligence in CX reduces the amount of time a customer spends jumping through channels or from agent to agent trying to have their concerns addressed. How so? AI pinpoints the customer’s needs and, behind the scenes, figures out what occurred, why, and what the best resolution is. It prevents agents from spending too much time researching the customer’s ticket and figuring out a resolution that might not be well received.

With AI, customer service is proactive rather than reactive — as such, AI in customer experience increases productivity for agents and happiness for customers.

#3. Simplify feedback analysis to drive action

Tracking current behaviors and predicting future trends? If you’re not doing it with artificial intelligence, you’re not doing it effectively at all. AI in customer experience simplifies the analysis of feedback to present insights worth acting on. You’ll know the challenging pain points causing friction in the customer journey and the opportunities that will take experiences to the next level.

#4. Personalizing every experience

Aiming to make experiences unique for every customer with personalization? There’s no doubt your brand needs artificial intelligence. AI in customer experience gives brands the chance to craft an experience for individuals, forgoing the one-size-fits-all approach that too many brands continue to rely on.

Consumer behaviors are shifting at a rapid pace, and each customer’s preferences are different. By using artificial intelligence within your CX strategy through experience orchestration, you’re personalizing every experience at scale and strengthening customer loyalty.

How Industries Deliver Better Customer Experience with AI

Automotive

In the automotive industry, manufacturers are utilizing artificial intelligence for driver assistance systems and self-driving cars. AI, in turn, is delivering better experiences for customers. Not only does this create a convenient experience for drivers and passengers, but AI in cars also makes for safer experiences while on the road.

Energy and utilities

Brands in the energy and utility industry are, for example, using AI to automatically predict potential defects, deploying technicians to repair or replace equipment before major service outages or breakages occur.

AI in this industry also impacts pricing. Energy and utility brands rely on artificial intelligence to offer dynamic pricing, ensuring customers pay a price based on usage levels and the cost of energy.

Customers, meanwhile, get to use AI to understand energy consumption and are able to forecast what they should expect to pay.

Financial services

Artificial intelligence is widespread throughout the financial services industry. Brands offer automated investing, fraud detection, and customer service powered by AI — all due to the technology’s ability to process and act on large amounts of data in real time.

Future of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience

Looking ahead, the future of artificial intelligence in CX is closely tied to the rise of digital experience (DX). While some brands will continue to maintain in-person experiences at physical locations, every brand needs digital channels such as websites and mobile applications to be optimized.

Online channels are heavily utilized in most industries already, and thus it’s important for experiences across them to be frictionless — and personalized. As mentioned earlier, AI in customer experience solves both parts. Artificial intelligence empowers an organization to remove barriers preventing customers from completing their activities, and it personalizes experiences — at scale — for every customer.

Increases in customer signals may seem overwhelming, but artificial intelligence in CX automates the path from collecting feedback to analyzing words and sentiment to acting on insights.

Get Started with Medallia’s AI-Driven Capabilities

Now, it should be clear: AI is a game-changing technology for customer experience. It makes an organization run more efficiently, and it leads to breakthroughs that improve CX for customers across the channels they choose to interact with a brand.

Leading brands in top industries are choosing Medallia Experience Cloud to leverage AI-driven capabilities trained by more than 60 billion experience signals for their customer experience programs.

Meet with a Medallia expert — you’ll discover why more than 1 million weekly active AI users choose our platform to capture signals across in-person, digital, and contact center interactions.