The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

“By 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human” – Gartner

IDC predicts that by 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by some sort of cognitive computing or AI effort.Gartner says that 85 percent of customer relationships will take place without human interaction by 2020. And Juniper Research predicts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per year by 2022, up from $20 million in 2017.

These are transactions, less interactions.

Personalized and pre-emptive targeting

Artificial Intelligence helps you predict customer needs and offer the relevant choices before the customers do it. Artificial Intelligence gives you insights into each customer and helps you target them with the offer they would most likely be interested in. This level of personalization not only drives loyalty through relevant experiences but also ensures higher conversions and repeat business.

Data and customer segmentation

Artificial Intelligence provides access to complete customer details including their demographic data, individual preferences, and buying patterns. Based on this data, businesses can segment their customers based on personas, offer personalized products or services to their customers, and top it up with cross-selling activities. With AI, you can segment and address your customers based on data without being a data scientist.

Chatbots and real time conversations

AI is enabling customers to interact with business in real-time through intelligent chatbots. This helps businesses to provide customers with human-level interactions without having to manage real humans. With Natural Language Programming enabled AI systems, chatbots will soon be intuitive and understand the context of interactions like humans.

The importance of empathy

The customer service industry is one where empathy and interpersonal skills are required to truly understand a customer’s needs, desires, and emotional state. Without these skills, your customer service department cannot deliver a high-quality service experience to customers.

With the digitization and increasing automation of customer service departments, your agents should focus exclusively on delivering empathy to customers. The best customer service experiences are those in which humans are involved and the customer was genuinely surprised by the level of attention and service they received.

There’s a reason we like that human touch. Machines are smart, but they just don’t understand us the way people do. There’s a fundamental barrier.

You can’t exchange jokes with a robot, and you can’t share a smile. AI doesn’t get your sarcastic tone, or your dry sense of humour. A robotic receptionist doesn’t get what your raised eyebrow means, and a chatbot doesn’t know that “Wow” can represent horror just as much as delight.

So, if a business relies too heavily on AI, it runs the risk of alienating its customers and creating horribly robotic experiences. How many times have we had to change our flight reservations on low cost carriers – they’re cutting cost yes with a ‘chatbot/assistant/concierge only’ approach to customer service; get that but (today + next few years at least) there’s a huge cognitive chasm, i.e. what we humans expect to feel/empathy (someone to listen to us, to solve the problem) vs. transactional responses fished out of an emotional knowledge base (yes, it’s still learning!). We’ve heard many a digital native business learning this the hard way – a client’s competitor switched earlier because the live chat vendor they were using had completely removed their support team in favour of chatbots, an exasperated customer couldn’t get through to a human rep and ended up leaving; perhaps the few upsides for a physical/traditional business like Walmart with an Omni/phygital play; what’s retained of their ‘friendly neighborhood + know each customer by name’ feels – ironically these businesses spent years shaving off cost trying to emulate their more nimble, digerati competitors.

Arts, design, and how to be human- that is going to be what’s left for us (to do). We are in the shift from an experiential to an based empathy economy. What’s a magical customer experience today will largely be prerequisites in the few short years to come. Things will happen at the speed of thought – limitless, boundless, frameless; we will be able to preempt customer intent vis a vis predicting customer preferences today. Imagine a world of infinite intents, thoughts, and as we are nearing the last mile; what you can imagine is real.” – Picasso.

Cost to serve is plummeting; the high-impact zero moment of truths (ZMoTs) should be reclassified as the intersection of intent x authenticity = trust barrier.

What we should do, is to connect with fellow humans, in this empathy economy.

 

These are all examples of AI being used as a cool addition to streamline the customer journey, rather than take over the journey completely. When used like this, the impact of AI on customer experience is impressive and intelligent.

As customers, we’re at a turning point. We now want AI to help improve our experiences, but we don’t want that to be at the cost of human support. It’s a fine balance: and one that could well tip as we move forward into the future.