How AI-powered self-service is elevating the customer experience

In this article, Jeannie Walters, CX Thought Leader, highlights the challenges businesses face in effectively integrating AI to enhance customer experiences and outlines specific strategies for utilizing AI in self-service options to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. Discover how to navigate these challenges and ensure your AI initiatives drive customer retention and loyalty. 
 
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing customer experiences in ways we could have never imagined. It feels like you’ll fall behind the competition if you don’t implement AI everywhere you can.

Okay, the first part is true. But the second part? Not so much. (At least not yet.)

Yes, AI adoption is surging. Yet most organizations still have a lot to learn about using AI to accomplish their business goals and fulfill their customer expectations effectively. 

As I partner with leaders to understand where AI can drive the greatest value for their organization, I often revisit the purpose of Customer Experience Strategy: To provide customers with a personalized and frustration-free experience as they engage with us, which leads to customer loyalty, retention, and business outcomes that go with that.

The fact is that increasingly, customers don’t want to engage with a human. This might contradict what you have anecdotally learned since complaining about robots taking over has become part of the zeitgeist.

One in four customers now prefer using AI-powered self-service options for everything from product or service exploration to implementation, support, and cancellation. And more than half of customers at least want the option to choose self-service.

This presents so many opportunities for CX leaders to start using AI in ways that will make a meaningful difference… and fast!

Let’s examine how AI is powering better self-service customer experiences, and the challenges teams can face when implementing AI options.  

AI use cases for self-service customer experiences 

At its best, AI empowers CX change agents to cover more ground than before and deliver on customer needs at scale. While AI will eventually touch every aspect of the customer journey, organizations will prioritize the areas where it matters most for their customers.

How should you find your AI starting point? Start with the human side.  

• Who is your customer?  
• What are they trying to do?  
• How are they trying to do it?  

Their goal isn’t to use your app or check out at your kiosk. Their goal is to run a faster mile, get groceries quickly, or fix a problem. In some cases, your customers may need to use tech-supported options to get the help they need in a way that works best for them.

Maybe you’re still learning or don’t yet have the right tool or data set to really dive into full AI integration. You can still start to explore the possibilities that lead to better experiences for your customers.

When assessing the right places to infuse AI into the self-service experience, three areas in particular come to mind:  

• Chatbots: Chatbots are vital assets to organizations because they can help answer routine customer questions quickly (without needing to enter a live support queue). By using AI to analyze your customer support transcripts and customer communications, your team can identify the most common questions and issues. Then you can create a chatbot that effectively fulfills these needs. CVS is currently working to enhance its customer service by using AI to answer pharmacy customer questions, and providing human reassurance when needed. Check out some other inspiring chatbot examples here.
• Personalized recommendations: Personalization is essential for a superb customer experience. When customers opt for a rep-free checkout experience, they may miss out on valuable information about their purchase or complementary purchases they could consider. AI can be used to personalize the self-service checkout experience to quickly analyze a customer’s information, current purchase, and past purchases to suggest complementary items or flag vital information they should know. Amazon excels in this area with its customized homepage and tailored product recommendations that are more often relevant than not. Gatorade is also blending chatbots and personalized recommendations with its pilot AI Hydration Coach, which gives customers custom advice about their hydration needs. 
• Proactive reminders and customer service: AI can help customer service agents transition from reactive to proactive support by analyzing customer data to deliver relevant reminders. For example, AI can understand how frequently customers order specific items or renew their subscriptions to then deliver reminders that make the checkout or renewal process a breeze. AI can also identify customers who may be encountering product or service quality issues so a human agent can reach out and help them troubleshoot the problem before it escalates.  

Challenges for implementing AI in CX 

Incorporating Al into your customer's experience might not be seamless. The organizations achieving the most success with Al now are addressing common challenges head-on to unlock AI’s full potential:  

• Data management: Data integration and centralization are critical to well-executed Al performance. Now is the time to look under the hood and make sure your customer data is where it needs to be. It's difficult for machine learning to get smarter if only part of the customer journey is explored. A universal understanding of what data, how to use it, where it's kept, and how to govern its usage are absolutely imperative to the ethics of using customer data.  
• Siloed leadership: If your teams are working independently on Al initiatives, just like any customer experience strategy, your customer’s journey may feel disjointed. If one area of your organization, like e-commerce, has developed and executed great personalization strategies for shoppers, those customers will expect the same personalization when requesting help on the store app, for example. If those teams are leading separately and not communicating, the customer suffers. Get your cross-functional team together to address the whole customer journey and how Al can support that, not the other way around. (This is where a centralized CX Strategy can really help!) 

• Culture, training, and employee engagement: Many employees today are asked to use new technology and leverage the Al tools available without the proper communication, training, and ways to provide feedback. These employees are vital to the success of the adoption of Al, so create a rollout strategy along with training and communication plans. The good news is that AI can help with this, too. A bloated knowledge base can be a challenge for a person to dig through to find the right resource. But AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP) can find the right resource at the right moment, based on natural questions like “how should I enter customer data?”  

These are some big challenges. A little encouragement can go a long way as you overcome them. Celebrate your successes as you roll out new tools and technologies and share wins throughout the organization.

CX best practices for scalable AI

There are a few ways CX teams can stay ahead of their AI opportunities and address any new hurdles with grace:  

• Conduct journey mapping: Revisit your customer journey maps with an eye toward AI advancement. Evaluate every customer touchpoint and ask if AI can improve that process for your customer or your team. AI can also help provide specific insights from data and create action plans based on what’s learned. 
• Cross-functional collaboration: Keep close contact throughout your organization and provide cross-functional reporting to help every team understand how your AI implementations are driving the business forward. Encourage frequent idea sharing to uncover new opportunities quickly. And tie everything back to your overall CX Strategy! 
• Prioritize ongoing learning: Every team member deserves access to ongoing training and professional development opportunities to help advance your Customer Experience Mission and use AI to its fullest capacity. 

An AI-powered customer experience future

Our customers want to experience a personalized and frustration-free journey. Leaders can embrace AI to offer a mix of AI-powered self-service and human-assisted experiences that empower customers with choice.

AI will continue to make an impact for customers in ways small and large, which raises the bar for all of us as our customers expect these elevated experiences. Now is the time to align with your leadership and keep a close eye on your customer journey.

Let’s stay ahead of the curve and continue to deliver great experiences — no matter how your customers choose to engage. 

Are you up for creating a customer experience culture that not only delights your customers but also champions your agents' mental well-being? In this episode of CX-WISE, our host Nathan Bennett engages in an insightful conversation with renowned CX Expert, Annette Franz. From addressing mental health concerns in contact centers to dispelling common misconceptions about customer experience, Annette's expertise will inspire you to navigate the complexities of the modern CX world, one step at a time. Annette also shares her practical advice for leaders on fostering a human-centric culture for CX success, revealing the crucial CX metrics that truly signal progress. Tune in to gain a fresh perspective on CX, filled with real-world anecdotes and actionable tips. Learn how you can embrace customer-centricity for CX success in your business.