The value of AI-powered customer experience

What would you say if I told you the face of customer service is changing for good? Price and experience are playing a bigger role in consumer decision-making, and customers are 76% less loyal to brands than they were two years ago, according to research by ServiceNow and Opinium.

To truly stand out from the competition and drive better customer relationships, your customer experience can’t just be good—it has to be great. That requires providing seamless service and fast results.

The ServiceNow/Opinium research shows that the single-most important factor for EMEA customers when choosing a business is that problems can be resolved quickly and efficiently (95%). Meeting this demand used to require countless resources, additional staff, and thorough training. Today, we have a simpler solution: AI-powered customer experience.

What is AI-powered customer experience?

Ultimately, serving your customers is about providing a clear, seamless path through your processes—from initial contact to the transaction to post-sale. AI-powered solutions can help automate this path, reducing the number of repeated tasks for customers and employees.

A Clockify report found that workers can spend up to 19 workdays each year on repetitive tasks, such as email, data collection, and data entry.

Identifying and automating these tasks can save customers time and energy. It can also free employees to focus on more complex service requests that require human input. This can make the customer journey faster and more efficient—and give you an edge over your competitors.

Finding balance between AI and humans

It’s worth noting, however, that your customers don’t want an entirely automated experience. The ServiceNow/Opinium research reveals that withholding the option to speak to a live person is likely to create frustration rather than efficiency.

More than one-third (37%) of consumers in EMEA want the option to speak to a human customer service agent. This shows the need for striking a healthy balance between human and AI-powered customer service.

Customers also want to be kept in the know. IPA Research shows that nearly three-quarters of consumers want to be told when they’re not dealing with a real person. The combination of AI and human interaction will always be more effective than AI alone. It’s vital to be transparent about when you’re using AI, what you’re using it for, and what it means to your customers.

What does this experience look like?

As consumers, we’re used to seeing virtual agents that help point us to a certain product, an answer to a question, or an automated returns process.

There isn’t a business—across any industry—that can’t revolutionise its customer experience with AI. Solutions like these can improve efficiency and streamline processes by automating contract creation, insurance claim processing, or data entry.

An employee in the administrative department of a financial services organisation, for example, may only need to access a specific system or application once a month. It’s not a particularly complicated task, but infrequent use means the employee will likely need to be reminded how the process works.

Identifying a repeated task—and creating an AI-powered solution to help predict and assist with it—can negate the need to raise a ticket and eliminate the back and forth that ensues. In this way, AI can speed up the process by reducing a human response or follow-up times, resolving the issue before it occurs.

Implementing AI-powered customer experience

AI-powered customer experience can be applied in any industry, organisation, or department. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Applications can be tailored. What processes look like will vary depending on the objectives and aims of each business.

Getting started requires strategic partnerships and a clearly defined plan. The pace of innovation in this area is staggering. That’s exciting, but it also produces challenges. New regulations, security considerations, and ethical questions are being raised every day. It’s essential that business leaders have guardrails in place and be willing to adapt these guardrails where and when necessary.

My advice: Make use of partnerships that provide a solid foundation. Organisations need to “monetise” their own data internally—make sure it’s accurate, accessible, and unbiased. Are you using data to create functional, fast processes? Or are you simply adding further complexity to already inefficient processes? A good technology provider can help address these questions while advising on bespoke, clearly defined guardrails that protect against security risks.

Keeping customers happy

Regardless of the industry, seamlessness is the crucial quality of AI-powered customer experience. Once you’ve created clearly defined guardrails, a simple and flexible strategy, and the right strategic partnerships, you’ll be positioned to make the best use of your technology and the data that feeds it.
AI-powered customer experience enables organisations to empower humans by reducing delays, boosting access to actionable data, and following a holistic, connected approach. That empowerment is the key to unlocking customer and employee satisfaction now and in the future.

Find out how ServiceNow can help power your customer experience with AI.