How AI, analytics and cloud can elevate customer experience

As many industries start to embrace hyperpersonalization in customer experience (CX), sticking to a generic approach to customer service is ineffective, at best, and can alienate your customers, at worst.

This goes beyond having different versions of a contact-center script, however. You need an in-depth understanding of the unique characteristics of your customers so that you can match their intent to the right internal resources and processes for the best possible outcomes.

Achieving this without AI-enabled technology and automation is impossible. How else can you analyze huge volumes of data quickly enough to make these decisions? But the world of AI is huge and complex, and finding the best use cases can be a challenge, so having the right partner to guide you is just as important.

Great CX strengthens the bottom line

CX has always been pivotal in driving customer satisfaction – and all its spin-offs. Tailored interactions that meet specific customer needs or address unique preferences go a long way to creating a more enjoyable experience. Everyone wants to be seen as an individual, and personalized customer journeys build loyalty and retention.

Top-level executives are increasingly recognizing how CX improvements are directly affecting bottom-line performance – and reshaping their organizations to reap the benefits. Now, 92% of CEOs agree that improvements in CX directly affect their net profit, according to NTT DATA’s 2023 Global Customer Experience Report.

When your customers feel valued and understood and are offered the solutions they need, quickly and with minimal effort, they are more likely to be happy – and to come back. In this way, better customer engagement improves customer retention, which in turn boosts sales and revenue.

Over time, it also builds the kind of brand trust that becomes a competitive advantage.

On the flip side, generic, inefficient CX that requires multiple customer-driven interactions is frustrating and can drive customers away.

To get CX right, don’t neglect EX

The peak–end rule is a psychological concept that states that people tend to remember the most intense part of an interaction as well as how it ended. Personalized and efficient customer service makes both the high points of an interaction and the outcomes more positive, painting your organization in a better light.

The ability to respond rapidly and appropriately to customer needs depends heavily on having the right technology in place: 95% of respondents in our CX report agree that demand for personalized CX is driving the rapid integration of touchpoints that unite real-time customer data with AI and analytics.

But the reality is that CX is not only about customers. Employee experience (EX) is just as important in improving the bottom line and enhancing the total experience (a recent term for an overall combined approach to EX and CX) for both internal and external interactions.

Empowering employees to provide better service – for example, by recommending their next best actions or highlighting relevant information at the right time – makes their interactions with your customers easier, more natural and more empathetic. This improves both CX and EX, as job satisfaction will suffer when contact-center agents frequently bear the brunt of disgruntled, frustrated and unsatisfied customers. 

Cloud and AI are transforming CX

It can be a challenge to support hybrid- and remote-working environments while empowering employees and improving CX delivery, which is why many organizations are turning to cloud-based CX.

In fact, cloud technology is identified in the CX report as the top solution for enabling future CX capabilities, followed by AI and predictive analytics.

AI powered by real-time analytics can pick up on sentiment, provide effective prompts to steer conversations, and surface insights that can help retain customers or drive sales. It can even coach agents on aspects such as their talking speed, provide them with the right knowledge bases so they can deliver effective answers to customer queries, and enforce policies and procedures, using natural language processing, that simplify their jobs.

Design customer journeys so you don’t overstep boundaries

While AI can be a powerful tool, it must be deployed effectively and in the right areas, with the appropriate business use cases in mind, to deliver the best benefits.

You don’t want hyperpersonalization to go too far, crossing the boundary between useful and invasive, so the customer journey and experience need to be carefully designed.

To derive maximum value from their CX efforts, organizations also need to deal with legacy issues such as data silos, lack of ownership of CX and data quality challenges to create the all-important golden thread and overall picture of customers. The right technology, delivered by the right partner, lies at the heart of resolving these challenges and using analytics to elevate CX.

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Use the right tools for excellence in CX and EX

Cloud-based contact-center solutions like Amazon Connect offer all the computing power and technological capabilities that you need to use AI and analytics to drive CX, EX and total experience in your organization.

They empower organizations of all sizes to take advantage of next-generation technologies without massive capital expenditure, minimizing the risk of trying something new by enabling the ability to fail fast – and cheaply. By the same token, they also allow you to realize benefits fast and tap into the work done by hyperscalers in improving AI and natural language processing.

• ALSO READ → Genesys and Amazon Connect help you soar in cloud-based CX

The power of AI is practically limitless, which is both its drawcard and its downfall. It is huge and complex, and organizations risk getting lost in this complexity – if they do not ask the right questions, the answers that AI provides will make no sense.

Partnering with NTT DATA can help you understand your business problems, frame the question, “What do I want AI to do for my business?” correctly and ensure that AI can help you drive the best possible total experience outcomes.