Customer experience (CX) has become one of the key differentiators for businesses in today’s digital era. And the gap is growing between businesses that prioritize it and those that do not. CX encompasses the entire customer journey, from a customer browsing a business’s website to purchasing its products or services. With a variety of pressures including an explosion in the volume of customer interactions and ongoing hiring difficulties, companies must prioritize CX to remain competitive.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has heightened the competition in the CX space, and has extreme relevance to every business. The technology superwave of AI is revolutionizing CX, giving businesses an unprecedented boost to their business, uncovering areas for automation to empower employees and deliver proactive and human-like self-service. However, to fully realize these benefits of AI for CX, businesses need to be smart about how they invest their money in AI, focusing only on purpose-built AI systems that address their specific needs.
Barry Cooper serves as the President of the CX Division at NICE.
Why does AI need to be purpose-built?
Purpose-built AI for CX is designed specifically to improve customer experience by addressing brand-specific business needs. It is not trained on the open internet, such is the case with some other popular AI models on the market today. It is secure and developed with brand-specific guardrails and language to make sure that what it generates is accurate, appropriate and relevant.
Here are the advantages of AI for CX for businesses:
1. More personalized experiences
AI can give businesses a real-time view of customers’ behavior and preferences, deciphering trillions of intents. Armed with this invaluable knowledge, businesses can create targeted content that truly speaks to their customers. Purpose-built AI takes it a step further, providing customized recommendations and suggestions tailored to individual customers and aligned with a business’ brand and goals.
Let’s use an online retailer as an example. Using purpose-built AI, this retailer can better understand its customers’ browsing behavior and purchase history and use this information to send personalized product recommendations to its customers. This is a major opportunity for brands to build customer loyalty and keep customers coming back.
2. Improved efficiency
Businesses can harness purpose-built AI to automate mundane or repetitive tasks like customer inquiries, order processing and inventory management. This can free up employees’ time to focus on higher-value, more complex tasks.
3. Augmented customer service
AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants can provide 24/7 support for customer inquiries. Purpose-built AI can take customer service to the next level, training chatbots on agents’ best behaviors to provide the same level of service as a business’ best employee. These chatbots greatly augment a business’ existing workforce, reducing the workload of human staff and further improving customer experience across the board.
A hotel chain could use purpose-built AI to enhance customer service. The system could provide guests quick and accurate responses to common inquiries, such as room service requests or information about local attractions. This would free up human staff to focus on improving the overall guest experience.
4. Upgraded fraud detection
AI-powered fraud detection systems analyze customer behavior and point out suspicious transactions. Purpose-built AI for CX can be designed to enhance fraud detection in targeted industries, like banking and insurance.
A financial services provider can use purpose-built AI to analyze customer behavior and transaction patterns to identify fraud in real-time. This reduces the risk of financial loss for the provider and its customers.
The bigger picture: why AI and CX must work together
Purpose-built AI for CX requires a partnership between CX experts and AI developers. This ensures the AI addresses specific business needs and delivers the desired outcomes. CX experts and AI developers need to work together to figure out which areas of CX can benefit most from AI and how best it can be integrated into existing CX processes.
Purpose-built AI for CX also requires a commitment to ethical practices and data privacy, so that businesses can make sure their AI systems are transparent, accountable and protective of customer data.
Purpose-built AI for CX is the future of CX. With a commitment to purpose-built AI for CX, businesses can deliver better customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, and stay ahead of the competition.
