Since 2020, consumers have been forced to find new ways to shop online and McKinsey found convenience matters in our post-pandemic environment too. âA whopping 75 percent of consumers tried new shopping behaviors, with many of them citing convenience and valueâ as the reason for switching brands or channels, they said.
Adding an AI assistant to your team to work outside your core team hours is one way to offer customers convenience, answering customer queries at the time they have them, day or night.
Key Fact: 30% of all contact with our AI assistants is made outside office hours
3. Personalise every customer journey for greater experiences
With the innovation of AI assistants, you can truly personalise experiences. These intelligent agents can swiftly analyse customer data and preferences to offer recommendations and experiences for every individual, regardless of how many customers you have. Like having a suit made to fit, itâs comfortable, practical and makes customers feel good.
Youâre finally able to genuinely treat every customer as a unique individual, showing understanding and care, which leads to improved customer relationships and business growth.
4. Send out a consistent (correct) message to every customer
Consistency pays off if you want to be well-known for what you do. Whether itâs the drive-through at McDonalds, flatpack furniture from IKEA, or binge-worthy TV shows from Netflix, when you do one thing well and everyone knows it, you become the dependable brand.
Using AI, you can be consistent even when you have tens of thousands of customers whose data you need to instantly recall on an individual level. Thatâs a doddle for an advanced AI assistant, especially if itâs connected to all the business systems you already use to handle customer relationships, like your CRM, diary, or booking system. Accuracy increases too with the use of AI, leaving no room for human error.
5. Increase efficiency with affordable AI to reduce costs
Soon after Mytime Active leisure company added an AI assistant to their customer service team, they were able to stop looking for more hard-to-find talent to help them get on top of a contact backlog. By automating their routine enquiries, they were able to save the cost of hiring two more full-time employees and in just six months had revolutionised their business.
Taking advantage of innovations in AI to reduce your customer support costs means you can also pay more for top talent. With an AI assistant taking on routine enquiries, agents can be given more rewarding work to do and opportunities to develop specialist skills, so youâre more likely to keep hold of them. This helps avoid the cost of replacing agents, which is around 20% of their annual salary.
6. Be proactive and anticipate what your customers need next
When you know what people are most likely to do next, it can help you identify trends, predict concerns, and offer preventive solutions to problems. This results in a seamless customer experience that helps build and strengthen long-term relationships. Being able to anticipate and address issues before they escalate lets people known they can trust you, which drives greater loyalty.
7. Learn about your customers continuously to improve service
An AI assistant never stops learning on your behalf about the behaviour of your unique customer base. Without AI youâd typically learn what your customers want or donât want through online questionnaires or forms, focus groups and interviews, or analysis of past data. This could create several problems that AI innovation now solves:
- In a survey, people can only answer the questions you choose to set. Using a conversational AI assistant, your customers can feed back on any part of your offer they want to comment on.
- Focus groups and interviews can be costly to set up and time intensive. Use of conversational AI is affordable, and feedback can come in at the exact point a conversation is happening in real time.
This âhere and nowâ customer-centric experience can only happen thanks to AI innovations today.
