Using AI to Create Seamless Customer Experiences

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Customers don’t expect just great service — they want every interaction to be easy, intuitive, and maybe even a little magical.

As a customer experience change agent, you know fulfilling that expectation isn’t always easy.

• Customer journeys span dozens of channels and touchpoints.

• Even with a CX Mission Statement and strategy, your time and resources are limited.

• Tradeoffs are inevitable as you balance priorities and pursue new opportunities.

• Everything can feel like a priority. (Where can we find that magician training?)

The good news? Artificial intelligence (AI) is opening up exciting ways to cover more ground and deliver highly personalized and timely experiences for every need.

Here are a few ideas for how to use AI to create seamless customer experiences that feel personal, effortless, and human. You’ll get practical steps and a look at what’s next so you can build a customer journey that’s not just smarter — but unforgettable.

What is a ‘Seamless’ Customer Experience?

A seamless customer experience feels personalized and consistent across every channel customers use. The trouble, however, is most organizations don’t deliver a seamless experience.

Departments like sales, marketing, customer support, and social media have historically worked independently of one another. They use separate tools to manage their work, they may not share customer insights, and they focus on just their team’s goals.

When customers engage with independent brand teams, their preferences and information stay within that channel, which is a recipe for lackluster experiences.

• The experience feels clunky and impersonal as customers transfer from their online account to customer support or social media to sales.

• Customers receive duplicate offers or generic messages that don’t reflect their distinct needs and desires.

• When customers need help, they often have to re-explain themselves to each new representative (and brand representatives aren’t always consistent in how they show up for customers).

Tools and processes now exist to unify teams and customer insights. Organizations create holistic customer profiles that reflect insights from every channel. Every customer-facing representative can use that data to deliver personalized experiences and informed interactions in real-time. This foundation enables you to bridge the gaps between each step in the customer journey.

It’s pretty great, isn’t it?

AI is an especially helpful — and increasingly essential — tool to fuel this experience and empower teams to keep up with the ever-shifting channel and touchpoint landscape.

Getting Started with AI for CX

A key thing to remember about AI is in its name: its intelligence is artificial. It relies on the information it can access to recognize patterns and offer insights. Its intelligence is limited, and it can’t connect dots accurately without plenty of dots. (In this case, dots are your customer insights.)

To make AI truly work for you, your customer data needs to be in good shape — centralized, clean, and up-to-date.

• Store your customer data in a centralized location, such as a data cloud, CRM, or customer data platform.

• Work with IT and channel teams to ensure all organizational tools feed into this customer data storage location.

Be Safe and Secure with AI

Another important consideration with your chosen AI tool is that any information you give it could inform its output for other users. This means you should never upload confidential information unless you can guarantee its privacy.

Work with your organization’s IT or data security team to ensure your AI use adheres to your organization’s data privacy rules, industry regulations, and cybersecurity protocols. When in doubt, don’t share with AI.

Your organization will likely need to use a paid AI solution to protect your data and mitigate potential security risks. General use without these guardrails could put your customer data or other private information at risk.

Common AI Pitfalls to Avoid

• Over-automating and losing the human touch

• Not auditing AI outputs regularly

• Neglecting customer privacy and transparency

4 Practical AI Use Cases for Customer Experience

There are a few use cases in particular that can be great starting points for AI to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Start small with your AI implementation and test your setup with a small group of customers to work through hurdles. You’ll quickly become more comfortable and can see some results fairly quickly, like team time saved or a reduction in customer support requests.

Consider these ideas and expand your use cases as your strategy evolves:

1. Personalize Every Interaction with AI

Customers have a better experience — and are more likely to take the desired action — when they receive content tailored to their unique needs. AI is powerful at personalizing every interaction, including text offers, email messages, and product recommendations on websites or mobile apps.

To partner with AI in this way:

• Upload your existing customer personas and ask your AI tool to recommend adjustments based on its analysis. If possible, give your AI tool access to your customer data source so it can access every customer insight.

• Ask what motivates each customer persona and what type of content or offers they look for.

• Draft distinct messages for each persona for various activations, or ask the AI tool to refine a general message for each persona.

• Continually measure your results and ask the AI solution to suggest improvements based on the response data.

AI can be especially effective in driving conversions with personalized pay-per-click advertising. For example, Amazon uses browsing history and past purchases to suggest products, and Starbucks uses location data to offer beverages fit for the weather (such as hot drinks during cold days).

2. Streamline Support with AI Assistants or Chatbots

When customers have questions, they deserve fast and convenient support. AI chatbots are becoming a go-to resource for answering questions and directing customers to other support avenues as needed.

Organizations across industries have boosted satisfaction with chatbots, including these chatbot examples:

• Bank of America’s Erica offers financial advice and directs customers to personalized offers and services.

• Sephora’s chatbot on Facebook Messenger gives personalized product recommendations and how-to videos.

• Starbucks’s Barista helps customers place orders and offers information about products.

If your customer channels do not offer a chatbot, you may want to work with your IT team to implement one. The chatbot can answer common questions, suggest products or services based on a visitor’s needs, or direct people to human support. These chatbots not only reduce the strain on your service teams, but they also keep customers moving on their journey faster.

The chatbot queries also show your team what challenges customers often face and give data to inform what areas of the journey you can focus on next. AI is great at recognizing patterns in data!

3. Stay Ahead of Product or Service Problems

Because our customer journeys span so many channels and touchpoints, it’s inevitable for issues to arise somewhere in the journey without you noticing. That’s where AI can be especially helpful.

AI can help with predictive maintenance and automatically alert customers about delays with their order or issues with their service, such as sending an automatic shipping update if a severe weather event impacts the route or provide an outage notice before customers have to contact support.

These types of thoughtful, proactive communications at scale can help reassure customers before they feel the need to call.

4. Create Fulfilling Content Experiences

Every customer’s journey is unique. They will interact with your product or service at their own pace. As a customer experience leader, it can be difficult to know the right time to send specific messages like a satisfaction questionnaire, onboarding guide, or complementary service offer.

AI can save teams countless hours by monitoring customer activities and delivering perfectly timed messages based on specific actions or triggers. For example:

• If a new customer shows low engagement with your service in their first weeks, your AI tool can send messages explaining how to get the most out of the service and ways to get started.

• If customers who previously shopped frequently show signs of churning, your AI solution can deliver re-engagement messages and offer products or services that complement their past purchases.

The Human Touch in an AI-Driven World

AI can handle so many routine tasks that would require humans to be on standby 24/7. It is an essential resource for customer experience change agents to fulfill customer expectations and deliver a consistent, personalized experience across every touchpoint.

With AI handling core tasks and upleveling customer insights, customer experience change agents can focus their time and efforts on strategy and designing experiences that AI simply can’t.

Human ingenuity and curiosity are essential for creating remarkable customer experiences. AI can point us in the right direction and save teams countless hours that we can focus toward Customer Experience Investigation. This important work, including root cause analysis and watching for unmet needs, is what separates good customer experiences from great ones.

What tasks or processes take the most time for your team? Can you apply AI to accelerate those tasks? What can AI handle that doesn’t require your team’s expertise? The opportunities are endless when it comes to AI. Its impact will only grow in the coming months and years, but the heart of great customer experience will always be human.

This article originally appeared as 4 Ways to Use AI to Deliver Seamless Customer Experiences on ExperienceInvestigators.com.