Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction.

Machines are getting smarter every day, and companies across the world are discovering new ways in which they can leverage AI to significantly enhance engagement and customer experience.

Research carried out by Gartner indicates that “in a few years from now, 89 percent of businesses will compete mostly on customer experience”.

In 5 years, 85 percent of consumers’ relationships with a company will be managed without interacting with a human being, highlighting the movement towards a DIY customer service concept.

If customer experience is the new combat zone, then customer service is your greatest defense.

And when it comes to satisfying customers, the trends show businesses are no longer fighting the conventional battle, but a digital one. We are already starting to see the results of that. According to Gartner, Enterprise use of AI grew 270 percent over the past 4 years.

This is not just a passing fad. AI customer experience is the future.

How AI improves customer experience

Imagine you have a problem with a company's product, and you call their support center. While you may be looking to speak with a human, you may interact with a computer at first, as an initial step towards solving your problem.

However, this is not the traditional “virtual response system” — where the computer frustratingly demands you repeat yourself, often over and over again.

However, effective digital experience automation works differently. A core feature of AI is that the machine will understand customers, regardless of differences with accents and dialects, and so on.

The interaction is like that with a human, asking questions to help solve the issues you're having.

More importantly, it gives you helpful answers and suggestions. Not only that, but it provides them quickly and accurately.

Let’s take a look at how AI customer support can be used to better serve your customers and enhance growth.

1. Smart email content curation

Teams often spend hours composing and scheduling weekly emails to multiple segments of customers.

The problem is, even with the right email segments, you can’t deliver a personalized email to every single customer on your list. According to a study by Demand Metric, “80 percent of marketers say “personalized” content is more effective than “un-personalized” content.

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Algorithms can record a subscriber’s email browsing data and website experience to fully understand how the individual interacts with your content.

This knowledge helps the algorithm to detect hyper-relevant content and create personalized emails.

Dynamic emails can be assembled based on:

• Previously read blog posts
• Previous interactions with a website
• Most popular blog post at the time
• Initial interactions with branded emails
• Total time spent on a web page

And more.

Bottom line:

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible to send highly personalized emails to every customer by analyzing a customer’s topics of interest and reading patterns to recommend the most relevant content.

AI-assisted emails improve engagement. However, not all AI-backed programs are capable of learning from user's feedback. As you evaluate AI systems, be wary of this.

2. Improved customer experience

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” – Sam Walton

Artificial Intelligence has vastly improved customer experience. Let’s take a look at how:

i). Personalization: Your customers want personalization when they visit your website or online store. With the help of AI, you can offer it to them. Customers can even place orders, or access devices with fingerprints or face recognition. AI helps businesses to build a more interactive, personalized customer experience.

ii). Fix problems before they occur: Chatbots are designed to stay one step ahead, proactively creating a seamless experience for the user, and resolving problems for customers before they even realize they exist — addressing any sort of hiccup on the path to purchase.

iii). Streamline the sales path: When customers want to buy, it’s important to make the process pain-free. Live chat representatives can over-complicate things, but a chatbot designed with AI can streamline the entire process, and improve customer experience.

Bottom line:

The perfect way to use AI is to serve your customers better without them even having to ask. If you can personalize your customers experience via machine learning and predictive analytics, it will significantly improve your brand image and enhance customer experience.

3. Better service and lead gen

If you’ve recently chatted online with a customer service representative, perhaps they kept a little secret from you.

You might have been chatting with a bot the whole time.

If you're new to chatbots or are interested in implementing one, check our free whitepaper on how chatbots help to create a successful customer service strategy and increase customer engagement.

From healthcare to insurance to education, chatbots provide smart customer support in almost all industries. And in most cases, they’re better at crafting personalized content than humans.

Chatbots have access to lots of customer-centered data points — they can also combine location-specific requests to easily detect common issues, identify patterns, and predict what’s causing problems for a certain user.

This makes them more knowledgeable than human customer service representatives.

The Acquire examples above show how an AI-powered chatbot offer advice and tips in the research phase of the purchasing process, providing the opportunity for a new form of content marketing.

Also, you can use one of Acquire's chatbots to generate leads more easily. See how a software company increased sales conversations by 35 percent.

Bottom line:

AI-powered chatbots are fairly common these days. You can use the opportunity this brings to enhance your customer chats with personalized content marketing.

Devise means to employ AI agents as proactive advisers for all your online visitors, not just for direct customer service communications.

4. Increases in productivity 

“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” – Tim Ferriss

AI can proactively start conversations with customers, providing them with the information they need, or help with the purchasing process. Chatbots solve common queries and transfer any queries they cannot deal with to the customer agent team. This means the customer support team only has to handle the more complex customer queries.

Bottom line:

With this approach, productivity increases and customer experience is improved.

5. AI-driven customer insights

“Predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s artificial intelligence.” – Dave Waters

Where it would take human beings a huge amount of time to analyze the numbers and extract customers’ behavioral patterns, AI can do it in the blink of an eye.

For example, Dynamic Yield helps companies like Sephora, Urban Outfitters, and Under Armour to build actionable customer segments with the use of an advanced machine learning engine.

AI algorithms use billions of data points to systematically develop customer personas. Some of these data points include:

• Previous communication
• Geo-specific events
• Purchase behaviors
• On-site interactions
• Travelers’ survey image source
• Psychographic factors
• Source of referral

Because of this, machine learning algorithms have the ability to:

• Detect which customer segments should be added and removed from campaigns.
• Match customers to the products they're more likely to use.
• Avoid certain stocks from being promoted to buyers who constantly return items.

Bottom line:

Artificial Intelligence enables you to display the most relevant content, or products, based on how users previously interacted with you on your website or via the shipping department.

6. Uninterrupted work at no extra cost

As technology advances, AI is becoming more productive and even cheaper. It needs no sleep, doesn’t take breaks, and never gets sick. It can work round the clock in a way no human could ever hope to. Also, AI can easily learn new skills and it doesn’t make mistakes. Machines work tirelessly with consistent efficiency, resulting in greater productivity.

This isn't an argument for replacing employees with AI, but rather it shows how AI can make a business's life easier and ensure its employees will never feel overworked and burned out.

AI = Better CX

Artificial intelligence (AI) has affected every aspect of business (e.g., prospecting, marketing, sales), and especially customer service. Undeniably, it has many benefits for improving customer experience through every stage of the customer journey.

So, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, the time has come to develop plans on how you can leverage AI to significantly improve your own customer service operations.