Drawing the Line: Where AI in CX Should Stop (at Least for Now)

There is strong evidence that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can significantly impact the customer experience and enhance the bottom line. In 2019, in collaboration with Forrester Consulting, LogMeIn looked at how business success is affected by a company’s customer experience (CX), including AI.

The survey of 479 decision-makers uncovered that companies with a mature strategy, most of whom included AI as part of their process, enjoyed increases in revenue and conversion while leaving their less mature counterparts behind.

While LogMeIn called out the business intelligence that AI can provide as one of the differentiating factors, there is likely a compounding reason for the growing gap - the top 58% had incorporated AI into their strategy holistically. In other words, the leaders in CX that were using AI had included it as part of their business processes and customer journeys and not as stand-alone tools meant to fix all of their CX shortcomings.

Where AI Falls Short in the Customer Experience

There is no doubt that AI can improvise the customer experience. From shorter wait times to increased self-service options, the addition of artificial intelligence can improve an organization’s CX.

Forrester surveyed 40 organizations across the Asia Pacific region, and 76% of those indicated that conversational AI had improved resolution rates for customers during the pandemic. Smart self-service, virtual assistants, and speech-enabled virtual assistants were additional technologies these companies were investing in.

However, AI in CX isn't an "if you build it, they will come" strategy. In that same survey, Forrester discovered that AI solutions had, in fact, improved customer service efficiency. However, 80% of those surveyed indicated more negative experiences with chatbots than positive or neutral ones.

Why is that? AIs can help identify published and known solutions to problems and even help human agents better understand customers through sentiment analysis. But they come up short when dealing with a situation that calls for a relational interaction or one that must leverage empathy for the experience to be beneficial to the customer.

This doesn't mean that AI can't be an essential or critical part of your customer experience success. It simply means that AI isn't a panacea and that it must be viewed and architected for what it is - a technology tool that can be a valuable part of an entire customer experience process.

Setting the Line with AI

You wouldn't expect a new hire on your customer support team to fix the entire customer experience, so it's unfair to expect your AI tools to do the same thing. Despite an AI's ability to handle significant loads and processing faster, AI tools for the customer experience still require partnership with its team - the humans that the AI works alongside and that can pick up where the AI drops off.

This requires interweaving AI tools throughout your CX to scale improve it, not replace the entire business process with machines. A proper AI strategy that both reaps the benefits of AI while improving customer satisfaction injects these tools at precise points within the journey:

Before interacting with a human agent, AIs like chatbots can begin conversations with a customer. If they need to be directed to the correct information or need information or transactional support such as a return or an order delivery lookup, the AI can handle it. If not, the bot can forward the customer along to the agent, most likely to be able to help them or solve the problem.

During customer interactions: AIs can still be helpful once a customer has been handed off to a human. An example would be something like Salesforce’s sentiment analysis which can, in real-time, analyze a customer's language and inflection and make recommendations to human agents on how to respond. This lets these two parts of the CX journey - the AI tool and the human - partner to provide information and assistance with a dose of empathy.

Post interaction analysis: Once a customer interaction is complete, the AI can capture the data related to the call, from post-interaction surveys to call analysis and so on. That data can be used to train the AI further and help the organization better understand where the customer experience needs improvement.

Insight development: The data captured after each interaction can be compiled and analyzed rapidly by an AI to provide meaningful data points and correlations. From there, humans can review the data and create insights that would otherwise have been unreachable without the speed and scale of the AI.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence isn’t a magic wand for the customer experience. Instead, it’s an advanced and adaptable tool that can work alongside a customer service and success team to streamline support and create space for empathy.

Because we are more than implementation specialists, the team at Six Consulting can help you inject AI into your customer experience journey in a way that leverages artificial intelligence to its full potential while keeping it in its place - as a tool within the CX process. Want to know more? Contact Six Consulting today to learn how we can help you realize the advantages of AI-enabled customer experiences.