If you’re like many of our clients, you are constantly searching for better ways to connect with customers and build your brand’s reputation. In an era when the demand for fast, seamless and personalized customer service is at an all-time high, brands need a strategic way to engage consumers that goes beyond getting their names right. While opening an email with your name in the subject line felt novel and exciting in 2003, technology and customer expectations have evolved. Creating intimate, loyal relationships with customers now requires much more than a personalized email campaign.
A recent Salesforce study discovered that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and 62% expect companies to anticipate their needs. The nature of a company’s customer service can make or break their brand reputation, but AI can help optimize your brand’s customer service. By integrating artificial intelligence into your customer service strategy, your brand can reach its target audiences in very personalized ways, meet customer needs more efficiently, and truly optimize the customer journey.
The Truth About AI
The truth is, even brands that don’t have extensive budgets or robust internal teams can still take advantage of AI capabilities. Artificial intelligence can be used to help businesses of any size and industry scale with their customer service. With data-driven analytics and time-saving automations, AI can capture consumer data and develop insights that allow your business to customize every touchpoint.
In fact, many businesses are already investing in AI-powered tools and software. According to a Zendesk study, 57% of business leaders plan to increase their companies’ AI investments by at least 25% in 2023. Offering individualized customer experiences via artificial intelligence is vital to keeping your brand competitive in today’s digital marketplace. The goal is to utilize AI in ways that make every customer’s touchpoint as seamless and stress-free as possible.
How AI Improves the Customer Experience
If you make the decision to adopt AI solutions or choose to partner with a branding agency to help guide the process, your next step is leveraging those solutions to improve your customer journey. Here are 10 ways your brand can use artificial intelligence to enhance customer experiences:
1. Boost customer engagement and retention.
AI can analyze past customer purchases and actions and then use this data to determine future behaviors and needs. These valuable insights allow brands to predict products their customers might want, remind them when reorders and refills are needed or make recommendations for other content or services they might enjoy. For example, streaming services like Spotify and Netflix often recommend playlists, movies or tv series based on what users have enjoyed before.
2. Assist in customer data analytics.
AI-enabled tools can free up marketers’ time by gathering data across multiple sources and organizing it in a meaningful way for marketers and analysts, who can then use these insights to predict consumer behaviors and develop more focused customer engagement strategies. Keep in mind that humans should still be monitoring AI models to make sure the predictive analytics aren’t using insufficient data or irregular variables that lead to biased conclusions.
3. Improve insights and decisions.
Businesses don’t have to rely on guesswork to make decisions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can leverage information to help marketers make more data-driven choices. From recognizing latest trends to identifying hidden problems, AI offers valuable information that can improve customer service insights and decisions across all web and app platforms.
4. Provide 24/7 customer support.
Staffing customer support with live agents is an unrealistic goal for any business and implementing artificial intelligence tools to fill the gaps and provide coverage on nights, weekends and holidays is a great scalable solution.
AI chatbots can gather basic customer information and serve customers by recommending related products or offering links to instruction manuals or FAQs to empower customers to solve their problems independently.
5. Quickly resolve issues.
With AI to engage customers promptly and decrease handling times, online customer support can quickly assist customers with common questions and concerns, as well as resolve issues quickly and smoothly. Not only can integrating AI reduce customer wait time, but it also has the power to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. By filtering out spam, AI bots give customer service agents the freedom to spend time on real people with real problems, not fake tickets.
6. Minimize employee burnout.
Rather than overtaxing your customer service team, AI can be leveraged to automate routine tasks. AI can also autofill data on customer service calls and customize landing pages with relevant promotions and ads. Reducing time spent on mundane data entry and freeing them to deal with more complex problems will lower your agents’ stress levels and give them the bandwidth to provide the high-quality service your customers crave.
7. Reduce errors in customer service. 
From forgotten information to typos, human error is real and unavoidable. Errors can easily slip by without notice when customer service agents are required to manually enter every piece of data and personally handle every support ticket. AI mitigates human error in the customer service experience by automating routine processes. By removing human errors that could leave your brand looking unprofessional or disorganized, artificial intelligence can help agents provide consistently accurate information that increases customer trust and loyalty.
8. Direct incoming calls and messages.
Using keywords to identify a customer’s demographic and problem, AI can direct customers to the right agents. Rather than pass customers between multiple departments before finding someone who can help them resolve their issue, AI can match customer problems with appropriate agents and save everyone time and stress.
9. Anticipate problems and customer needs.
Providing FAQs is still a valuable website tool, but integrating AI that can detect and anticipate customer needs and then provide relevant responses will elevate your brand’s customer service even further. You can even task AI with reviewing and grouping customer support tickets to determine the most frequent questions or problems, and then use these insights to teach your AI system more advanced or specific customer responses in the future.
10. Track conversation history for seamless interactions.
We all know that poor customer service experiences lead to customer churn. Maybe a customer has contacted customer service before about a related issue, and provided information like their name, order number and date of purchase. AI can identify these factors and use previous interactions to seamlessly inform new responses. This can reduce customer frustration because they will avoid repeating their concerns.
Artificial intelligence can be put to work for your brand in countless ways. AI can provide more personalized and accessible services and more seamless and accurate support. You can lead your brand into the era of AI by partnering with an innovative branding agency and unleashing the potential of AI-driven strategies. If you want to explore how AI in customer service can build your branding, (matter) is here to support you. (matter) incorporates AI to provide you with a personalized branding strategy that allows you to design your company according to your own goals and desires. Visit the (matter) website or contact our team to learn more!
