Top 7 Ways AI Will Delight Your Customers And Improve Branding

Don’t only attempt to make your customers happy. Dazzle and delight them.

Truly, an effective customer service is by far the most important factor in business. Why? Because customers are Kings—and they are the reason why your business exists.

If you give your customers an outstanding customer service, you can guarantee they will come back to do business with your brand over and over again—which means you can continually record significant sales and increase your revenue.

On the flip side, if you don’t treat your customers well, they will dump your business and even tell their friends about their bad experience.

A recent study revealed that 42% of B2C customers purchased more after a good customer service experience, whilst 52% stopped buying after one bad customer service interaction.

That is why a lot of companies invest the chunk of their budget into creating a great customer service experience, for example, Amazon, and Airbnb.

Technological advancements have helped businesses to delight the customers by providing best customer services and help in improving brand image.

Specifically, Artificial Intelligence has become the top priority for Fortune 500 companies—and with AI; you can take customer service to a whole new level.

According to Gartner, by 2020, more than 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without the need for a human agent.

AI (artificial intelligence) is the answer to that. The relationship between humans and machine is changing very fast. You can now leverage AI to deliver high customer service.

Let’s discuss how you can do it:

1). AI Provides reliable service, wherever customers need it

“Artificial Intelligence is the future and the future is here.” – Dave Waters

Have you found any human who can work all day and all night for 365 days? I don’t think it’s possible.

Though impossible, customers still expect you to answer their questions whenever they need it—even if it’s by 12.00 midnight.

A recent report shows that 57% of consumers expect a response within 30 minutes whether at night, weekends, or during the day.

It goes without saying that if a company needs to keep their customers and thrive in this competitive marketing environment, there is need to provide a reliable and an effective customer experience, and not just a service.

And that’s where AI comes in to help and support human shortcomings. AI provides a high-level of reliability you can’t get from humans. AI is simply a computer or piece of software that does what you can't-do.

If you want to run your business 24/7 you should consider using an AI chat bot for your business.

AI Chatbots are not just there to be used at any time, they try to provide your customers with the best information they require to solve their problems.

More so, because AI Chatbots are built with natural language processing and machine learning, they have cognitive abilities; they understand your intent as you communicate with them. AI Chatbots are built to learn from their interactions with humans.

If you make a spelling error while typing your message, it quickly understands your intent and may give you the correct spelling and inquire from you if that’s what you meant.

In an interview with Fast Company, the CEO of Concierge, David Barrett noted that Concierge (an artificial intelligence Chatbot) has helped reduce banking problems by 75%.

2). You can use AI to automate customer service over messaging apps

“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.” —Jeff Hawkins

Most of your customers are either on Facebook Messenger, Slack, or Skype or all of them. They will have the opportunity to message your business right from their favorite messaging app.

According to a study by Nielsen, in 2015 Facebook Messenger was the fastest growing messenger app, and still is.

The truth is most of your customers spend most of their time on messaging apps.

Therefore, it’s a lot easier for them to reach your business from their favorite messenger as compared to picking up a phone to call you or navigating to your website to use your contact form.

Facebook introduced their Chatbots in 2015 with an open source API for developers to leverage and build powerful Chatbots. Slack also introduced their new AI Chatbot API for developers. These days many businesses are integrating Chatbots on their websites to communicate with the customer via a chat interface.

Chatbots provide extensive customer service 24/7 has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction. You can use the messenger Chatbot to generate sales, leads, and to allow your customers to fill online forms in an interactive manner.

For example, Trim is a Fintech startup that helps you negotiate your bills, check your balances and transaction information right from your Facebook Messenger app.

It also allows you to cancel any subscription by simply chatting with it. Customers will be more satisfied with your brand if you can make your customer support accessible to them no matter where they are.

3). Customers love self-help services

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”- Donald Porter

Customers are becoming more demanding as the day goes by. They basically don’t want to wait for you to help them do what they can do for themselves—they want a level of control.

They expect you to provide a way for them to help themselves.

It’s becoming harder and harder to please customers nowadays. Customers expect to see a self-help service on your website. In fact, it should be a part of every website. They want to be able to help themselves until they run into muddy waters, and then you can step in and help them out.

You’ve got to understand that customer service facilities such as phone and email support can’t measure up with the increasing demand for an effective self-help service.

Recent studies show that 90% of consumers expect a brand or organization to offer a self-service customer support portal.

Below are some of the reasons why self-service enhances customer experience.

• Self-service is faster – When customers face some issues they have to go somewhere or they have to wait in order to get the information or resolution they need. This is because there are not enough customer service assistants to help customers. So instead of waiting for someone, they can solve the issue using self-service technology.
• With self-service errors will be less – Sometimes, well-trained agents make mistakes while handling customers. If customers do not rely on agents and are doing by themselves with the help of AI technology, customers are less likely to make errors.

AI Chatbots are the self-service agent customers are looking for. With AI Chatbots a customer may not have the need to call a customer service agent, except in extreme cases where the bot can’t help them resolve their problem.

Apart from the fact that customers need you to implement this feature on your website, it can have a great impact on your bottom line. It drives a lot of engagement with your brand and website, increases time spent on your site, enhances brand affinity, and of course, encourages repeat traffic.

4). AI allows you to personalize your customer service experience

In today’s digital world, the top priority of any business should be to provide hassle-free, frictionless, personalized customer service.  To achieve business goals, it is important to keep customer’s priority at first. More and more B2B companies are adopting AI technology to improve their customer experience and increase sales.

Customers want the best customer service option. If you can provide them with the best service with whatever technology, you will inspire them to stick to your brand. However, they don’t want to lose the human touch and personalization. “People feel more comfortable when they talk to a human being and not to an automated machine,” says Amalia Agathou.

Customers want to be listened to and they want to feel that you care about helping them solve their problems. They want to interact with your brand. AI Chatbots can be a great compliment to your overall customer service efforts.

With cognitive ability through machine learning and natural language processing which are added to Chatbots, they are becoming more sophisticated and “human.”

Since AI Chatbots are built to learn from human interactions, they tend to learn from your customers as they interact with them and know the best way to relate to them.

While you can also add a human picture in your Chatbots, don’t try to deceive the customer into thinking they are chatting with a real person.

When people interact with a well-designed AI Chatbots, they will assume they are communicating with a real person.

The analytics in AI makes it more interesting as Chatbots use the data they extract from their conversations with your customers to serve them better.

In addition to this, a smooth customer transition is experienced here compared to when you have multiple customers handling your customer support.

As an example, if a customer was earlier attended to by Brian, David will definitely not be able to recall and sync the previous interactions. On the other hand, AI Chatbots are able to recall your last conversation and try to help you complete your unfinished transactions.

5. AI allows you to answer customer’s questions quickly

In this fast-paced era, customers want answers quickly. To stand out and win your customers against your competitors, you need to provide a quick and better service than your competitors.

To meet the high demand consumers are placing on brands, brands are embracing robotics to help customers resolve their issues quickly.

For example, in the Hospitality industry, specifically the hotel niche, brands like Hilton have incorporated AI as part of their key customer experience in Hilton McLean Virginia, USA.

They partnered with IBM using Connie, the first Watson-enabled robot concierge to help guest with any information they might need about the hotel and the surrounding environment.

So customers don’t need to worry about calling a customer service agent, but instead, they can quickly meet Connie and ask any question they want and get answers quickly.

The robot—Connie, gives customers quick access to personal information through cognitive reasoning in a friendly manner.

6). AI improving business operations

“In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: People, Product, and Profits.” – Lee Iacocca 

AI helps businesses to streamline their processes and operations, reduces costs and provides better customer service. AI can handle customer’s query and can provide real-time solutions to the customers.

With the advancement of AI, more and more businesses are integrating automation into their operations thus this speedup repetitive tasks and customer service agents can focus on more complex tasks and this results in better customer engagement.

7). Reduces Operating Costs

New and innovative technologies like industrial robots, Artificial Intelligence, and machine learning are advancing at a rapid pace.  Artificial Intelligence streamlines business functions and operations and improves productivity and efficiency which leads to higher profits over time. AI can handle high volume workflows and thus this leads to more conversions and generates more revenue. AI manages cost in the most effective way while still producing high-level output.

Integrating automation in business operations reduces the chance of errors and thus this increases security. AI will have a significant impact on the businesses in the near future. To remain ahead, it is necessary for any business to automate their processes and thus this will reduce operational costs and will lead you towards success.

Conclusion

Some people think that AI is set to replace humans. What do you think?

Personally, I think differently: AI won’t replace human. AI is built to help individuals do what they struggle with. Interestingly, while we were worried that automation has replaced 800,000 workers, it created 3.5 million jobs.

For example, live chat agents can’t stay up 24/7 answering questions, but AI can, a human can’t remember so much but AI can.

Bear in mind that AI is still in its teething stage literally, so hopefully in the future things would get better.

I don’t see AI as a threat, but rather, I see it as a complement to human weaknesses. Adopting AI into your customer service is an effective way to deliver a memorable customer service experience. Check more in this whitepaper.

Sam Suthar

CMO, Acquire.io

Sam Suthar is Acquire's Head of India office, where he manages day-to-day business operations.