Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are transforming customer experience (CX) and opening up unprecedented opportunities to engage and support customers in new and efficient ways. As much as these technologies promise increased efficiency and scale, they are bound to change the way we interact with both businesses and customers – and they will have huge implications for everyone involved. In this article, we’ll be exploring how AI and automation are impacting CX and what that means for businesses and customers. AI-Driven Personalization At the core of AI-enabled CX is the capacity for unprecedented individualization, driven by the ability of AI to gleam insights from even the largest of datasets. These insights can then be used to tune offerings and interactions to the needs of individual customers. We all experience this to some degree in simple e-commerce settings, where AI-driven recommendation engines can grow sales by up to 35 percent, and in the case of Netflix and other streaming services, where recommendations keep us glued to our devices. At the heart of the matter is the need to deploy AI not just to push box sets, or third shirts, or anything else on us, but to transform CX in a way that genuinely enhances the quality of being a customer, making it more relevant by being more individualized. Automated Customer Support Customer support automation in the form of chatbots, virtual assistants, and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools marks the tip of the iceberg of this new approach to support, culminating in serving customers with questions as varied as basic FAQ-style queries all the way to more transactional actions, all with the twin benefits of offloading significant wait times and allowing human agents to become available to handle the more nuanced calls that the AI can’t yet do on its own. Automated support is here to stay, and its growing adoption continues to call into question how we analyze and improve the unique relationship between the customer and their agent. Rather than focusing on how to make that relationship run more smoothly, it’s crucial that we balance the need for good human relationships with the efficiency that technology provides. Predictive Customer Engagement But then, beyond reactive engagement, AI allows for predictive engagement. Here, businesses can anticipate what their customers might do, and meet their needs in advance – through reminders, personalized offers, or preemptive support interventions. Predictive engagement makes for smoother experiences, through deeper knowledge of customers’ behavior. Rather than having to ask for support, they can be pre-emptively helped, thereby building loyalty and trust in the relationship – they feel their needs were already anticipated. Ethical Considerations and Customer Trust When it comes to implementation, one of the greatest ethical conundrums for businesses is the use of AI and automation in customer experience. How much data should be captured and how it is secured must be dealt with in an ethical way. Whether businesses are using it or not, people are intuitively skeptical about the amount of data collected about them, and increasingly they are voicing their concerns. Businesses must be transparent and trustworthy in managing this data, and be clear about how it will be used and only for the customer’s benefit. As we develop an AI-inspired world, customers need to fully understand why their data is being used. In turn, this requires businesses to be honest, informative, and ethical in the use of their data, alongside putting in place robust and responsible mechanisms to protect it. Conclusion AI and automation will undoubtedly have a profound impact on CX's future but while the entire CX capability ecosystem may become more digital – the very best CX strategies will take advantage of technology to complement humanity, not replace it. Robots may not embrace customers, but we humans still do, and the most effective CX futures will be those that help us to do that with more empathy, understanding, and creativity.

The Future of Customer Experience: AI and Automation

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