How Artificial Intelligence can Transform Customer Experiences

Deepak Pargaonkar, Senior Director - Solutions Engineering, Salesforce India

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We might not always be aware of it, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now an established component of our daily experience as consumers. Whether it’s choosing a movie based on unique recommendations from Netflix, Amazon making recommendations while you shop or interacting with online customer support via bots. AI is behind the scenes delivering highly personalized, smart interactions for the connected customer.

As a business, this experience can be the differentiator between success and failure. Compounding the anytime, anywhere mindsets fostered by mobile and social technologies, AI has generated a base of connected customers that expect personalized and, increasingly, predictive experiences across every touchpoint.

Many major company supply chains are relying on AI and robots to intelligently improve efficiency and reduce human intervention, en­hancing customer experiences. The opportunities that AI brings to the table for businesses is unparalleled. Computational skills, data storage, speech recognition capabilities and a lot more. This can be of utmost im­portance in managing complaints, subscription, and billing processes for businesses in various sectors. It isn’t just changing the way consum­ers shop and interact with brands. It’s also empowering companies to create truly personalized experi­ences and automate the time-con­suming manual tasks that they face every day.

Creating experiences

AI makes shopping personal. It gives you insights into each customer – whether they like blue or teal, stripes or solids, jeans or chinos. It can help consumers offer the buyer what they want, in their size, instantly. And this personalisation – the best customer experience – increases basket size and repeat business. In fact, 69% of consumers say that personalized customer care influences their loyalty.

Away from the shopping experience, AI can personalise marketing campaigns. Say you’re a high net worth individual, prepared to spend $500 on a coat without agonising over the price. You’re probably not going to feel understood if a brand keeps sending you generic EDM content spruiking more price-sensitive threads. A customer cluster, a.k.a customer segmentation, is the result of analysing historical transactional data to create groups of like-minded customers. You can then direct specific marketing campaigns to those clusters. By harnessing AI, you can segment and understand your customer base, and send out more personalised marketing assets to get better results – all without a data scientist.

Data is indeed the new oil 

By now, I’m sure you have experienced or are aware of the long and tedious process of loan approval. This requires you to fill in a form which in turn will be entered into a database then has to be sent to the necessary departments and back-office systems for approval. This entire process typically takes 3 working days, is time consuming and a major irritation for customers. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can just walk into the branch or apply online for a loan and your credit worthiness is assessed and in less than an hour your loan approved.

In the near future, combining AI methods with massive customer data streams that include clickstream data and device data can yield extremely valuable information about the satisfaction of customers. The days of guessing about customer satisfaction and forcing our customers to endure customer satisfaction surveys will be over.

In other words, AI will be integrated into the foundation of everything we do going forward. We are solving all kinds of questions:

· Are you selling the right product to the right customer at the right time?

· Are you servicing customers on the right channel by the right agent?

· Are you marketing on the right channel at the right time with the best content?

· Are you building apps that leverage the predictive power of AI?

AI has implications for every line of business. Sales will be able to anticipate opportunities and focus on the best leads. Customer service teams will deliver the next generation of proactive service, preventing machine failure or addressing FAQs in a customer community before they have a chance to become service cases. Marketing can build predictive journeys for every customer, personalizing experiences like never before. IT can embed intelligence everywhere, creating smarter apps for employees and customers. We foresee inboxes that organize themselves, calendars that plan meetings, deeper and richer insights into customers during service calls. AI will soon become a global economic engine for new technologies, business models and jobs. Yet, for AI to be truly effective, it is imperative that everyone have access and the opportunity to learn skills needed to be successful in this new age of intelligence.

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