I work with a lot of different industries, including fashion, and if you’re like me I love using, or should I say, chatting with AI. I love how it can immediately give me insight on any question about the latest trends in designer apparel! Or even just what to wear on a night out. Sometimes I cannot decide or haven’t a clue. AI to the rescue. And with empathy and understanding and encouragement. I’m beginning to seek it out more or more in my everyday life.
In that same vein, I believe it’s a golden opportunity for businesses to fill a need that’s hiding in plain sight. We want more understanding and listening to our problems! The question is, if you are in any business (consumer or B2B), can you truly leverage the power of AI and give us a meaningful customer experience where we are heard?
Because after all, customer experience isn’t just part of your business strategy. It is your strategy. It’s how you earn trust and loyalty and ultimately, outpace the competition. But as customer expectations rise and needs become more complex, traditional CX tools can fall short, and teams can feel the strain to keep up. As more brands experiment with AI, its power to shape customer experience strategy keeps growing. Strategic and balanced use reveals all that AI can help you achieve, from uncovering deeper insights to seamlessly personalizing engagement, but it also reveals the gaps — what AI still just can’t do.
AI can transform your CX strategy, but you need to use it mindfully to balance AI capabilities with the human touch that connects you to your customers.
Rethinking Research Using AI-Driven Customer Understanding
I do fashion, but also digital marketing. And AI is a huge part of our marketing game plan. AI’s ability to analyze large datasets in seconds is one of its biggest advantages in CX strategy. Before AI, you had to read and analyze past customer data, monitor social media mentions, and read through industry publications for behavioral trends and insights. You also made educated guesses on how to segment your target audiences. And it was easy to get it wrong. I know I made a few misjudgments.
Now, you have AI and no more excuses. AI gives you insights from volumes of historical data, social media analysis, industry trends, and more. With more data points, you get a more accurate assessment of customer preferences and pain points. AI lets you define well-targeted personas and use dynamic segmentation to personalize messages based on user behavior.
Perfecting Journey Monitoring Through the Human-AI Partnership
The concept of journey monitoring is not new, but it’s huge now with multiple touchpoints available to everyone. And it’s only going to get bigger. But there is a plot twist. Even though we as consumers are accustomed to AI, we still want to interact with a human to handle the sensitive problems. You may have seen this in your own business. Recent studies show that while your customers are likely comfortable with AI, 71% prefer humans to handle tech support.
Your human customer support team offers a valuable service, allowing customers to feel heard and appreciated. They can still use AI to enhance the customer experience. For example, how many times have you had a customer experience go awry because of a simple misunderstanding? An AI platform can analyze a conversation in progress between a service rep and a customer and suggest relevant responses or content to help the agent better understand the customer and resolve their issue.
As one Qualtrics report put it, AI-enable journey monitoring can “proactively spot — and suggest fixes for — pain points in consumer behavior patterns.” With these tools, your CX team doesn’t just react to issues, but they can anticipate and address these issues proactively, before they escalate.
What AI Can and Can’t Do for CX Strategy Workflow Optimization
If you’re like me, you find that repetitive tasks eat up your bandwidth to focus on the important aspects of your CX strategy. AI’s ability to automate repetitive tasks is one of its greatest appeals. Using automation to streamline your team’s workflows frees them up to focus on complex issues. In CX, AI can triage and prioritize service tickets by analyzing sentiment, intent, and other information. Each ticket ends up with the right team so your customers aren’t stuck in a web of automated menus.
It can also autotag products, landing pages, and other content to personalize the customer experience at every step. Tags tell your system which products or pages to show a customer based on their behavior.
However, AI needs historical data to work properly. Your employees need to input past data and prompts that train the system and evaluate the results. Otherwise, your customers may not get the optimized experience they deserve.
Using AI to Enhance Content Creation Without Generic Output
When generative AI tools such as ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, many business owners recognized them as game changers. AI can generate content faster and more efficiently than marketers can.
After the initial shine wore off, marketers started to see its limitations. Generative AI often compiles existing information from various websites, meaning that your content could be plagiarized from other sources. AI is limited it its considerations of brand tone and voice and sometimes sounds robotic.
Effective brand storytelling still requires a human touch. Nobody knows how to connect to your customers quite like you do. Instead of relying on AI to write your content, use it as a drafting tool. AI is great for drafting outlines, coming up with topic ideas, and generating research with the right prompts. Then use your voice and finesse to tell stories that resonate with your customers.
AI as a Tool, Not a Thinker
What I’ve learned is that as you develop an AI strategy to enhance CX, remember that it’s a tool in your arsenal. AI has truly changed how we can enhance and personalize customer interactions. It evaluates data a lot faster than humans, which gives you access to deeper, more accurate (mostly 😉 ) insights.
This data informs every part of your CX strategy, from inventory planning or product design to customer support. However, AI doesn’t think for itself. It processes data based on what you input, so quality prompts give you better results. Inputting clear prompts that are specific and contain contextual clarification helps you deliver more impactful customer experiences.
When your CX team is using AI, encourage them to think like prompt engineers. Have them draft multiple prompts using precise instructions that result in the best output. Instead of asking, “What are my customers saying?,” try, “Summarize pain points from customer support chats between January and March, sorted by theme.“
Transform Your CX With AI
If you haven’t tapped into the potential of AI for your CX strategy yet, now is the time to start. AI processes large data sets faster than your team ever could. With multiple data points of analysis, you get a thorough customer understanding that impacts CX at every step.
Leverage AI-generated insights to create impactful marketing messages that convert your customers. Use it to grow your business more strategically. Stay ahead of the competition by providing memorable customer experiences that make people want to keep doing business with you. Odyyc specializes in creating meaningful customer experiences, and we know how to use AI to enhance the process. Share your experiences with AI in the comments, and subscribe for more insights from Our Odyssey. Or schedule a meeting and learn more about how we can help you navigate AI.
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