Workforce Management Featured Article
AI Has a Place in the Future of Personalized Customer Journeys
The cliché is familiar: a customer gets on the phone with a company and tries a trick she knows to get connected to a human being. Yelling “agent” at the interactive voice response (IVR) system is one way to get around circuitous self-service menus. Pressing zero twice is another. These actions often do very little, but they may help with venting frustration.
The problem here isn’t that companies are offering customers self-service. Few people actually prefer to speak with a human being over an automated system. The problem is that automated systems are often ineffective and act as a barrier rather than an enabler of a good customer experience. So what if companies could build self-service solutions that actually worked properly? It’s not like they don’t have the raw data that could enable a great customer experience.
“Marketers are hyper-focused on bridging the gap between marketing, sales and customer service by taking all of the data generated from this new level of connectivity and creating a single view of the customer to deliver personalized experiences across all interactions,” wrote Vala Afshar (News - Alert) in a recent article for Huffington Post.
While there are certainly instances when the human touch is necessary for very complicated or problematic customer problems, most customer service issues could be solved with little fuss. In fact, moving forward with customer support may involve less human interaction and more machine…simply because humans aren’t capable of combing through the vast amounts of data available today to find the right solution.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) will be crucial in delivering these next-gen personalized experiences for customers, and as the conductor of the customer experience, marketers need to embrace it in order to succeed,” wrote Afshar.
Building a personalized customer journey involves pulling data from customer relationship management (CRM) records, sales documents, retail and warehouse information, past customer interactions, shipping companies, accounting and more. With all this information at the backend, expecting a contact center worker – no matter how skilled he or she is – may not be able to sort through it all effectively to properly personalize the customer experience.
Going forward, Afshar notes there is a great deal of space for “smart CRM,” which would involve an integrated sales, marketing, services and communities effort as well as customer sentiment. Gathering all this info so it’s relevant would be the job of the AI that drives the smart CRM.
“Customer service insights like customer satisfaction or net promoter scores (NPS) can determine lead scoring algorithms,” wrote Afshar. “Social listening, analysis and reporting logic powered by AI can recommend adjustments to marketing campaigns, the outreach program for inside sales, and publishing calendar and content makeup based on customer personas and industry needs.”
A Harvard Business Review study cited by Afshar revealed that most companies aren’t nearly ready for this AI-led, data-driven personalized customer experience. As of April of this year, only 15 percent of companies were found to be widely using the kind of advanced tools, data and practices that enable true personalization. While many companies are using data-driven analytics to look backwards at what’s happened in the past, the best providers of personalized customer support will need to focus their analytics on what’s happening now and what customers are likely going to want in the future.
Edited by Alicia Young
