AI in CX: How to Incorporate AI in Customer Experience to Elevate Your Business

“60% of CX Leaders Expect AI to Have ‘transformative’ or ‘significant’ impact.” reveals a survey by CMSwire.

With so many leaders betting big on AI, it is certain that this technology is all set to disrupt the CX landscape. AI isn’t just talk anymore, it’s turning out to be a strategic tool in the business realm. Businesses are already tapping into AI for smoother, faster, and more personalized customer experience.

Now, if you believe AI is exclusive to large enterprises, think again; because it seamlessly serves businesses of any size, if used wisely. Since that’s cleared up, you are probably figuring out how to leverage AI for customer experience. Fret not, we’ve got you covered. 

In this post, we discuss AI customer experience and how it can elevate your business. Dive in.

What is an AI customer experience (CX)?

AI customer experience is the employment of AI technology like machine learning, and chatbots to improve the efficiency, speed, and intuitiveness of customer experience. 

It transcends the traditional system to leverage AI to gain a deeper understanding of customer data and behavior. You can thus deliver deeply personalized and highly responsive customer experiences efficiently. As a result, your business can enjoy benefits like:

• Gaining reliable insights: AI can help you procure real-time insights into customer behavior, sentiments, and preferences.
• Cutting operational costs: By automating simple tasks, and enabling self-service, AI reduces the need for extra tools or staff.
• Improving efficiency and productivity: AI-powered chatbots can handle requests and automate simple, repetitive tasks, to free up agents for more complex issues.
• Boosting customer retention: When you proactively identify points, address concerns, and solve issues, it makes customers happier and encourages them to stick to your brand.

10 Ways to Leverage AI for Customer Experience (CX) in 2024

Now that you’ve understood how important AI is for customer experience in the current business landscape, let’s see the top 10 ways you can incorporate this technology in your CX domain in 2024.

1. Deliver Real-Time Personalization

AI can modify your customer’s experience in real-time according to their behavior, and deliver what they want at the moment, thereby customizing the user interface to cater to individual customers. By utilizing AI development services, businesses can ensure that their AI solutions are tailored to meet specific needs and enhance user satisfaction.

Amazon is a prime example of a brand using real-time personalization. Amazon’s AI system analyses its customer’s behavior in real-time and accordingly delivers personalized product recommendations. This makes the customer’s shopping experience more engaging and seamless.

2. Employ AI-powered Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are being widely adopted and turning out to be the lifelines of many companies. This is one fine example of how AI is enhancing customer experience. 

These chatbots automate customer service by handling queries, resolving basic issues, and providing instant information 24/7 without human intervention. They can also answer FAQs, offer personalized recommendations, and process orders, while freeing up agents for complex tasks. In fact, many customers appreciate the quick responses and around-the-clock availability, with 64% finding the 24/7 service quite helpful and 68% approving of the quick answers. Well, that’s proof enough of how AI chatbots are indeed improving customer experience by eliminating common roadblocks.

3. Provide Omni-Channel Experience

Modern-day customers prefer omnichannel experiences. They purchase and engage from multiple channels as per their comfort. In fact, a 2024 report from McKinsey states that over 60% of consumers participate in omnichannel shopping. When that’s the case, AI can be used as a medium to provide a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers by integrating data from diverse channels.

For example, if a customer wants to exchange an online purchase but finds the shipping time too long, they can do it at the nearest retail store, since AI integrates customer data from multiple channels.

4. Segment Customers

AI can help you deliver highly personalized customer experiences through segmentation. AI can dive deep into customer data to segment the customers based on their demographics, behavior, and preferences. Moreover, your team can also create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns based on this data to connect with the right audience. As a result, you can provide experiences that are relevant to the customer and leads, thereby boosting customer satisfaction and conversion rates.

5. Leverage Predictive Analytics

AI’s predictive analytics can help you foresee customer needs and expectations. AI systems analyze customer history, behavior, and preferences to predict their requirements in advance. As a result, AI offers relevant products, services, and recommendations, thus improving customer experience. 

For example, e-commerce businesses can leverage predictive analysis to prevent customer churn. If a customer hasn’t visited your site in a long time, you can use AI to analyze their past behavior and suggest items via the platforms they frequent a lot (like social media). By doing so, you can motivate them to return and shop from your site.

6. Analyze Customer Feedback

AI-powered text analysis tools have the ability to read through an insane amount of customer feedback from numerous channels and analyze emotions. Text Analysis helps you analyze thousands of feedback in just a few seconds and gives you top trends and sentiments for you to take action on.

And by analyzing these insights, you can make actionable, data-driven decisions to deliver a smooth customer experience. Text analysis is a prime example of how AI can elevate customer experience to a whole new level.

Navigate through thousands of feedback to discover customer sentiments via text analytics.

7. Provide Voice Assistance

Voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are widely used by their customers. These assistants harness AI’s Natural Language Processing to understand and act upon commands. The voice assistants can place orders instantly, swiftly answer questions, and provide recommendations based on your customer history and preferences.  As a result, you can offer fast, seamless, engaging, and personalized experiences for customers, earning their complete satisfaction and loyalty.

8. Integrate AI and CRM

AI can bring a significant boost to customer experience if integrated with your CRM systems. AI can automate CRM tasks like data entry, lead scoring, setting follow-up reminders, and even writing follow-up emails.  Plus, it’s smart enough to give insights like predicting which leads are likely to convert, helping your team work smarter. You can create personalized and seamless experiences for such leads and make them feel valued, encouraging them to sign up for your product/services — thus you enhance the overall experience, boosting sales.

9. 24/7 Customer Support

Here’s one of the best ways to leverage AI for customer experience. With conversational AI, chatbots can engage in natural conversation, even when your executives are off-duty, like on weekends or late night. AI doesn’t just provide 24/7 support but also speeds up replies. It can give agents ready-made responses based on the conversation’s context. There’s also generative AI, which instantly creates full replies from just a few words. Such features enhance your customer support service by solving issues faster and reducing wait times — a vital aspect since nearly 90% of consumers consider an immediate response to their inquiries quite important.

10. Maintain a Self-service Knowledge Base

Many customers prefer to troubleshoot issues on their own first. In fact, 67% of the time, customers use self-service portals to resolve issues. Therefore, maintaining an updated knowledge base is crucial. 

Here’s where you utilize AI for CX yet again. AI-powered tools can help you keep your knowledge base up-to-date with relevant content effortlessly. Now, when it comes to creating content, generative AI can be of great help. Integrating generative AI development services can further enhance your content creation capabilities and keep your knowledge base robust. All it needs is a few key points to provide you with full-fledged help center guides.

3 Great AI Customer Experience Examples to Take Inspiration From

Here are three examples of companies that are nailing AI customer experience (CX).

1. Bank of America

Banking is mostly done digitally nowadays. In order to maintain the personal touch in their digital banking experience, Bank of America introduced Erica, an AI-powered virtual assistant, to its 25 million mobile customers. Erica offers help via voice commands, texting, and tapping, while also assisting with banking tasks like checking balances and making payments, etc. The bank aims to expand Erica’s capabilities to solve more complex tasks in the future, thus leveraging AI in customer experience.

2. Starbucks

Ever heard of Deep Brew? Deep Brew is an agile tool Starbucks uses to enhance its customer experience through AI. This AI-powered tool taps into machine learning and predictive analysis to personalize messaging, boost loyalty, and manage their inventory. Deep Brew is so interesting that it can recommend drinks to customers based on their past orders, location, time of the day, and even weather!

3. Myntra

Myntra is an Indian brand that is acing it with AI customer experience. They are using AI extensively to deliver top-notch experiences to their customers. For example, “My Stylist”, is one of those AI-powered features of Myntra that acts like your personal fashion guru. My Stylist leverages AI to offer outfit recommendations based on factors like uploaded images from customers’ offline wardrobes, their purchase history, browsing history, and the current trends on the platform, thus enhancing the experience.

Embrace AI to Upgrade Your Customer Experience

AI is indispensable in the modern CX landscape. From real-time personalization to sentiment analysis and 24/7 support, the possibilities of AI in CX are endless. 

Now, the question is where and when you need to leverage this. The answer is – As per your customer’s needs. 

Find what your customer wants, what are their pain points, and what is that they are unsatisfied about. But how do you gather these insights and analyze them? By investing in an AI-powered experience management tool like SurveySensum.

With such a tool, you can collect customer feedback in real time and extract insights to uncover underlying emotions through text and sentiment analysis. Accordingly, you can finally decide as to when and where you should incorporate more AI capabilities to enhance overall customer experience.