How AI will transform customer experience

Business and technology leaders plan to experiment more with AI to improve customer relationships and experiences in 2024. But are their organisations, customers and employees ready for AI?

Not all are yet. Forrester predicts half of large global firms will experiment with customer-facing generative AI next year and notes that executive enthusiasm will drive many firms to test generative AI for customer-facing applications “regardless of whether [they] are ready.”

Understanding how customers and employees want to engage with AI is crucial to the development and execution of AI adoption strategies. This is particularly true in Australia, where reluctance to embrace AI is among the highest globally.  

Consumers' biggest concerns about engaging with AI during their experience with businesses is the lack of human connection, the possibility of people losing their jobs and the misuse of personal data, according to Qualtrics.  

These are the types of challenges businesses need to overcome to tap into the value of AI. 

Using AI to personalise customer experience 

AI undoubtedly presents a significant opportunity for businesses and governments to better understand and serve the needs of their customers. Forrester notes that 42 percent of AI decision-makers identified improving or personalising customer experience as a top use case for generative AI.

But what does this actually look like for customers and employees, and the organisations delivering the experience?

According to Qualtrics, AI will help leaders rapidly and easily understand where the greatest friction points are in the business, so their organisation can respond quickly, decisively, precisely and accurately. 

Creating emotional engagement between a customer and a brand

According to Brad Anderson, president of products, UX, engineering and ecosystem at Qualtrics, businesses should connect the entire customer journey to create emotional engagement between customers and their brands.    

For example, a customer’s experience with an airline–once flight options including price and availability are considered–typically starts with booking a ticket digitally.

If the customer comes across an issue through that process, they most likely move to a chatbot to address the issue. If they do not resolve the issue at that point, the customer typically moves to a voice call. 

“At this point, the customer has crossed multiple frontline experiences: the digital frontline, the chat frontline and the human frontline,” Anderson explained.

“Qualtrics works with businesses to bring those together, and by applying AI, help them understand where to make improvements across that customer journey.”

With digital experiences now the norm across physical products like refrigerators, as well as digital products, creating human connections across huge numbers of customers can be challenging. “You need AI trained on datasets that help businesses understand product and experience gaps, and this is what Qualtrics brings to the table,” Anderson said. 

Enhancing employee experience key to better customer experience

Businesses also need to understand that, to deliver high quality customer experiences and drive productivity, they need to enhance employee experience and engagement. 

For example, Forrester argues that in 2024, closing employee experience gaps that lead to customer experience shortfalls will be a key driver of business use cases for generative AI in the contact centre.  

Closing these gaps is particularly important at organisations like airlines, hospitals and retailers, where frontline employees can be prone to burnout, resulting in deteriorations in service and higher attrition rates. These can, in turn, compromise the customer experience and ultimately productivity.

To ensure employees are happy and highly engaged, businesses want to understand employees’ lived experiences on a continuous basis. In addition, chief human resources officers and heads of people teams at businesses need to understand where to invest to improve employee engagement.

AI-enabled experience management technologies such as those provided by Qualtrics, are key to achieving this understanding. For instance, it can help summarise direct employee feedback with behavioural insights - such as how many hours they are working, how much time they’re spending in meetings, or when they’re sending emails -  and then correlate that data to each employee’s well-being.

Bringing these two data sets together for the first time allows managers to continually understand how their employees are feeling, and the most impactful actions they can take to help them do their best work.

Alongside an in-depth understanding of what employees need to do their best work, AI can also provide managers with personalised insights and recommended actions predicted to have the greatest impact on positive team outcomes.

“At Qualtrics, we bring the customer experience and employee experience data together,” Anderson said.

“Then, we enable people leaders to understand where to invest in employee programs to deliver the biggest impact for their teams. On the customer side, we help leaders to, during a challenging experience, react and adjust in the moment to give a customer a great experience. We’re helping a lot of organisations do that in real-time.”

The benefits to businesses that deliver the best experience to customers and forge the emotional connection that drives engagement are considerable.

“Organisations have to understand that there is so much vying for the attention of customers, that being able to personalise and deliver the best experience possible can push one brand above the rest,” Anderson ended.