Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a transformative technology in CX. According to Gartner, 91.5% of leading businesses invest in AI on an ongoing basis to boost their customer relations. As a result, customer satisfaction is expected to grow by 25% by 2023 in organizations that use AI. From automation to assistive technology, it’s clear that AI applied to CX improves outcomes and cuts costs.
Where should AI be applied to add the most value? Beyond analyzing troves of data and augmenting the work of humans, AI can help businesses make improvements to customer experience through synthesis – the automatic generation of new content (documents, media and even real-time avatars such as Meta’s Metaverse). And until recently, this area has been largely untapped. Here are 3 areas where enterprises can leverage AI to improve CX.
Conversation
AI has the power to enhance the way we communicate with one another. While we often think of applications of AI and natural language processing (NLP) in written form, speech is becoming a bigger piece of the pie. While text-to-speech and translation apps were a step in the right direction, the evolution of speech-to-speech is going to change communication as we know it. With the ability to support various accents, languages, dialects, and non-verbal queues, the barriers of location and understanding will be significantly lowered.
This will be a particularly important use case for call centers. Heavily accented speakers may struggle to find employment and perform at their job. AI enables enterprises to customize the tone of speech used by their agents in real-time to maximize the understanding between caller and agent. The benefits of AI in this scenario are significant: agents have more tools and opportunities to succeed in their roles, callers have a better overall experience, and operators can expand their operations at the rate that the market demands.
Content Creation
We now have algorithms that can read and write. As NLP becomes more mainstream, almost all financial news is now written by machines—Bloomberg Terminal, SEC filings, and even tweets. To take it a step further, algorithms can now be tasked with content writing, too. The algorithm reads an article, decides what’s important, and when and where to post it to get pertinent information out quickly and accurately. Taking twenty minutes vs. two-minutes to distill important information makes a huge difference.
It’s not just writing, either. With advances in well-known systems like DALL-E and stable diffusion, machines can now be tasked with artistry and video, too. While this is a fun use case, businesses are starting to realize the value. In fact, Microsoft recently launched its new Designer app, which will use AI-image generation to help users overcome writer’s block. Users can simply type in a prompt and generate a creative asset within their document, all thanks to generative AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has stunned the world with its ability to write insightful prose and even poems.
Personalization
From marketing and advertising to customer success and patient outcomes, AI has made it possible to create highly personalized experiences for customers and end-users alike. Much like the previously mentioned speech-to-speech technology and components of generative AI, advances in NLP have made it possible to distill the most contextually relevant information and act on it.
For example, AI analysis of non-verbal cues can indicate sentiment, intent, satisfaction, and other views more quickly and accurately than surveys and other traditional data collection methods. Not only is this less invasive, but it can change the ways customers are helped in real-time. A caller who signals interest in a promotional offer for flights to Hawaii can be quickly routed to a specialist. In a clinical setting, AI “in the loop” enables doctors to track their patients’ progress through continuous analysis of their speech quality, resulting in better care delivery.
Brands that provide a good customer experience generate 5.7x more revenue than competitors who fall short (RCE). On the other end of the spectrum, companies with engaged employees outperform the competition by 147% (Gallup). Whether the consumer or the end-user, positive experiences matter. AI is a great tool to up-level CX and improve business operations in the process.
