How AI and ML will shift digital customer experience to the next level?

An immersive 'Digital Experience' is the heart of Digital Transformation. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) have been the major catalysts in transforming the 'Digital Customer Experience' and enabling the emergence of new business innovations. Together, they accelerate growth opportunities for customer-centric businesses aiming to harness the greater potential of digitalization.

Gaining the full potential in today’s customer-empowered marketplace demands a broader view of what customers desire, need, and expect. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning hold tremendous value in unifying the vision for customer engagement and experience management across all digital points. They enable organizations to gain a competitive advantage by:

• Understanding customers' ever-changing desires and alleviating customer pain points
• Creating a great digital experience that a potential customer will value lifetime
• Analyzing their behaviors to deal with the rapid shift in preferences
• Driving loyalty among existing ones.

The result - a more hyper-personalized digital experience, which leads to more profitable customer relationships.

Many forward-thinking companies across different verticals are leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning along with advanced analytics to improve their customer experience. As a holistic digital transformation strategy, they use Artificial Intelligence to automate labor, produce big improvements in responsiveness, and accelerate decision-making using data.

What's more? Some businesses are using the power of Machine Learning to train legacy systems to find patterns, recognize speech and automate repetitive tasks. They recognize ML as the next frontier to unleash the next wave of digital disruption. Augmenting human decision-making, data processing from fragmented sources, business agility, operational efficiency, scalability, speed, intelligent automation, cost management, and optimized customer experience are the long-term competitive benefits of using this transformative technology.

The right adoption of AI and ML enables businesses across industries to achieve many significant improvements in their customers' day-to-day experience by ‘enhancing and not replacing' the human element. Let’s find out how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning revolutionizing the digital customer experience and help businesses to accelerate their digital transformation journey:

Predict Customer Behavior: Predicting customer behavior and patterns correctly is a business imperative. Understandably, the combination of AI and ML is best leveraged by organizations everywhere to analyze historical and behavioral data. Also, it does wonders to capture a more accurate understanding of their customers' behavior and use real-time decisioning for more effective marketing goals. Companies use this real-time customer insight to deliver more hyper-personalized experiences to their customers every day by pushing highly relevant content and personalized recommendations that help connect with customers on a more personal level.

• Intelligent communication: The virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology is the new normal for a better customer digital experience in the wake of the global COVID-19 crisis. The customer service (via chatbots) not only reduces human dependency by analyzing what to say when interacting with people and when to route to humans. But, transitioning to chatbots minimizes room for error and ensures increased digital (and self-service) effectiveness. At the same time, the natural engagement methods powered by AI and ML technologies help achieve higher operational efficiency and enhanced customer journey by mitigating the average time spent on day-to-day activities. This sparks intelligent and personalized interactions 24/7 with greater precision, accuracy, and speed in complex situations.
• Greater operational excellence: According to a study published by Forrester, approximately 71% of people agree that Artificial Intelligence can do wonders to improve business efficiency, and 59% say that it enhances scalability. People consider AI as the key enabler to greater digital operational excellence as they can quickly predict end-users behavior in real-time. They allow businesses to become more innovative, improve risk prediction, raise top-line profits, generate better customer insights, and gain greater business agility by efficient scaling through intelligent automation.
• Product enhancement: Do you know over 55% of business leaders say that transformative technologies like AL and ML play a vital role to predict customer behavior? As a result, companies can understand their end-users needs, offer improved products, and serve their potential customers better without them even asking for them. This way, they are putting a step forward toward an excellent customer experience.
• Contacting interested customers: Making investments in centralized CRM data centers can unlock some quick wins as it documents every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. An AI-powered CRM system works on predictive intelligence, text analytics, and machine learning to provide an Organization with actionable insights. This information can be utilized to better understand the customers' psyche and their expectations at every touchpoint. This way, an organization can reach out to interested customers at the very moment with the right message that will result in more business opportunities.

Final thoughts

We are living in the age of extreme customer expectations where the much-hyped digital customer experience will stay longer in the future. And to gain a competitive advantage, companies will keep experimenting with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to reduce friction in the customer journey and invent compelling experiences in a digital world to drive long-lasting customer engagements. However, the customer experience (CX) transformation using AL and ML is critical to success in the next normal. It can be daunting as the journey is overwhelmed by the many serious challenges. There is a need for an agile transformation approach to succeed and embrace the revolutionary technologies - AL and ML that underpin compelling digital customer experiences. Are you ready?