Transforming CX Through AI & Analytics 

Customer experience is a critical asset in maintaining customer loyalty for brands, and AI technology combined with data analytics may be the key to keeping consumers engaged in a crowded market, writes Cris Kuehl, VP of analytics and client insights, Sitel Group.

Nearly a third (32%) of customers say they would stop doing business with a brand after only one bad experience and 73% point to experience as an important factor when deciding on a purchase. Customers also aren’t shy in spreading the word about their bad experiences – in fact, 30% would write a negative review of a brand online to prevent others from shopping with the brand. All of this said, there’s no denying that customer experience (CX) is an important element of any business, but for consumer brands in particular, there’s an added element of risk involved as customer loyalty is at stake. 

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Brands gather a gold mine of data every day through the customer journey, but not every organization knows how to use that data to their advantage. Through reimagining sentiment scoring, improving employee experiences and integrating technology with the human touch, brands can best utilize their data sets to improve CX and thus brand loyalty and the bottom line. 

Learn More: Why Chatbots Are a Customer-service Must This Holiday Season

Set a Higher Standard for the Employee Experience

It’s clear to both consumers and employees that customers receive better support when they are having a better experience in the workplace. Our research has found that there’s one particular aspect of the employee experience that will make or break the employee experience: training. Nearly four out of five (79%) employees find it important that their future employer offers a formal training program, and more than a third (37%) of employees say they would even leave their current job/employer if they were not offered training to learn new skills. Furthermore, the vast majority (83%) of employees believe that on-the-job training is most effective in helping them deliver a great performance. In CX, a huge portion of the experience, both positive and negative, relies on customer service and the agents that take customer calls. In order to improve CX, brands must therefore improve training for these agents. Through AI technology, employees can receive real-time feedback and coaching from their managers that align better with their personal challenges in the role, making them more confident in their position, better at handling customers and providing a superior customer experience. 

Understand Emotions in Their Rawest Form 

While many brands use categorical numbers when addressing sentiment data, it can be counterintuitive as it’s difficult to fully quantify emotions. AI-based technology helps brands to recognize specific emotions and provide a better sense of how the consumer market views the brand. Through identifiable words and phrases, the technology can help customer service agents recognize emotions in real time and escalate a problem from a chat to an agent or an agent to a manager. It also creates a lasting association to help teach the agent how to best respond to emotions, training them to better address customers and create a better reputation for the brand. 

Learn More: Foresight 2020: CX Trends and Predictions

Fuse Technology & Human Elements 

Nearly three in five (59%) consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of the customer experience. AI and data analytics are key elements to put the human touch back into CX, but brands must understand the right strategy for their business. AI has created a tech-savvy way to sort through the trove of data created every day through shoppers’ path to purchase, but ultimately, just sorting through the data is not enough. 

This is where the human element - and emotional intelligence - comes in to make CX data programs successful. There’s a reason data scientists are highly sought after roles to fill - these experts are crucial in interpreting the data and telling the right story around the results - leading to better understanding of customer experiences. You must have people to be able to pull the right data points to provide the most meaningful results. AI is not yet (and may never be) capable of fully conceptualizing which data a brand needs to look at in order to understand success and challenges, and often that data also changes from campaign to campaign or year to year. With the right data pulled and organized through AI technology, data scientists help to tweak the algorithms and provide the key results that CX managers need to determine their strategy. 

Learn More:  Customer Service Vs Customer Experience (CX): Key Differences And Similarities

Now that we’ve discussed how AI and data analytics can be used to improve CX programs, how will your brand create a better strategy?