Should You Approach Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Technology Solution?

A friend of mine was involved in a startup a few years ago in the preventive healthcare space. They were a bunch of research-oriented people who held doctorates in genomics.

Their idea was to do genome sequencing as a preventive measure for individuals and predict the likelihood or onset of life-threatening conditions.

While they had the technology solutions and the knowledge to do genome sequencing, they did not have the reference data to base their findings. They were using reference data from developed countries, which were way off the mark.

Collecting reference data in a vast country like India will cost billions of dollars, and the amount of time it would take would be multiple years. This was about five years ago, and even today, as a country, we are not investing in collecting reference data.

This organization pivoted and changed its business model to services, and it started providing genome sequencing services to organizations in the West.

This taught me the importance of data availability, its volume, and its sanctity while trying to predict situations and conditions in the healthcare field.

The same is the case with Artificial Intelligence. You need to have data and it should be sufficient enough for the models to learn from and provide you with the necessary insights.

Any AI initiative should be aligned with the business model for it to be successful.

Should AI Focus On a Business-First Strategy Instead of Technology?

Absolutely, business-first should be the AI strategy for any organization, especially in the customer experience space.

Most businesses rush to implement AI as a technology-first solution. However, AI is only as good as the strategy behind it. Implementing AI without considering customer needs, service journeys, and business outcomes can lead to more frustration than improvement.

Why Must Customer Experience Drive AI?

Should we solve pain points or create new ones?

• Are you looking at addressing specific customer challenges, like reducing wait times?
• Are you looking at streamlining self-service and making it easy for your customers to use?
• Do you want to enhance the personalization of your communication and offerings?

These are good use cases for AI to address, and it is easy for you to measure the outcomes as well. Once you drill down your needs, you will end up solving customer pain points with AI.

According to PwC, 59% of customers will walk away from brands after a few bad experiences, no matter how advanced their technology.

What Makes Your Customers Loyal?

One of our customers, who is in the lending space, implemented AI-powered chatbots, and they replaced their frontline agents. The customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and NPS nosedived drastically.

Now, they redesigned their AI to assist human agents, improving both efficiency and CX scores.

After all, customers value personalized interactions, empathy, and quick resolution, all of which contribute to building customer loyalty.

Poor AI Implementation Leads to Frustration

I recently tried booking a train ticket using the chatbot available on the booking website. When I tried booking, there were only 20 tickets available. I went through the process of booking, and after I made the payment, I received a text stating that my booking was pending and I should know the status of my booking shortly.

As this was a non-refundable booking, I couldn’t book again, and I waited for the status of my booking. After two hours, I was told that the booking didn’t go through and that they had initiated a refund for my payment.

By then, all the tickets had sold, and I could not book a confirmed ticket.

Would I ever try booking through the bot? I doubt it. Poorly implemented bots can drive customers away rather than improve their journey.

How Do You Go About Implementing AI to Ensure Exceptional Customer Experience?

Step 1: Define Customer-Centric Goals

• Identify key pain points in the customer journey
• Use customer feedback and support data to prioritize AI use cases

Let us assume that you are an eCommerce company, and your support data analysis shows that 70% of issues are related to order tracking.

What do you do with this information?

Now, you can deploy an AI tracking assistant that can help customers track their orders while considerably reducing the percentage of inbound calls.

Step 2: Use AI Only Where It Is Needed

• Do all your customer interactions require AI?

One of our customers, a leading healthcare provider, used automation for appointment scheduling, confirmation, and cancellations for regular outpatient needs. However, they directed all critical cases to human agents. 

Step 3: Design AI to Enhance Human Agents

One of our customers wanted to reduce their call handling times, and we set out to assess what they were spending their time on. We understood that most of the agent’s time is spent accessing information from multiple screens, and their workflow is so complex that it requires the agents to be well-trained to provide suggestions.

We built intelligence to assist agents with suggestions and next-best actions, which helped them reduce their call-handling time by 30% and increase their first-call resolution rates.

Step 4: Continuously Train AI with Real-World Data

Imagine using a chatbot in your banking environment, and it falls short of detecting fraud due to false positives. It would be a nightmare when you flag a lot of non-fraudulent transactions.

So, train your AI-driven chatbot with real-time customer conversations, which will reduce false positives and give you more confidence in your fraud detection.

Step 5: Measure and Optimize the Impact of AI on CX

What is the best metric to measure the impact of AI on CX?

The two key metrics that you should consider are customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and NPS to see if AI is actually making a difference to your CX. You can continue optimizing your AI offerings and improve your CSAT and NPS scores.

The brands that will win in the AI era are those that put customer experience first and technology second.

You should resist the temptation to implement AI as a standalone technology solution. You should carefully design it to enhance customer journeys, support employees, and align with business goals.

AI is just a tool, but it can enhance the ability of human beings to offer exceptional customer experiences.

Are you willing to use AI the right way?