Imagine your customer searched for a fitness tracker; while researching, he came across your brand and landed on the product page. While hitting the purchase button, he saw the website was too slow to load. That left a wrong impression on the customer, and he instantly left your site for a better product hunt.
In such a case, that customer is less likely to revisit your website for a bad customer experience.
In today’s world, quality customer experience is the foundation of an organization’s success. A delightful customer experience would boost overall customer satisfaction and loyalty and eventually turns customers into brand advocates.
Customer centricity is the first step to a superior customer experience. AI is helping companies replace the old, disjointed customer experience to meet their emerging demand.
Not just for customer experience, AI and automation hold massive value to save time and cut down high costs.
How exactly can AI enhance customer experience?
When we think of AI, we imagine robots replacing humans in the workplace and other scenarios we often see in any sci-fi movie. But, the reality isn’t like sci-fi movies.
AI is bringing tremendous benefits to industries. Businesses that have integrated AI for an improved customer journey noticed a positive spike in their customer feedback. AI can improve work efficiency, decrease call processing and complaint resolution time.
Among the many technology trends shaping 2019 and beyond, the adoption of AI when it comes to CX is one of the most exciting. The use of AI technologies such as machine learning, natural-language understanding, and natural-language processing can help analyze customer sentiment and customer feedback at scale, precision and speed not achievable through humans.
Companies that have integrated AI into their service have reportedly increased intimacy, created hyper-personalized service for their audience. In this hyper-personalization age, customers are looking for customized services that can dig deeper to solve their pain-points.
AI facilitates a much deeper understanding of customer behavior. Analyzing historical and behavioral data can give organizations a more accurate understanding of their customers.
According to a 2020 MIT Technology Review survey of 1,004 business leaders, customer service via chatbots is the leading application of AI being deployed today.
Chatbots can respond to customer’s complaints and be at service around the clock. Omnichannel technology helps bring all communication channels into one dashboard for convenient customer interaction.
In 2020, watching a more significant shift in consumer behavior, many industries have invested in AI to meet customer’s emerging service demand. Organizations are benefitting from AI innovations.
Keep reading to know how these industries are leveraging AI for a better customer experience.
4 Industries that are leveraging AI for better customer experience
Although it doesn’t comprise every industry that has integrated artificial intelligence for a supreme customer experience.
This article will provide a solid overview of how AI helps solve common customer objections across a wide range of industries and ensures a delightful customer experience to create a meaningful customer relationship.
Here’s a list of 4 industries that opted for AI in their service.
1. Ecommerce and Retail
E-commerce and Retail is the sector that’s benefitting the usage of AI at its best.
In 2020, customers worldwide became heavily dependent on online purchasing due to many local stores’ shutdowns.
A massive surge in orders, disrupted supply-chain, sudden changes in consumer behavior. All of these have taken a heavy toll on the e-commerce and retail industry But, amid this chaos, many companies have seized this opportunity and walked a few extra miles to win the heart of their customers.
Amazon uses machine learning to drive relevant product recommendations to customers, and AI predicts some other product recommendations that customers might have some interest in. In 2020, Amazon’s sales increased by 26% in Q1 and 42% in Q2 globally.
Here are some common yet innovative ways to eliminate customer objections, enhance function and improve overall performance using AI in e-commerce companies.
a. Customer Assistance around the clock
In online shopping, a seamless customer experience plays the most crucial role in acquiring more customers and increasing the number of recurring sales. Most customers expect businesses to provide 24/7 service. To put it in a real-time calculation, having a customer assistance team around the clock can be an expensive option to go with. But, to ensure a better customer experience providing 24/7 customer assistance is no longer an option. Here a conversational chatbot can help to meet the increasing demand.
Every e-commerce customer looks for a high-value experience that makes their buying journey enjoyable.
The best way to do this is by being responsive to the customers and be at their service whenever they need it. Omnichannel technology has become another essential touchpoint of the customer experience. It helps to provide a consistent and frictionless customer journey throughout multiple channels.
Chatbots can converse in multiple languages without sounding like a bot and makes the job even easier. Tactful AI ensures their chatbot boost interaction, engagement, connects with customers, and with omnichannel technology, you can centralize customer communication from all channels and bring it into one dashboard.
b. Personalization and Predictive Behavior Analysis
When we hear about any offer or deal, the first thing we look for is ‘what’s in it for us.’ Because we humans care about our needs first and other things second. Consumers are looking for a more customized service that understands their requirements and recommends a product that suits their needs. AI collects and analyzes customer data to scrutinize the gaps between what they need and what they get. It also reads the pattern of customer behavior during interaction with a brand.
This enables brands to generate highly relevant content, improve the customer journey and elevate sales opportunities. Studies show that personalization can prevent cart abandonment, increase customer loyalty and ROI. Early adopters of AI-driven customer experience are seeing massive success and leaving their competition behind.
2. Finance and Banking
This industry is reaping the higher dividends in terms of benefitting the power of AI.
Over the last couple of years, AI has become a symbol of improved efficiency while reducing financial space costs.
AI has given the finance and banking industry a whole new approach to meet the demand of customers looking for a smart, secure, and reliable way to save, spend and invest their money. It brought the touch of personalization to the banking sector. Customers can make better financial decisions with AI while keeping their data insecurity at bay.
From cybersecurity to decision making, here’s a rundown of how AI is transforming financial companies.
a. Risk Management
In the finance world, security risk can be deadly if not given proper attention. AI can prove to be a game-changer in managing risk. Credit risk, fraud risk to underwriting risk, or any risk you name, AI can help overcome all of these challenges.
Credit is considered one of the largest risks for any financial organization, as borrowers fail to repay a loan or contractual obligations.
The machine learning algorithm can be used to measure consumer credit risk by – analyzing customer credit history. The insight provided can reveal and catch patterns that human eyes easily miss. Banks or financial organizations can flag customers that are showing warning signs of concerns.
Identity theft and money laundering are some common criminal activities in the financial industry.
As AI models can analyze data in massive volumes, they can instantly spot patterns from multiple different tandem channels and send alerts about potential fraudulent threats or activity for a virtually countless number of banking clients at once.
- Many financial companies are switching and specializing in AI for layers of security and potential cost-saving opportunities at the same time.
- For example, Danske Bank drastically reduced fraud cases by a whopping 50% with AI.
- The underwriting process depends on proper data management and analysis. Humans traditionally oversee it.
- If the data points aren’t able to give a clear picture of what or whether a customer is likely to claim, it can be costly for the insurance company.
In this case, AI can collect data points from multiple sources and give each customer a holistic profile. It can save the company from making major mistakes and prevent fraud cases.
Artificial intelligence will fundamentally disrupt and transform insurance underwriting.
b. Stronger Data Security
AI keeps consumer’s data safe. Data scientists are continually creating and reforming models that detect any harmful, suspicious behavior. By detecting patterns and suspicious activities, artificial intelligence is used to identify any fraudulent activity, transaction. It also provides a boost to refining any financial documentation.
This means more security and fewer attacks on customers’ data. AI is coming up with unique solutions for the FinTech industry. Artificial intelligence can read and analyze a large volume of data and generate reports way quicker than any human being. So, it’s not just increasing efficiency but also productivity while mitigating security risks.
c. Enhance human work through automation
It goes beyond saying the benefits of artificial intelligence to offer incredible insight into customers. Deep learning can make connections between sections of data. These connections can lead to mitigate costs and reduce complexity across numerous systems by processing tons of customer data even quicker than ever possible before.
Financial organizations can make decisions faster. And many banks can reinvest millions of dollars saved by automation right back into their innovation budget.
Here are a few examples of how banks leverage AI technology:
- JP Morgan uses AI to automate loan agreement analysis. Back in the time, this work required 360 person-hours to finish.
- Wells Fargo announced adding a special AI team that will develop innovative payment technologies and alleviate its corporate clients’ services.
- Bank of America launched Erica, which is an AI-powered virtual assistant for their mobile app and several ATMs across the country.
- Finally, CitiBank has recently funded many AI-based startups and projects like Feedzai that use artificial intelligence to spot and fight fraudulent online banking activity.
3. Telecommunication and Contact Centers
The telecommunication industry is going to hit $2.2 billion of market valuation by 2022. And, the demand for AI in this sector is going through the roof.
While artificial intelligence and machine learning implications are high in telecoms and contact centers, there are multiple examples of how call centers use data and machine learning for a stellar customer experience across their organizations.
From automating customer assistance to skyrocketing sales, AI is covering it all in the call center companies.
a. Improved Customer Network Experience
Contact centers can reap an enormous benefit from the use of AI. Just like most other companies, contact centers have their share of customer-centric problems to deal with. One of five customers complains about network service even with a well-developed infrastructure in place.
In such cases, AI and data science can improve network performance, reliability, and security. Intelligent network analysis puts together numerous data sources and gives actionable insight into customer’s mobile network experience. By applying data science, contact centers can evaluate customer experience from their perspective. It will give telecom companies a competitive edge.
b. Increase Sales
Every company is in the race to increase its sales ratio while cutting back on excessive expenditures. The journey from achieving a higher closing rate to gaining more loyal customers requires delivering the right product or solution to the right customer.
AI-powered sales tools help the sales department with offering the right solutions to customers much easier and faster. Tactful AI provides AI-powered analytics that gives sales insight to improve sales revenue and overall customer experience.
This way, companies can enhance their efficiency, decrease customer objection to meet their ultimate satisfaction. A Happy customer brings more customers, which leads to more sales.
c. Automating Customer Support and Omnichannel Contact Center
Customers hate wasting their time waiting for customer service. They no longer would endure endless hold times, slow-witted service agents, or transferrals. They need instant answers and solutions. Contact centers can double their customer service department’s size, but that’s not a feasible solution to minimize expenses. Chatbots can increase the response rate by answering multiple customer queries simultaneously, which is faster than human capability.
Customers can place cancellation or complaint requests about services automatically without any customer support. Vodafone has improved customer satisfaction by 68% just by adding chatbots to handle customer queries faster. AI is benefitting contact centers to meet customer demand that leaves customers with a satisfactory experience.
Younger customers prefer message-based communication over traditional phone calls or email. Opting for omnichannel approach contact centers can give customers a seamless experience regardless of their different communication methods.
In the past, the omnichannel approach was centered on voice and video interaction solutions. But, now it has extended to integrating social media, live chat, or messaging service. It gives customers a more manageable solution and reduces efforts.
4. Healthcare and Medicine
The potential of artificial intelligence technology is massive. If one industry that would make consumer’s life much easier using AI in healthcare. The biggest problem consumer of this sector encounters is the cost. In the U.S., it’s costly to access quality healthcare.
Healthcare has a lot of possibilities in using robots, artificial intelligence. A technically ‘smart hospital’ can bring revolution to surgeries and patient stays. But, this industry is slower and more traditional to adapt to all these changes.
As more technology companies partner with healthcare providers, this is likely to change in the upcoming years. This brings us to some examples of AI in the healthcare and medicine sectors.
Identifying Disease and Treatment
Instead of robots, AI in healthcare refers to doctors and hospitals accessing a wide range of life-saving data sets. This includes treatment methods and their outcomes, survival ratio gathered from millions of patients of different geographical locations, but have interrelated health conditions in common. Artificial intelligence can detect and make predictions by analyzing data at a large and small scale.
For the healthcare sector, machine learning is designed to identify health concerns. It also uses a statistical approach to give computer systems the ability to read patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.
A Few Final Thoughts
Customers are at the center of everything we do in a revenue-generating organization. Their demand and expectations are evolving. Companies in every industry are always working on improving customer experience and create meaningful relationship with their customers. AI is transforming how traditionally companies deal with customer requirements.
Companies can leverage AI for better customer understanding, predictive analysis to provide hyper-personalized service, and many more. It’s saving time, surging work efficiency, and saving costs without leaving any room for customer complaints. Early adopters across multiple industries are reaping the benefit of AI.
