One of the newest benefits of cloud computing is that it enables businesses to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). This rapidly developing technology offers significant development opportunities that many companies have already been quick to seize upon. In this post, we’ll look at some of the ways your company can benefit from cloud-based Artificial Intelligence.
1. Improving personalized shopping experiences
Providing customers with personalised marketing increases engagement, helps generate customer loyalty and improves sales. This is why companies are putting so much effort into it. One of the advantages of using AI is that it is able to identify patterns in customers’ browsing habits and purchasing behaviour. Using the millions of transactions stored and analysed in the cloud, AI is able to provide highly accurate offers to individual customers.
2. Automating customer interactions
Most customer interactions, such as emails, online chat, social media conversations and telephone calls, currently require human involvement.Artificial Intelligence, however, is enabling companies to automate these communications. By analysing data collected from previous communications it is possible to program computers to respond accurately to customers and deal with their enquiries. What’s more, when AI is combined with machine learning, the more the AI platforms interact, the better they become.
One example of this is AI Chatbots which, unlike humans, can interact with unlimited customers at the same time and can both respond and initiate communication – whether on a website or an app.
It is estimated, that by 2020, 85 percent of all customer interactions will be taken care of by intelligent machines that are able to replicate human functions. The days of using a call centre look like they are coming to a close.
3. Real-time Assistance
Artificial Intelligence is also useful for businesses that need to constantly communicate with high volumes of customers throughout each day. For example, in the transport industry, bus, train and airlines companies, which can have millions of passengers a day, can use AI to interact, in real-time, to send personalised travel information, such as notice of delays. Some bus companies, for example, are already tracking the location of their buses and using AI to provide travellers with real-time updates about where the bus is along its route and its estimated time of arrival. Customers receive this information on the bus company app.
4. Data mining
One of the biggest advantages of using cloud-based AI is that artificial intelligence apps are able to quickly discover important and relevant findings during the processing of big data. This can provide businesses with previously undiscovered insights that can help give it an advantage in the marketplace.
5.Operational automation
AI is able to operate other technologies that increase automation in business. For example, AI can be used to control robots in factories or maintain ideal temperatures through intelligent heating. In Japan, human-looking robots now serve as receptionists in some of the countries’ hotels automating check-ins, booking services and dealing (in four languages) with customer enquiries. In retail, Artificial Intelligence is also being linked with RFID and cloud technology to track inventory. In China, police forces use AI to catch criminals. The country has a vast CCTV network and AI uses facial recognition to spot and track suspects so that they can be apprehended.
6.Predicting outcomes
Another advantage of AI is that it is able to predict outcomes based on data analysis. For example, it sees patterns in customer data that can show whether the products currently on sale are likely to sell and in what volumes. It will also predict when the demand will tail off. This can be very useful in helping a company purchase the correct stock and in the correct volumes. It is predicted that, within 10 years, the days of seasonal sales will be over as AI will mean there is too little leftover stock to sell off.
This ability to predict is not just useful in retail. Artificial Intelligence is also being used in many other areas, for example, in banking where it can predict currency and stock price fluctuations or in healthcare where, remarkably, it can predict outbreaks of infections by analysing social media posts.
7.Improve the recruitment process
It may be bad news for recruitment companies, but AI is now helping businesses automate the recruitment of new employees. It is able to quickly sift through applications, automatically rejecting those which do not meet the company’s personal specification. This not only saves time (or money spent on a recruitment agency), but it also ensures that there is no discrimination or bias in the shortlisting process. The AI programs available can even take care of the many administrative tasks of recruitment.
Conclusion
As you can see, AI systems provide businesses with a wide range of benefits, including personalised marketing, customer service, operational automation, inventory management and recruitment. And these are just a few of the many ways AI can be used. What’s remarkable, however, is that many of the AI apps, which are designed specifically for cloud-based systems, are quickly and easily deployable. Companies whose systems are in the cloud can be benefitting from them in no time at all.
From Siri in the phone to Netflix recommendations on Smart TV, the Artificial Intelligence technology is revolutionizing our lives. It has become the hottest technology of the present time. Every small to medium businesses- from food chains to personal fitness centers are employing this technology to reap higher benefits. And finance industry is not at all lagging behind. Finance companies are also hiring the top mobile app developers to invest in this technology and enjoy its perks. Before we begin to delve the benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Finance and Banking sector, let’s have a quick recap of what is it all about.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fusion of three state-of-the-art technology, namely Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Cognitive Computing. The main idea behind this technology is to mimic the human intelligence and provide better communication between the humans & machines.
Artificial Intelligence Technology & Banking Mobile Apps
In the war of gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace, it is quite tough to rely completely on humans. The humans have a limit to the speed with which they do any task. They can’t act with the speed of light to deliver an impressive experience to multiple users at the same time. However, human intelligence machine can do this. And this is the prime reason they are gaining such a huge traction in the market.
Following are some of the benefits finance and banking industry is enjoying with the help of AI:
Customer Support
The banking sector is adopting the AI technology to enhance its support system and offer better value to users. The AI-based customer service Chatbots are imitating the human interactions and providing them desirable information/result in no time. This feature is helping users with relevant information and in tasks like recovering passwords. This way, it is cutting down the workload of financial specialists, empowering them to focus on more crucial tasks.
“Artificial Intelligence allows us to offer an experience that doesn’t require our customers to go through several pages on our website; they can easily get the information through simple conversations. This is a great time-saving convenience for busy users who are already using Messenger.”
– Steve Ellis, Head of Wells Fargo’s Innovation Group
Fraud Detection Technology
Fraud detection is one of the key areas excelled by Finance world with the implementation of Artificial Intelligence. The AI equipped apps easily identify the fraudulent activities and alert the customers. It also helps payment providers and retailers in examining and securing financial activities in connection with their firms.
Financial Planning
The Artificial Intelligence plays a significant role in assisting the users to choose the right plan for them. Using the data from the past activities of the users and offers from banks such as credit card plans, investment policies, funds, etc., the AI-enabled mobile applications are offering the most optimal recommendations to the users.
This feature is the core factor behind the revenue growth in the major banks and so, is highly in demand by many other entrepreneurs. If you are also in the finance business, reach to the top mobile application development companies today!
Automated Transaction
The users love automation and the opportunity of running timeline crucial tasks. Because of the same, the AI-based applications are ruling the industry. At Anteelo, our adept mobile app developers have built various projects based on automated functionalities.
Personalized Remainder
Various finance companies are implementing the AI based personalized reminders into their mobile apps. Just like an alarm clock, these reminders remain active for a certain period of time to enable users to perform a particular task on time. This feature is helping the users in renewing their policies and other such financial transactions before the time passes.
Wrapping Up!
Artificial Intelligence is heavily influencing the market, especially the finance industry. The industry’s leading giants have already begun to enjoy its benefits, setting a new stage of the competition. If you are a finance or banking corporation, it’s high time to hire the best mobile app developersand get your own AI-integrated app. Otherwise, you might find difficult to remain on the apex of the market.
The topic related to ‘Product Management’ has received several laurels in recent years. Several rounds of discussions have happened to create an analogy out of client’s stand point. As I heard more of these conversations, there was an uncomfortable ambiguity stemming from disbelief – is this another fad or is there meaning to it? Well, the initial rumblings were from the cool kids in the bay. But, why did grounded Midwest and shoot-from-the-hip south latch on? Must be something deeper, right?!
Product management has been around forever in the software, e-commerce world. But, today, mainstream IT and AI teams in fortune 500 companies are thinking of a product paradigm shift. Leading consulting firms are also developing products or beefing up their technology as an eventuality.
But, the question that begs attention here is – why products? What happened to software as a service, platform as a service, ML as a service? Do we need another paradigm shift? Or as the saying goes – Old wine in a new bottle?
IT teams are today being led by progressive Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data officers. Conventionally, CIOs have been leveraging their value by app dev teams, BI teams, infrastructure teams et al. While this may have become a table stake, it has been around for a while already. The question is – ‘How to deliver incremental value to business?’
So, what has changed?
Demand:
IT is today called upon to be a true business partner. And, given the rate at which business is facing change, the time to deliver value is compressed.
Glocal innovation:
For a fortune 500 firm operating globally, innovation is striking at its core from multiple directions. While the USA is still the biggest revenue (EBITDA generation engine), problem and solution innovation is happening in other markets faster than the USA. For starters, they have less legacy to deal with. The local markets are facing competition from nimbler players. VC money is flowing into firms in China, Israel, Korea, India which are encountering newer problems in e-commerce, voice commerce sectors. Other traditional revenue generating markets, individually facing slower growth, find it difficult to make a business case to invest in solutions led by such innovations.
Problem repeatability:
This is going to sound rhetorical. But, I must state it because it is relevant. Business problems in today’s enterprise are constantly changing. Few of them get recreated, and hence are not available in large volumes. Few others are becoming common across markets and thus moving into a constant state of being a tightly defined problem that can be applied globally. Repeatable.
A good indicator to this is AWS recent product launches – out of the box image, text, voice, reinforcement learning, forecasting. Common problems which are finding repeatable solutions.
The AI candy shop:
Today, nobody wants to use process automation tools that are not embedded in intelligence. Passé, inefficient. Wallstreet, investors and boards are lapping up the buzzwords – cognitive, AI, embedded ML.
Cloud enabling global scalability:
Cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS have ensured that once you have these AI capabilities developed, they can be deployed globally. The global-local adaptation is a key design criterion in this context.
Glocal solution adaptation…er,… maybe Glocal problem adaptation:
Each market has its secret sauce in terms of the market structure, drivers and customer nuances. Thus, before adapting a solution from one market to the other, it is essential to adapt the problem as well. For example, it is an interesting pursuit to adapt the problem structure from the modern trade Australia market to half way across the world in Brazil.
And, then adapt the solution.
So, who’s game is it anyway?
Given the above guard rails, it is quite evident that the business case should be developed by a country specific P&L or ROI measure. It must be a global mandate. IT is one of the few functions which is ideally poised to ride this wave. That, they own the data systems is coincidental. Or, well.. was that the whole plan! Go, Trojan..
Finally, after rambling about half the things in the world – we come to the initial topic of this article. Products. Why?
A product has a life – it evolves constantly. The focus is on continually making the best product for its end user, ever possible. It has a roadmap. In a world of multiple users, it needs a strong owner who plans and decides well. It has a clear value proposition in each update/release. It can be developed in a sprint like manner. It can be defined with a bounded scope and sold internally in enterprises, with greater ease. And, be defined, abstracted, customized for a global roll out.
Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a… must be a duck. Yes, I guess it does look like a product.
But, how do we help organize people and teams to get the products rolled out?
While the below roles are common to a product-oriented firm, the thought process is different from conventional IT projects. Sharing of resources across projects being the biggest drawback. The smartest of each of the below folks will perhaps still fail, without an organizing framework. The roles to work in a closely integrated manner, dedicated to making a single product management successful.
Product Designer:
The role of a product designer is someone who can completely immerse himself in the shoes of the end user, without worrying about the AI or Tech related issues that may occur sometimes. Just solve the end user’s real problem and keep tracking the end user’s behaviour as the product usage evolves. In product management, there is a contradictory school of thought which mandates that the designer must appreciate “how” a product works. This, however, might dilute the designer’s objective of empathizing with the end user.
Product owner:
A functional expert of impact analysis who can connect the dots and identify the nuances of each problem. A great problem solver, with functional expertise, has the knack to see through the commonalities, and the uncommon aspects too. Prioritization between the must-haves, nice-to-haves and must-not-haves is a key skill required in the role.
Product BAs
Products are quite massive in terms of their scope today. Primarily, each product usually is broken down into sub products which are owned by individual product Bas.
Usually, it is very difficult to get a product owner who really gets AI solution development. By and large, individual intelligence is anyways overrated. It is important to have a dedicated AI solutioning team which can translate the problem into a modular AI solution.
The AI deployment team
It is not enough to develop a modular AI solution. To be able to deploy it in globally scalable platforms requires seasoned IT big data engineering & testing capabilities. The plumbing and wiring required to take the AI concept to enterprise last mile reality is no mean task. It is a specialized function. Truly speaking, they give the product its real-life form.
Scrum & Program Managers
Last but not the least, you need the scrum team and program managers. Everyone benefits from their discipline and order amidst the chaos.
The future is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and various industries are investing heavily in creating self-evolving AI applications. The CPG industry (consumer packaged goods) has till now been somewhat dormant and is looking at opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce expenses. Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have been among the front runners in this domain. Amazon, for instance, spends more than 10% of its yearly revenues on Tech research, whereas top CPG companies are still at 1-2%. This is changing and changing fast, more and more CPG players recognize the hidden power and are putting in robust efforts in the area.
Expansion of AI Application in the CPG Industry
Overall, the possibilities of AI application in the CPG industry is infinite. However, presently the state of AI application is still at a stage of infancy, lagging far behind other sectors such as retail and technology. Even though investment in AI from CPG companies has considerably increased, most companies are still working on identifying the critical applications with high business impact. In 2015, CPG firms, on average, spent 0.66% of revenue on AI application. This percentage is expected to keep increasing until a precise evaluation of their AI maturity is established. This article will discuss the areas in which CPG companies can expect to find successful applications of AI.
Consumer Feedback
Receiving feedback from customers at a massive scale usually involves leveraging natural language processing (NLP) programs for sentiment evaluation. Fundamentally, NLP focuses on teaching a machine to infer the gist of raw text. It is tremendously valuable but more complicated and resource-demanding than processing structured data. Structured data is greatly systematized and easily cognized by machine language. For instance, an AI program will be easily able to compute names, credit card numbers, geo-locations, stock data, etc. Analyzing customer sentiment, on the other hand, requires much more resources. The analysis is only the first step. A comprehensive AI-powered system must also be able to integrate ways to convey this analysis to the company’s customer feedback manager in plain and simple terms so that essential modifications can be made.
For instance, Hitachi devised a way to analyze customer feedback in a bid to reduce food wastage. They conducted a test in a hospital where trolleys mounted with cameras were used to collect trays from patients. The camera clicked images of the leftovers, and machine learning was used to detect the patterns of leftovers. In future servings, these wasted food items were not included in the patients’ meals.
Supply Chain
Another heavily researched field of AI application in the CPG industry is forecasting consumer demands. The data of wasted and sold food items in the past can help businesses efficiently forecast market demands. At the retail level, supermarkets will be able to stock precise amounts of food, considerably reducing wastage and avoiding stock shortages. CPG companies can easily supervise product locations and stock availability using AI tools that will eliminate the need for manual labor and boost effectiveness in logistics.
For example, when a major apparel company was faced with exceeding supply chain expenses, their products were not being able to reach potential customers, making lost sales a critical problem. Even a 1% recovery could provide a substantial increase in its yearly revenue. The company implemented AI to examine its products and discover how in-demand they were in the eyes of the customer. This application of AI was able to forecast precise classifications by store and by item. The AI program was able to predict which store would sell which item, ranking each item in terms of expected demand. Based on this analysis, the company was able to cut down on excess inventory and provide its customers with improved product-availability.
Marketing
A recent Nielsen survey revealed that over seventy per cent of CPG investment in marketing fail to breakeven. The major problem that CPG companies have when it comes to marketing is that they fail to integrate forecasting and planning in order to find the best promotional solutions. AI has the capability to introduce a data-driven method for CPG industry marketers. Powered by historical data, they can easily detect which marketing avenues are expected to generate maximum returns. An efficient program will be able to forecast and make recommendations on whether an in-store marketing tactic like – ‘buy two, get one free offer’ is the most effective for a specific product or brand, or if television advertisements will give the desired results.
AI programs can evaluate thousands of scenarios, incorporating even the littlest amounts of data before providing the ideal suggestion on which promotional channel will deliver the best results. Providing marketers with vital data like this is the only way for CPG companies to implement operationalized marketing projects on a large-scale yet cost-effective manner.
Pitfalls to avoid
CPG companies find themselves in a perfect place to make the most out of the AI boom. The technology is widely accepted as useful, and there are several verified methodologies shaped by other industries. By analyzing companies that are already reaping the benefits of AI application, the key takeaways include –
AI as a means, not an end – CPGs can apply AI to various aspects of their business operations and get augmented results. However, this is only possible when AI application is treated as a means to help workers, not eliminate them. For instance, when applying AI in marketing, any substantial discoveries or predictions should be provided to the experts in the marketing team so that they can then make even more informed decisions.
Streamlined Approach – CPG companies should avoid incorporating AI into every aspect of the business. Launching ten initiatives at once will more than likely result in those projects being stuck in the development phase for the next ten years. Companies must narrow down on one or two aspects of their business in order to have a better chance of delivering mass-scale results.
CPG company heads must stop viewing AI investment as “research projects” and welcome it as a way of carrying out day to day business tasks. Accepting the use of data-driven models in departments where employee intuition has always led operations can be a challenging and combative change. There is lot that CPG companies can achieve by using AI applications to support business but choosing the right initiative may be the key to its successful implementation.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction. More and more businesses are showing interest in understanding the basic mechanisms of AI and ways to use the technology for enhancing customer engagement and experience.
But, is the technology really effective? And can it really make a difference in upgrading your customer experience strategy?
Let’s find answers in this article – starting from the very basic, i.e, why you should pay attention to Customer experience.
Table of Content
Why Should Businesses Focus on Customer Experience?
Role of AI In Customer Experience
Different Industries Delivering Higher Customer Experience with AI
Future of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience
Steps to Use AI for Delivering Better Customer Experience
Other Technologies that are Innovating Customer Experience in 2019 & Beyond
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about AI in Customer Experience
Why Should Businesses Focus on Customer Experience?
“Customer Experience is the new battlefield” – Chris Pemberton, Gartner
With people understanding the difference between User Experience and Customer Experience, the latter term is becoming the key to unlock unparalleled opportunities in the business market. It has become imperative to the process of understanding your customers and planning a marketing strategy using these insights to give a personalized experience. Thus becoming imperative to gain higher success in the marketplace.
And this can be clearly proven from the following statistics:-
Now as we have taken a glance of why to focus on customer experience, let’s jump directly into where AI stands in all of this. What does AI means to the CX world in 2019. Or better say, what are the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence in your Customer Experience strategy.
Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Customer Experience
1. Know Your Customer
One of the foremost reasons why you should use AI to improve customer experience strategy is that it serves you with ample real-time user data. It helps you gather and analyze user data in real-time and in this way, enable you to remain familiar with the change in their behavior and expectations.
2. Simplicity, Efficiency, and Productivity
Another reason for using AI to improve customer experience is that it adds simplicity, efficiency, and productivity to the business processes.
The technology, in the form of Chatbots and self-driving software, automates repetitive processes which means the efforts and time required for performing repetitive tasks cut down to a half.
It also gathers and analyzes the user data in real-time to help you introduce the features and concepts that they want and in the way, they wish to interact with. Moreover, the inclusion of AI in quality assurance helps you to design an innovative mobile application with a higher scope of efficiency and simple structure.
Besides, these AI-powered bots and platforms perform most of the routine work and give the workforce an opportunity to perform other productive tasks.
3. Better Decision Making
Artificial Intelligence is also acting as the right companion for business in terms of the decision-making process. The technology looks into the user interaction history as well as the current market trends, which makes it easier for businesses to predict the future. This eventually provides them with clarity of what feature/functionality to introduce in their business solution for gaining huge momentum in the market.
4. Streamline Purchase Process
In the present scenario, various customers add products into their cart but never proceed due to slow loading, complicated check out process, and more. Artificial Intelligence, in this context, helps in understanding the challenges faced by the customers and deliver a seamless purchase experience – something that helps businesses to lower down app cart abandonment rate.
5. Fraud Detection
One of the prime uses of Artificial intelligence in finance, retail, and other industries, in terms of customer experience, is that it helps in detecting fraud. The technology, using its potential to gather, store and compare user data in real-time, is making it easier to identify any change in the actions of users, and thus, helping with taking a timely preventive measures against frauds.
6. Customer Analytics
Artificial Intelligence is also showing a remarkable significance in the customer data analytics process. The AI-enabled tools and platforms are simplifying the process to gather a heap of user data from different sources and arrange them effectively as per the key factors.
Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence is making it possible to predict the context of user interactions and build better customer engagement strategies using the right use cases of the technology and insights gained from the data quickly and precisely.
7. Self-Service
Many customers these days prefer doing everything on their own rather than hiring an agent or taking help from any machine. This is yet another reason why investing in AI is becoming the need of the hour.
Artificial Intelligence, as we already know, provides you with valuable insights about where customers get stuck and what doubts/queries make them connect with your support team. Using these insights, you can provide users with some options or FAQs that give them a feeling that they have found out the solution to their problem without any interaction, or better say, on their own.
8. Visual, Text, and Voice engagement
AI-powered platforms are also providing the opportunity to deliver optimal customer experience to the targeted audience based upon their voice or facial expressions.
The technology, using Facial recognition and Virtual assistants, is making it easier to get an idea of the users’ emotions and sentiments at any particular time, and identify ways to deliver an instant positive effect to them through offers or refunds, etc. such that businesses gain long-term profits.
9. Predictive Personalized Experience
Last but not least, AI is making it easier for startups and established brands to analyze the user interaction history and predict their next move and hence, use the information gained to provide them with a perfect marketing offer. And in this way, gaining higher customer engagement and profits.
While this is all about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) improves Customer experience in general, let’s figure out what the technology mean to different business verticals and their customer experience efforts in 2020 & beyond.
Different Industries Delivering Higher Customer Experience With AI
1. Retail
When talking about industries that AI is transforming, the very first business domain that comes into the limelight is Retail.
The technology, using a heap of transactional data and machine learning, is making it possible to track and analyze purchase history and behavior of customers, which in turn is helping with determining when and what promotional offer/message to be delivered for getting attention of customers and thus, gain higher ROI.
A clear evidence of the impact of AI in retail is that, as per a survey of 400 retail executives by Capgemini, it was highlighted that the technology will save around $340B annually for retailers by the year 2022.
The survey also revealed that the use of Artificial Intelligence in Retailing customer experience has resulted in a 9.4% increase in customer satisfaction and a 5.0% decrease in user churn rate. An example of how brands are focusing on the usage of AI for bettering customer experience can be seen in Nike’s acquisition of Celect for predicting users’ shopping behaviour.
The technology is proving to be the nervous system of the healthcare user experience ecosystem by making it easier to analyze the patient health history and come up with medical treatment (or surgery) that offers higher chances of success.
It is also helping healthcare organizations in providing the best assistance to every patient in the form of Virtual Nursing assistants and thus, taking care of everything – right form notifying about the medicine intake timings to sharing real-time health data with the corresponding doctors.
An impact of this is that the AI health market is predicted to cross $6.6B by the year 2021, with a CAGR of 40%.
3. Entertainment
AI and its subset, Machine Learning are also leaving no stone unturned in delivering exemplary customer experience in the Entertainment domain. Clear evidence of which is Netflix.
The Entertainment platform is able to get a clear idea of the user behavior, needs, and expectations, and thus, showcase personalized options onto the screen. This is improving the customer retention rate as well as boosting customer loyalty – eventually resulting in higher profits.
To know further about the use of Artificial Intelligence in delivering impeccable customer experience on the Netflix platform, check out this video:-
4. Mobile Banking and Finance
Artificial Intelligence is also revamping user experience in mobile banking and finance apps. The technology, in the form of Chatbots, is providing 24×7 assistance to users and helping them in determining the right financial plan for themselves. It is also detecting and lowering down the risk of fraud in the processes – ultimately resulting in better customer engagement and retention rate.
As we have covered in this article so far, Artificial Intelligence is helping industries in revamping customer experience one way or the other. But, will this continue to happen in the future also? Will AI be a part of customer experience in upcoming years?
Let’s look into what is the future of AI in the field of Customer Experience to find definite answers to these questions.
Future of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience
The AI market has grown exponentially in the past few years. Over 1,500 companies including Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Amazon have invested their efforts into developing next gen apps for delivering higher customer experience and it is expected that many more will join the bandwagon. Many more companies will trust the AI’s ability to boost productivity and reduce the time and cost involved – something that can be predicted from the statistics shared below.
The technology will revolutionize the future of the business world and the customer experience in numerous ways, such as:-
It will automate routine work and encourage humans to focus on creative things. It will help pay attention to their vision and not on every minor detail of production.
It will make the business-customer interactions go from ‘one click’ to ‘zero click’ – giving a seamless and timeless experience to the target user base.
AI will also leave a significant impact on connectivity networks. It will encourage the idea of pattern analysis to troubleshoot any problem, pull out important user information from multiple channels to quickly and effectively get an idea of what users need.
Above all, Artificial Intelligence will also put the practice of gaining biased data to an end, eventually resulting in a better quality of information gained.
Now as we have covered what, when and how Artificial Intelligence drives customer experience, it’s the best time to head towards how businesses can integrate this technology to gain better insights and improve customer experience in 2020 and beyond.
Steps to Use AI for Delivering Better Customer Experience
1. Design a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy.
Before looking into how AI improves customer experience, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of your CX vision and strategy. So, bring your team on board to discuss your ‘CX-based’ expectations and ways you follow to meet those expectations. And, based on the insights gained, create/update a robust Customer Experience strategy.
2. Plan and Analyze User Journeys
Right from discovery to pre-sales, sales, customer support, and beyond, a user connects with your brand at different touchpoints and platforms. So, invest your time and effort into getting a comprehensive knowledge of all those connecting points, and deliver an AI-based omni-channel customer experience.
3. Have a Clear Understanding of AI solutions
The first step of AI project management lies in understanding that the technology can be used in different forms to improve customer experience strategy, such as Recommendation engines, Virtual assistants, Predictive search engines, Computer vision, Sentimental analyzing tools, etc. However, not all can be the right fit for your business needs and expectations.
So, the next step to employ AI in your Customer experience strategy is to determine what all forms of technology can be integrated into your business model.
4. Decide Whether to Create/Buy AI solutions
When talking about how to improve customer experience using AI, the next step to consider is to determine whether to integrate AI in your existing application or invest in a pre-made CX/AI solution.
Here, the former one will be the right option for your business, if you have a well-qualified AI expert team in-house or have a partnership with the right AI specialized mobile application development agency. Whereas going with the latter option can be a profitable deal when you have less time to develop an application and the vendor understands your customer issues and has the caliber to focus on critical points.
5. Track and Measure Success
Lastly, taking the backseat just after incorporating Artificial Intelligence in your CX strategy is not enough. It is imperative to keep a watch on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the success ratio of combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer experience. And hence, improve your strategy for a better future.
ALSO READ: Key Metrics to Evaluate Your Chatbot’s Performance
While this is all about how the use of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience can bring better outcomes and what steps to consider for implementing it in your strategy, let’s take this conversation further by exploring other possibilities.
Or better say, let’s look into what all other technologies can aid in the process to improve customer experience strategy in 2019-2020 and beyond.
Other Technologies That Are Innovating Customer Experience in 2019-2010 & Beyond
1. Internet of Things (IoT)
In 2019-2020, the number of connected IoT devices will reach 26 billion. Besides, the 5G technology will become more significant in the market with high-speed, lower latency, and other such features.
This will open new doors for universal connectivity – making it possible for the companies to find better insights to understand customer behavior and lifestyle and thus, come with valuable data points and strategies to deliver memorable customer experience.
Or better say, it will help companies to work with facts and not just assumptions about customer needs and expectations, and eventually redefine their Customer experience strategy.
2. Machine Learning
With a rise in IoT-based solutions, the volume of data points will also increase gradually. Clear evidence of which is that there will be around 45,000 Exabytes of data volume in the market the year 2020.
Now, with an increase in data volume, the process of gathering, optimizing, and operating data will become a challenge – something that Machine Learning will help with.
Machine learning, with its self-learning algorithms, will enable companies to perform better actions on the data and find new approaches to improve customer experience.
3. Blockchain
Blockchain is also acting as a catalyst in the process of improving customer experience. The technology, with its key features like decentralization, transparency, and immutability, is making it possible for companies to store user behavioral and demographic data on blocks securely, make them portable and letting users decide with whom to share their immutable details with. The technology enables users to know what exactly is happening with their personal information and thus, experience a sense of security and trustability throughout the process.
4. Voice Technology
Not only Artificial Intelligence, but Voice technology will also be seen playing an indispensable role in improving customer experience.
The technology, in the form of Voice search and Digital assistants, will continue to help businesses in delivering a faster, seamless and flexible experience to their target audience. It will enable businesses to engage users in a profitable manner and facilitate them with better actions.
And this can be proven by a study by Pindrop, which states that around 28% of companies have already embraced voice technology in their CX strategy while 57% are planning to deploy in the next one year. Also, another 88% believe that voice technology will give a competitive advantage in enhancing user experience.
5. AR/VR
Lastly, AR/VR is also one of the technologies that are reshaping the world of customer experience.
The technology takes users to the virtual world and enhance their customer journey effectively. It presents feedback form in different ways and increases the chances of getting a positive reply. And above all, it helps in product testing by exposing user/product to different situations and places.
With this, we have covered all about the process and use of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience. We have also unveiled what is the future of AI in the CX world as well as what all other technologies will disrupt the world of Customer Experience.
If you still have any doubts, feel free to check the FAQs shared below or directly get in touch with our AI mobility experts.
Frequently Asked Questions about AI in Customer Experience
1. What is the Role of AI in Customer Experience?
AI plays a crucial role in improving customer experience in the business domain in terms of automating repetitive tasks, streamlining processes, reducing the risk of fraud, and above all, delivering personalized options to every individual.
2. Why use AI to improve Customer Experience?
Artificial Intelligence, with its power to gather and analyze customer data in real-time, is helping in getting a better understanding of customer behavior and needs, and eventually creating a personalized customer experience strategy.
3. How AI and Machine Learning are improving Customer Experience?
AI and Machine learning are enhancing customer experience in multiple ways, including streamlining shopping experience, reducing the risk of fraud, and delivering personalized marketing schemes.
4. How to Start using AI to improve Customer Experience?
There are four steps to start using AI to improve customer experience:-
Design a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
Plan and Analyze User Journeys
Have a Clear Understanding of AI solutions
Decide Whether to Create/Buy AI Solutions
Track and Measure Success
5. How AI will shift Customer Experience to the Next Level?
AI will bring a drastic shift in Customer experience in the future in the following ways:-
It will encourage users to focus more on their vision and creativity, rather than looking into minor details of production.
It will turn ‘One Click’ experience to ‘Zero Click’, providing target audience with a quick and seamless experience.
It will improve connectivity networks.
It will encourage the idea of gathering and employing unbiased society data and deliver quality to all.
Artificial Intelligence can Revolutionize Your Business. The AI impact on business can help you streamline your processes across all domains in a way that every outcome is real-time and efficient.
While the world is filled with instances of how Artificial Intelligence can transform even the most traditional of the areas like Education or Real Estate, the general impression that has gotten created is that AI is for the industries and businesses that work in multi-million revenue cycle and a team size of hundreds of employees divided into the fifties of the team.
But, what we aim to achieve here today is that AI is not just a rich man’s dream of expansion, it is something that businesses of all sizes can employ in their process and make themselves more efficient and over time add them into the league of the leaders – a reason why you should start your search for AI development companies.
In this article, we will look at what AI’ impact on business is, how AI can fit into every single domain of your business and make it better.
Let’s begin and help you understand what makes AI the need of the hour for making businesses become efficient and intelligent by looking into the role of AI in business domains.
But before we look into how AI helps businesses, let us look into a holistic level view of the benefits of artificial intelligence in business.
What Is Leading To The Growing Impact Of AI On Business?
Customer and market insights – Whether it’s coming from your system matrix, social media, or web matrix, there is no limitation of the data about your customer and market. The data act as raw materials needed to make AI systems efficient, which in turn helps make crucial decisions about your business and product marketing.
Process automation – Automation of tasks that takes up crucial manpower resources is one of the biggest AI benefits in business. Across industries, businesses have been using automation capabilities to not just lower the workload on their employees but also prevent the chances of data entry issues.
Better customer experience – The role of AI in business goes beyond automation and process efficiency. Technology plays a huge contributory role in bettering the customer experience. Some of the benefits of AI in business in the customer experience front can be seen in:
Personalization
Streamlining of the purchase process
Fraud detection
Effective self-service
Real-time text, visual, and voice engagement
Now that we have looked into the many ways how AI can benefit businesses and why should businesses hire AI developers on an asap mode, the next part is to dive into the answer of how AI is changing businesses across domains. We will be looking into the use of AI in business across HR, Finance, Operations, and Marketing processes.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Resources and Recruitment
Talent Acquisition
The artificial intelligence impact on business most visible in the field of talent acquisition as compared to any other field. Artificial Intelligence is being used in a number of areas falling in the Talent Acquisition superset like – sourcing the candidates, screening their resumes, employing chatbots to engage with the candidates, and then using face recognition AI-powered software to recognize the emotion that the candidate is showing.
Employee Engagement
With the advent of NLP, chatbot technology, and sentiment analysis, it is now a lot easier for companies to analyze and get real-time feedback from their employees in terms of taking the right action. All the while answering how can AI be adopted in business.
Talking of employee engagement, one of the biggest concerns that employees tend to show on this front is in terms of them meeting their reporting managers once a year to discuss how the work is going and discuss their performance. A solution to this concern is given by Peakon, an AI-based software that enables all employees to reach their fullest potential.
HR Management
There are a number of AI products in the market today to help HRs in the management of administrative tasks. Personnel teams around the globe are now using Chatbots to answer employee queries and using Big Data to develop employee schedules, which in turn are helping businesses with prediction and meeting of demand via fair and effective staff rotas.
Career Management
When talking of the usage of AI for learning and development, there are a number of applications that come up – career pathing, personalized training recommendation, coaching delivered by the chatbots, and manager development led by real-time feedback from the team.
An example of AI for bettering learning and development can be seen through Gweek. The platform helps improve the presentation and communication skills of the users. There is another site called Sidekick that enables confidential coaching for the employees through the medium of messaging platforms.
Performance Management
Because the AI-driven assessments happen instantaneously, in real-time (with algorithms monitoring the quotas, targets, and how they are varying on a day to day basis for every employee), it becomes a lot easier to note all the good and the poor performances instances, ultimately helping in the correct measure of performance and giving an answer to how will AI benefit business internally.
The real-time access and monitoring also help in flagging the shortcomings on a per-day basis, enabling businesses to take action before a problem worsens.
Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
Research and Development
Artificial Intelligence comes loaded with the ability to develop a deep understanding of a range of different industries and customer bases. By gathering and analyzing the humungous amount of data that floats about a business and market helps businesses research issues and build solutions that weren’t thought of before.
In addition to automating tasks, AI can open avenues for new discoveries, methods of product improvement, and finding ways to accomplish a task better.
Customer Support
The most common answer to how is artificial intelligence used in a business environment lies in Chatbots. Deep Learning powered AI-powered Chatbots allows businesses to access the layers of data from the neural networks such as customer data and information, which have been built up over time.
When filled with real-time access to the preferences that customers come with and their purchase history, gives chatbots an edge over the human counterpart.
Content Creation
There is a chatbot for every content marketer who is bored of developing the monthly content across spreadsheets. There is a software, Wordsmith, which is known to transform a series of structured data in the written doc, with great success.
While at present the use case of AI in content creation is limited to articles having a rigorous format, there are a few agencies that have used platforms like Wordsmith for the development of content for fantasy football drafts.
Heightened User Experience
The answer to why is artificial intelligence good for business lies in this one statement – Your customers and consumers are a lot more demanding than they were ever before. They need a huge amount of products, information, and services – all at a real-time and lightning speed mode – all in one place. And when using AI, you offer all the services in one place in an instantaneous mode, which ultimately helps in elevating your users’ experiences.
Another thing that AI makes possible is Personalization. By incorporating artificial intelligence in mobile app development, businesses get a chance to study the customers’ preferences. AI technology makes it possible for marketers is to send personalized content in time and space that suits the customers. And there is nothing more user experience elevating in the world of marketing than personalization.
Emotion Recognition
The capability to identify human emotions is known to be the biggest challenge for an AI – a question that is solved by the answer of how is AI helping businesses. When an AI-powered Chatbot when backed by the NLP facility can gauge when someone is getting frustrated and can adjust its offering and tone automatically – by either giving them a discount or forwarding the call to a human consultant.
Sales Forecasting
Prediction is a forte of Artificial Intelligence. By analyzing the past sales performance and trends, it can help predict what would the sales figure be this time around or what deals would work and which won’t. Ultimately, an inclusion of predictive AI in app development made around the sales domain will help the sales professionals plan their tactics between upselling and downwelling based on qualified data coming in from their past trends.
Optimization of Lead Generation
Rather than someone from your sales team going through the potential clients’ on Google, or social media, you can incorporate Artificial Intelligence to review them for you.
In addition to reviewing the prospects, you can use AI for two more crucial sales tasks: A. To identify the right job title and brands to target and B. To analyze sentiments made on competitor’s sentiments made on email or social media. It means that AI-powered intelligent mobile apps can help identify the unhappy set of clients while giving you insights into whether the client is unhappy with the service they are getting from the competitor or are seeking something new from the market.
When you get a database of prospects who are unhappy with the service they are being offered by someone else, the probability of your closing the deal by offering them what they need, increases by manifold.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Finance
Accounts Payable
There are a number of AI-based invoice management system that makes invoice processing a lot more streamlined because of the digital workflows which are implemented. To achieve this, the machine learning algorithms are designed in a way to learn accounting codes that are appropriate for invoice creation and management.
Supplier Onboarding
Through the combined power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, AI development companies can help businesses shortlist suppliers on the basis of their tax information and credit scores and set them in systems without any human intervention.
Procurement
The purchase and procurement process of organizations is generally filled with a lot of paperwork and make use of different files and systems which more often than not are not compatible with each other. By taking the help of the combination of APIs and AI to integrate and process the unstructured data through AI powered mobile apps, the procurement process will become a lot more paperless and would call for less human intervention.
Audits
The digitalization of the audit process helps in increasing security by allowing a digital trail of when the file was accessed and by whom.
Using Artificial Intelligence, auditors will get real-time access to the digital files, thus removing the need to search the file cabinet for documentation – something which not just lowers the time gap in getting access to the information but also makes the whole process a lot more efficient. To make your audit process intelligent, you should get in touch with an AI app development company that specializes in the whole powered Audit processes.
Expense Management
Review and approval of expenses in a way that it is ensured that they are compliant with the organization’s policies is a time-consuming task for any accounting team. While though AI, people can employ machines to read the receipts, audit the expense, and then alert the finance team in case there’s any discrepancy.
Impact of AI in Operations Management
Log Analysis
Analysis of log is the biggest use case of AI-powered Operations. Every layer of the stack – operating system, server, hardware, and applications – leaves traces of data stream which can be gathered, stored, processed, and then analyzed by the Machine Learning algorithms. The data then is used for performing root cause analysis of events.
By incorporating the power of AI in Log Analysis systems, businesses can find lacks in the system even before a failure happens, marking a use case of AI benefits for business.
Capacity Planning
IT Architects spend a lot of time planning the resource needs of the applications. It can be very challenging for them to define server complications for the development of a multi-tier, complex application. Every physical layer of application should be matched with CPU cores, the amount of storage capacity, ROM, and the network bandwidth.
Artificial Intelligence comes in handy here by helping architects define the right specification of the hardware or for selecting the right instance type in the public cloud. These algorithms tend to study the present deployment and performances for recommending an optimal configuration for every workload.
Infrastructure Scaling
Auto Scaling can be configured to be reactive and proactive. Under the reactive mode, the monitoring infrastructure will be able to track the key metrics like memory usage and CPU utilization for initiating scale-out operations. And when load returns to normalcy, the scale-in operation takes place bringing the infrastructure back to its original form.
In the proactive mode, admins schedule scale-out the operation before an event.
One of the AI benefits for business lies in the fact that through Artificial Intelligence, IT administrators can configure the predictive scaling which learns from previous usage pattern and load conditions. This way, the system becomes intelligent to decide when it should scale with no mentioned rules. This new mechanism complements capacity planning through adjustment of runtime infrastructure needs.
Cost Management
Assessment of infrastructure cost plays an important role in the IT architecture. And when you work with a public cloud mechanism, the forecast and cost analysis becomes a lot more difficult and cloud providers tend to charge for a number of components like – VMs usage, storage capacity, external and internal bandwidth, API calls made through apps, and IOPS.
Through the analysis of workload and the usage patterns, Artificial Intelligence can estimate the cost of infrastructure by offering cost breakup around a number of applications, components, subscription amounts, and departments – something which would help the operation unit in securing the IT budgets accurately.
Performance Tuning
Once the application gets deployed in the production, a good amount of time is then spent in tuning the performance, specifically in the case of the database engines which deal with a good amount of transactions as they experience the most reduction in performance over time.
By analyzing logs and time utilized in attending to tasks like processing of a query or responding to request, Artificial Intelligence algorithms developed by a sound AI software development company can offer an exact fix to the issues. It comes very handy in augmenting log management through taking respective action in place of escalating issues to the operations team, which have a direct impact on the cost of support and on running the enterprise IT help desks.
Building Maintenance
The last point in our list of the benefits of AI in business operations is the help it offers with building maintenance. The technology can help facilities managers better the energy use while keeping their occupants’ comfort into consideration.
One example of this can be seen in the building automation services that an AI development company offers. In this, AI is merged with IoT to help manage the buildings’ equipment, light, cooling/heating system, etc. in addition to using computer vision for monitoring the building.
So here were the four domains which are considered to be the pillars of any business. The domains that the AI development services providers believe can have a massive impact on and can make more efficient. If you too wish to reap the benefits of AI by making your processes efficient, streamlined, and high revenue-generating, contact our team of AI Developers today.
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