How AI can make customer experience personal

'The future of CX will be supercharged'

We all know that generative AI is a transformative technology and most of us should be fairly comfortable in naming some obvious applications. Think sales and marketing content, collaboration, helpdesks, digital assistants and chatbots, and you surely won’t be wide of the mark.

But one less widely publicised impact comes in Customer Experience (CX). Let's dig deeper and look at some of the ways you can tap the power of GenAI (and AI more broadly) to empower a bolder, even more compelling customer experience.

GenAI is reshaping live and dynamic content offers

One of the things I'm seeing is the ability to provide personalised content via chatbots, that can provide real-time assistance and some predictive modelling to determine what the next logical step should be in a process. This use case helps companies to increase the level of engagement with customers and, more importantly, empowers the customer to take action.

Four ‘S factors': specificity, scalability, speed, and self-service

GenAI will help to tailor specific customer experiences while providing scalability and avoiding operational inefficiencies around delivering personalised services.

For ERP customers, this may mean faster response times and more personalised interactions for users. Predictive monitoring and insights could also help customers find areas where they can automate tasks and processes for greater efficiency.

AI tools can also help them to find answers rapidly to questions through self-service, which would remove the need for support cases, meaning less interruption to their workflows and, ultimately, increase user experience satisfaction levels.

A shorter loop between software vendors and software buyers

AI will enable software vendors to become more predictive in their approach to customer experiences. It allows technology providers to understand external trends, layer them on top of customer insights and shape recommendations. This will make for a more consultative, strategic relationship.

It also helps to streamline internal operating practices to become more standards-based and efficient, and that means improved customer journeys. In this scenario, AI will help to identify gaps from acquiring customers to on-boarding them. This in turn will help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

It's already happening…

In the area of personalisation, using AI offers the opportunity to analyse behaviour and understand what functionality customers are using within the product set, as well as the extent to which they are using it.

Armed with this information, the technology can make recommendations to help simplify and automate tasks. For example, at Unit4 our product intelligence helps the Customer Success Management team to unlock how customers are pursuing outcomes, where additional adoption is needed, and respectfully prompt them to consider additional training and education needs that may help to accelerate adoption and use of Unit4 products and tools.

Meeting the ethics challenge

Privacy and data protection is always a major consideration and AI can also play a part here. But it's also important that there is effective communication and transparency with customers about what data is being collected and how it is to be utilised.

Customers need to be reassured to build trust. By being open, it's possible for organisations to educate customers on how data will be used to improve their customer experiences.

It's also key to be responsive to customer feedback, to acknowledge input and be transparent about how we are going to address customer feedback through product development.

What next?

In the future, we may look at integrating AI into our Customer 360 Program to leverage all of the information we have about our customers across the business. I can envisage a scenario where you ask a chatbot to get more holistic information.

We could examine historical trends and understand where risks or failures may have occurred so that we can be more proactive with customers in future. This improves outcomes for customers and refines best practices that all our customers can learn from. Another area where we are looking at using AI is within support, as a co-pilot for our team in the form of virtual assistants and chatbots to provide guidance and self-service information. This will improve response times and enrich the customer experience, as well as streamline costs.

Generative AI's ability to continuously learn and become self-driving will enable more adaptivity to business and customer requirements too. Advances in AI tools recognizing voice, gesture and facial expression could make customer interactions very immersive. It might be possible to have a ‘digital human' engaging with customers in personalised experiences by ‘reading' situations and gauging sentiment.

It will also be interesting to see how AI integrates with other innovative technologies such as blockchain, the metaverse and Augmented Reality (AR). As Harvard's The Year in Tech, 2024 explains: "This year, tech is driven not primarily by new technologies, but by new integrations that are more advanced and efficient in using existing technologies."

As ever with emerging technologies, we need to set expectations, manage change and install guardrails, but the future of CX will be supercharged by the amazing changes we are all seeing through the rapid rise of AI.

Michelle MacCarthy is global vice president customer experience at Unit4