Customers want 5 things: efficiency, convenience, consistency, friendliness, and knowledgeable service.
Almost 80% of consumers indicate that these 5 factors are the most important aspects of customer experience.
A study from PwC of 15,000 consumers from 12 countries found that 73% of people say that customer experience is an important factor in overall satisfaction – 43% would pay more for more convenience, and 42% would pay more for a friendly and welcoming experience.
Companies see returns with better CX, too. The ones that lead in CX see 3x higher returns than companies that lag behind with outdated customer journeys.
Better customer experience is a mainstay of any strategic plan or annual blueprint.
So with all the new tech on the market, why doesn’t every company do CX well?
Two barriers to successful CX
It’s hard to change the meaningful parts of customer experience.
It’s easy to band-aid an experience with a pop of flashy design. But it’s hard to make an experience more efficient, or more knowledgeable.
Emphasizing a better CX usually leads to one of two problems. Most firms can’t supply a scaled customer experience that hits the top five elements of CX without overburdening their employees.
1) Overburdened employees
Personalized service is labor-intensive.
Since customers want a human touch, it makes sense to try and provide it through your employees. You probably hired the members of your customer support and sales teams because of their personable natures.
But when employees are asked to continuously expand, they’re at risk of burnout. There’s only so large you can grow without compromising the quality and consistency of your customer services.
The project can also fail if the employees reject the solution. Like employees not willing to add meta information to customer profiles so that a personalized email campaign can be sent.
The right tools aren’t going to create extra steps for your employees. The right tools will automate repetitive tasks and enhance employees’ ability to conduct their own interactions with leads and customers.
2) Rigid solutions
Not every customer problem can be slotted into a box.
While the available technology has advanced, customer service isn’t a process that should feel automated. Customers like the speed that new tech brings, but a customer-facing process should never feel robotic.
The goal for better CX in the age of AI, as explained by HBR, is to “use new technology with purpose to make the experience feel human.”
Most solutions won’t fit this bill. It wasn’t even possible for widely deployed tech solutions to feel human until recently.
Machines aren’t often used for the highest value CX tasks, like signing a major customer, but they can facilitate every step along the way. That means a customer needs to feel like they’re getting a helpful, friendly experience far before they speak to one of your team members.
How to avoid these barriers with conversational AI
The goal: Give customers a better experience, while empowering employees to do their jobs even better.
Conversational AI rings alarm bells for some – they might recall the poor chatbots of yesteryear, unable to hold useful conversations. Some gave unintelligible answers, made irrelevant connections, or didn’t work at all. Chatbots used to suck.
But like everything else AI, conversational AI – like chatbots and AI agents – have advanced rapidly in the past few years. Chatbots were a $1 billion market in 2020 in North America alone. And their compound annual growth rate is predicted at 24% until 2030.
A well-built and properly deployed chatbot improves all 5 of the desired components of CX, eliminating the common barriers.
The best chatbot platforms will allow you to sync your bot with your existing information and systems – your CRM, your website, Slack, internal documents – creating a seamless experience for your customers and employees alike.
While they won’t replace a 1:1 human experience, they can provide experiences that feel personal, friendly, and efficient. Not only can they help scale your operations, but they can assist your sales teams and customer reps to do their job even better.
Using conversational AI can improve your CX in two aspects: the direct experience of your leads and customers, and the ease of delivering these experiences.
What customers want
A successful customer experience needs to have the 5 key ingredients: efficiency, convenience, consistency, friendliness, and knowledgeable service.
While humans can excel at providing these, it’s difficult to hire and train enough reps to do all of them, all of the time.
That’s exactly why customer service chatbots were adopted in the market so early on in the AI wave (and also why we have flashbacks to a bad bot giving us the same prompt over and over again when we’re trying to find a return policy).
AI chatbots were made to enhance the five key factors of CX. Speed, convenience, consistency, knowledge, and friendliness are built into their design. They’re easy to control and easy to configure.
When properly set up and deployed, they can achieve each factor with ease.
Efficiency and convenience
By deploying conversational AI directly to website visitors, it hugely decreases the time they need to spend looking for answers – whether it’s a specific product, your pricing, or your return policies.
But bring the answer directly to them and they stick around to learn it.
Humans hate wait times, and chatbots eliminate the need for any waiting at all. The more advanced your bot is, the more complex a question needs to be before it needs to be escalated to a human representative.
Conversational AI is live 24/7 on your website or other messaging channels, updating your CRM or internal documents constantly. By nature, a chatbot completes a given task as efficiently as possible.
This can also be helpful for your employees. Instead of moving between multiple platforms to find information or log updates, a chatbot brings that same efficiency to internal operations.
Consistent, friendly service
Unfriendly service and bad attitudes is the number one customer repellent, with over 60% of customers saying it would drive them away from a brand.
Unlike us, a conversational AI chatbot never has a bad day. It’s always friendly; it’s always consistent. And it’s always on-brand, even in situations it’s never seen before.
When you’re using an AI chatbot, you don’t need to pre-program every possible response (like in the olden days). But you can still deploy a bot that always stays on-brand.
AI chatbots are able to embody specific brand guidelines and apply them across infinite contexts. It’s one way that they’re more reliable than a new hire – take the brand and personality of your best-performing salespeople and program it into your bot.
Knowledgeable service
Most organizations new to AI solutions are familiar with one famous chatbot in particular: ChatGPT. And OpenAI’s chatbot doesn’t always inspire confidence in a chatbot for business – it uses outdated information, and it searches through huge amounts of data to generate its answers.
But conversational AI for enterprises often uses RAG: retrieval-augmented generation.
Instead of a chatbot like ChatGPT, which searches vast swathes of the internet as it generates responses, a RAG chatbot searches specific documents. Typically these are a website, a table of products and inventory, documents, or large amounts of internal data.
A strong chatbot platform will allow you to program your own bespoke business logic. A chatbot nurturing leads down your AI sales funnel doesn’t need to push every lead into becoming a prospect. Perhaps you direct your chatbot to qualify your leads – users in select industries will be encouraged to watch a demo or book a meeting, while others are pushed to sign up for your free service.
And one of the largest benefits of a conversational AI chatbot is that it’s synced to all your internal documents and platforms. That means its information is always up-to-date, and it can even update internal information itself.
A chatbot synced with your existing materials means a seamless experience for your customers and employees alike.
Make CX easy for your employees
Effective tech deployment only works if the culture is behind it. If it’s not easy for your team to adopt – if it doesn’t make their lives easier, or they’re not on board with the new workflows – it’s not going to create a sizeable impact on your ROI.
Any solution that will successfully scale will need to be a seamless experience for everyone on the backend.
Most of us are familiar with chatbots from a user perspective. This facet is integral to the customer side, but how the bot is integrated with your team’s tools behind the scenes is just as important.
A seamless experience for your employees will include a chatbot that:
- Assists in the end-to-end experience for employees and customers alike
- Syncs to all your internal systems and information
- Updates your systems with new information – like tagging leads in your CRM or updating an employee HR file
A seamless tool doesn’t mean one and done. A customer support chatbot that doesn’t also qualify leads is too narrowly scoped.
Support CX and EX with conversational AI
Botpress is a platform for building next-generation chatbots and AI agents.
It’s endlessly extensible, and integrates with everything. The opportunities are endless.
With high security standards, a built-in library of integrations and templates, and autonomously intelligent bot building, Botpress is the best way to build AI chatbots.
Start building today. It’s free.
Or contact our sales team to learn more.
FAQ
What is CX AI?
Customer experience for AI is the use of artificial intelligence technologies for customer-facing interactions, like purchases, customer queries, or information sharing.
How can I improve CX with AI?
The most common ways to enhance customer experience with AI is using a chatbot or AI agent that orchestrates your CRM, internal information, and other platforms for customers and employees.
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