With the growing competition in the digital world, the cost of customer acquisition has increased. Too many players have also divided customer loyalty. So, businesses are realizing the importance of customer retention and generating more business from existing customers by creating better value for them.
Maintaining healthy customer relationships is the key to achieving this. However, it is not an easy task, especially for small businesses or start-ups with limited resources and manpower.
AI or Artificial Intelligence, when used strategically, can help businesses enhance the CX or customer experiences, deliver the best value, provide an enriched experience, and explore effective ways to ethically maximize sales per customer.
Thankfully, many CRM companies are actively using AI in their systems, and they also offer seamless integration with third-party AI tools. It plays a vital role in taking AI-powered customer experience to the next level:
Quick Response to Customer Queries
One of the surest ways to lose customers is to keep them waiting in the queue for long. However, with overburdened staff, providing quick support to every query seems like a distant reality. AI solves this problem by automating responses to general customer issues.
Along with speeding up a query resolving mechanism, it also relieves human staff from unnecessary stress. Customer care staff can use this freed-up bandwidth to focus on more complex issues and brainstorm ideas to constantly improve the customer experience. Timely resolution and better customer issue handling play a great role in building, maintaining, and enhancing customer relationships.
- It also improves and economizes 24X7 support services which are especially important for companies with a global customer base from different time zones.
- Bots assure you that no customers will be left wanting or disappointed with delayed/no response - which is a major cause of customer churn.
- With bots handling general issues, the human staff gains more bandwidth to resolve complex issues faster and in a better way.
- With a human staff dedicated to more complex issues, you would be in a better position to utilize and enhance the core capabilities/area of specialization of your staff.
- Customers appreciate personalized support for their complex issues, and you can use the opportunity to request their positive feedback on review sites.
Personalized Recommendations for Optimized Customer Experience
A key differentiating factor to help leverage your brand appeal is personalization, but not every company can afford the bandwidth it demands (attention, time, and efforts) in real-life hectic scenarios. With AI it becomes less difficult.
Along with advanced predictability and deep analytics, AI also has an added advantage of human-like learning ability. It equips AI to deliver the most relevant responses and interaction experiences optimized according to specific customer profiles and contexts.
A deep analysis of customer information, interaction history, and key parameters gives crucial contextual insights into AI like location, demographics, challenges, and preferences. Accordingly, it can constantly offer personalized experiences to individual customers.
AI also helps in building more accurate customer personas in a fraction of time which empowers businesses to tailor relevant material and send it at the right time. It further strengthens the relationship between a business and its customers.
- Smartly tracking the interaction history and past purchase behavior of customers, the AI bots can offer personalized recommendations. It helps customers make informed decisions and allows businesses to maximize the RoI of customer acquisition/retention costs.
- Most updated customer insights allow businesses to align relevant communication with the right timing and platform which multiples conversion possibilities.
- Customer insights also help businesses to explore and match any relevant cross-selling opportunities or mutually beneficial brand collaborations to widen the market, deliver better value, and increase per-customer profit.
Quality Lead Generation and Curation for Increased Conversion Potential
Chatbots can be trained to acquire high-quality leads with better conversion probabilities.
After acquiring fresh leads, the chatbots can also guide the prospects for immediate next steps by enabling them to automatically book the appointment through their present digital platforms, like a website or social media pages.
Along with that, they can also help the purchase process by delivering a zero-hassle buying experience to customers. Using this function wisely can help businesses effectively reduce the cart abandonment rates and extract the best value out of each lead they acquire.
Bots can ask specific questions to the prospects to pick only the leads that satisfy mandatory criteria. In that capability, it saves you from wasting time on irrelevant leads and concentrates only on the leads with decent conversion potential.
- NLP-based chatbots provide a human-like communication experience to the prospects which provides a pleasant experience for the prospects that satisfy their queries, engages them for longer, and in many cases, encourages customers to take things forward or at least continue the communication thread.
- Many customers come to your site for sales-related queries. Chatbots instantly answer their queries regardless of their time zone or query types.
- General queries are answered in real-time and complex queries can be forwarded to the relevant department. So, you can compare chatbots to a 24-hour salesperson for your digital platform who can handle multiple customers from different countries at the same time.
Mission-Critical Insights Through Predictive Capabilities
AI’s sophisticated analysis and predictability capacities allow it to deliver customers a feeling that your services or products are purpose-built for their specific requirements.
After thorough and cautious data analysis, AI recognizes the most relevant trends and market developments that influence customers’ expectations. This comprehensive data enables enterprises to extract actionable insights.
Acting on these insights, companies can grow with their customers and constantly improve the value parameters like satisfaction, engagement, experience, and products/services.
AI enhances the emotional bond with customers by delivering optimized experiences through humanized conversational messages. It increases engagement and eventually builds more conversion opportunities.
- With the help of AI, businesses can deliver purpose-specific information that satisfies the top concerns of prospects. It streamlines communication sessions, improves transparency, and quickly sets customers on the right path forward.
- The predictive insights of AI enable customers to access comprehensive customer data in a compact, easy-to-scan format. With the least amount of effort, they can quickly extract the required information through the relevant records of inventory, services, and product history to recommend relevant products to the clients.
- By delivering emotion-rich experiences, AI facilitates smooth interactions and enriches customer interactions
Voice Engagement for Hands-Free Convenience
Along with text-based messages, AI also automates the voice interactions to deliver a seamless conversation experience in the real-time
- With the help of assistant devices like Alexa, people can now enjoy a hands-free digital shopping experience, at any time and even without leaving or disturbing their daily tasks. It has also increased opportunities for instance-based shopping. For instance, on the breakfast table, one realizes the need for a new cutlery set but is less likely to leave the table or disturb the breakfast schedule to place an online order. With smart speakers, they can verbally place the order even while sitting and enjoying breakfast.
- Enabling voice interaction will allow the customers to know more about your brand, business, and products, shop for items online, and checkout through a convenient hands-free verbal interaction.
- With active smart speaker users in the vicinity of 40 million, it opens up vast sales opportunities for businesses.
- A good number of smart speaker customers come from affluent and sophisticated segments which allows you to diversify and elevate your market.
- With new capabilities quickly building up it can be assumed that AI will acquire more advanced capabilities to assess customer portfolios or emotions through their voice parameters like tone, cadence, etc. It presents companies with yet another strong parameter to create informed strategies.
- Using the comprehensive and platform/format-specific information, the companies can optimize the communication accordingly.
- It also allows businesses to assess satisfaction more accurately.
- The companies can also employ these insights to understand how to turn lay shoppers into regular customers and upgrade their overall experience.
Conclusion
AI or Artificial Intelligence is redefining the way businesses engage with their customers. It allows them to deliver assured assistance, better interaction, personalized recommendations, and enriched experiences to the customers at scale. So, businesses can improve customer experience and optimize their website strategy to ensure a better conversion rate. Recognizing its power to elevate customer relationships, many CRMs have already started using and actively supporting the integration of AI capabilities for a better customer experience.