Feature
The Gist
- AI importance. Striking a balance between AI in customer experience with empathy is crucial for effective customer satisfaction.
- Human connection. Mundane tasks can be automated, but complex customer issues still require a human touch.
- Agent enhancement. AI in customer experience can help train, reward and support agents, leading to better personalized customer interactions.
As AI continues to revolutionize the marketing and customer experience landscape, striking the right balance between automation and empathy is crucial. Let’s take a look at AI in customer experience alongside empathy.
AI in customer experience enables companies to handle more communications via various channels than they could ever do with human agents. Even though there are ways that AI can attempt to reflect empathy, it is still automation. Below are some ways that businesses can leverage AI's capabilities to streamline processes and enhance personalization while preserving the human touch that fosters deep, meaningful customer relationships.
Use AI in Customer Experience to Help Understand Emotional Responses
In a world of fluctuating customer demand, generative AI can help enhance overall marketing goals and strategies. AI can create scalable, customized follow-up emails to clients and prospects and can also provide on-demand customer service support, said Reid Carr, Red Door Interactive CEO. “Chatbots can give you the ability to respond in real-time to customer questions while also providing a rich database of information for future marketing campaigns and initiatives. Marketers using AI strategically can enhance project output and increase productivity, but with any good tool, its output needs a critical eye and a human touch.”
Marketers can use tools like ChatGPT to improve empathy in customer communications, Carr added. A simple way of doing so is by assigning it a role and having a dialogue with it to better understand potential “emotional” responses from a consumer. But while generative AI has a wider knowledge base to draw from and may be good at baseline tasks, it’s not good at mastering someone’s job.
Carr cautioned: “Be careful when presenting findings and using real spokespeople in messaging. Imagine enjoying a particular song but finding out a bot wrote it. Would you go to a live show and listen? These technologies are not end-to-end creative solutions, rather their true power lies in the combination of generative AI output paired with human thought (and hands). There’s power in human connection, and humanity will always be the most powerful tool to reach your customer base.”
Concentrate Usage of AI for Mundane, Repetitive Tasks
In the customer service and customer experience space, customers demand and expect a human touch, especially for their more complex issues, said Jeff Gallino, CallMiner CTO. “AI solutions can handle mundane, repetitive tasks — such as checking an account balance or confirming an appointment — but they still can’t effectively solve every customer issue. Instead, those scenarios are handled by human agents. This is a key area where AI’s capabilities can streamline processes and enhance customer outcomes.”
AI technology can trigger real-time alerts to aid agents during customer interactions, Gallino added. “For example, if a customer becomes increasingly agitated or frustrated, AI alerts can help guide agents to an effective resolution by offering next-best-actions. Alerts can also be triggered on positive interactions. If a satisfied customer is a candidate for an upsell opportunity, AI can correlate the current conversation with past customer insights to help the agent offer the best deal for the customer.”
Related Article: Real Talk With AI and Digital Customer Experience Management
Use AI and Empathy to Boost Agent Performance
Similarly, AI helps drive continual agent performance improvement, according to Gallino. “AI can surface both agent and customer trends at scale, helping organizations understand what customers are contacting them about most frequently and why, and how human agents are handling those conversations. By identifying the behaviors that deliver the best customer outcomes, organizations can both better train and coach agents, as well as reward those agents who are doing well.”
Empower agents to use AI accurately and efficiently, in a way that fuels the personalization of the customer experience and helps the agent, recommends Jason Finkelstein, Gladly CMO. “AI can be intimidating for agents but when companies take the time to empower these agents to use AI properly and give them a leg up in the industry, it can lead to increased job satisfaction which has a trickle down effect in customer interactions.”
Beyond improving CSAT, AI will boost agent productivity, Finkelstein added. “With AI keeping track of customers’ prior customer service interactions, agents will know customers by name, not by order numbers. Every conversation is personalized because AI stores customer history information, allowing agents to address customer issues faster and provide quality recommendations. Considering that 47% of agents ranked engaging and conversing with customers as a top motivator, customer support teams also want to have personalized interactions with customers.”
Related Article: Real-Time AI: A Necessity for Great Customer Experiences
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Consider the Industry
The intelligence and efficiency that AI brings to areas like streamlining customer interactions in call centers or password resets, reservation and delivery statuses, product information access, scheduling and more have realized powerful enhancements for business and value for customers, said Joy Corso, Vonage CMO. “There is a fine line between efficient and consistent touchpoints and the need for those touchpoints to have the insights and influence from those creating the experience as well as the intelligence to connect with a human interaction based on responses and needs.”
Corso added: “While the value of AI is broad across industries and applications there are areas where the need and sensitivity may cause some pause. Areas like mental health, medical procedures, and predictive healthcare — are all potential areas where customers may feel a much stronger desire to feel the human interaction, expertise, and empathy that AI may not be able to deliver.”
Final Thoughts on Balancing AI in Customer Experience and Empathy
AI in customer experience will continue to take on a greater role in the contact center as the technology continues to evolve and becomes more powerful. Smart marketers can even include empathetic-sounding responses in IVAs, chatbots, etc. Some companies already do this with their human-sounding IVAs, but when a customer is truly stressed, or needs an empathetic ear, such as in the case of a healthcare issue or a similar personal matter, a good human agent is needed.
Similarly, there are times a customer has the need to interact with a human, such as when failing to get the needed answers from automated systems, so the balance between AI in customer experience and empathy will continue to be a tricky one, with no easy answer.
