It doesn’t matter if your product is groundbreaking and your prices are competitive, if your customers aren’t happy, you’re not going to hit your KPIs.
The bottom line: customer relationships are critical to your business success.
While the art of creating a satisfying customer experience is tricky on the best of days, it’s only gotten more challenging since the dawn of the COVID pandemic.
COVID skyrocketed the use of online tools, making it more competitive than ever. Now, not only do customers expect a whole new level of experience, they’re also increasingly sensitive to negative experiences. And since so many online products and services have made onboarding easy, when customers have a negative experience, they become more likely to churn – simple as that.
So how can you keep up with your customer’s expectations in this marketplace? You’re only human, right?
Actually, wrong. Sure, you may be limited by being a mere human, but you have the power of AI available to assist you in achieving things you wouldn’t be able to on your own.
So why not use it?
Here are 3 ways you can use AI to improve customer experience and increase your NRR.
1. Let AI crunch your data
A smart approach to customer experience (CX) absolutely must take data into account. But if there’s one thing humans can’t do as well as AI, it’s crunch and analyze massive datasets from multiple sources. And there are a lot of numbers to crunch: the average Zendesk-powered help desk handles more than 600 tickets per month. And that’s one source! We communicate with customers in so many ways – emails, messages, chats, tickets, social media and more.
While it might take a human a full day of work to go through a handful of customer experience conversations and reach some conclusions accordingly, AI can instantly analyze customer data and extract valuable, actionable insights to point your Customer Success team in the right direction.
By reviewing previous customer conversations, purchasing behaviors, product engagements, psychographic factors, and more, AI can give you the data you need to create optimized customer personas, collect genuine feedback, and identify what areas might need more or less attention.
In short, AI can help you understand your customers, both on the macro and micro level. Helping organizations become more customer-centric and proactive. And, in turn, ensuring customers receive better products, services, and experiences; keeping them happy and successful.
2. Predictive analytics in real-time
What if you could predict when a customer was going to be unhappy or dissatisfied with their experience? Can you imagine how helpful it would be to be able to spot these issues early and proactively handle them before they become problems?
Sounds great, but unfortunately, you’re not a fortune-teller. No human being can predict the future…but AI can.
With real-time predictive analytics, AI can make conclusions based on the most recent available data and benchmarks. For example, AI can recognize a customer’s intent and come up with hyper-personalized offers, alert you to churn risks, and identify signals, so you can act fast and take advantage of opportunities at the right moment.
Using predictive analytics, AI can guide your customers using real-time, data-based insights. It can predict challenges in advance, giving your team time to adjust processes proactively, rather than reactively. Guiding customers to better achieve their goals with your service or product.
3. AI-powered chatbots
If you had the option, wouldn’t you love to hire somebody for your Customer Success team who can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and perform consistently 100% of the time? Well, meet your new favorite employee: the chatbot.
Now, we won’t pretend that chatbots are capable of taking over every one of your customer service interactions. At a certain point, some conversations get complicated enough that the human touch is needed. So it’s important to provide human support when necessary.
But AI technology is constantly improving, and chatbots are becoming more and more useful, helping you to customize and create seamless customer experiences, move high-intent customers through the lead generation funnel, and free up your human Customer Support team to deal with the more complex tasks and projects. In fact, 64% of AI-empowered customer service agents spend their time solving complex problems, in contrast to only 50% of agents without AI chatbots.
And it isn’t just you who appreciates the convenience and speed of chatbots. Millennials prefer live chat for customer service over every other communication channel, and the average satisfaction rate of bot-only chats is 87.58%. Customers report loving the fast response times and 24/7 availability of chatbots, something that human customer service agents simply cannot compete with.
AI-driven chatbots help us focus our Customer Success efforts on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks, like pointing someone to a knowledge base article.
Better for the customer, better for your team, better for your business
If you’ve ever found your team fumbling a customer interaction, struggling to deal with the volume of manual work that must be done, or failing to make a growth-focused action plan that makes use of your data when it’s still recent enough to be relevant, then you know what it’s like to be held back by the limitations of human ability.
But those days are gone. AI is now powerful enough to help improve one of the factors that matter most to your NRR: customer experience. Through the power of AI, you can create a win-win scenario where your customers have amazing experiences and your business profits accordingly.
It may be the case that AI can’t create the type of personal connection that exceptional CX requires, but it can help you make those connections. AI is giving businesses the tools they need to build and grow, helping them really listen to their customers and deliver what they want the most. Failing to make use of this invaluable resource is a surefire way to fall behind.
Staircase is the next generation of AI-based technology for customer experience and Relationship Intelligence. Book a demo to see how Staircase can help your team analyze, predict, and monitor data. Creating meaningful and valuable human connections that help you retain customers and grow your business.
