Feature
The Gist
- AI Advancement. AI customer experience personalization is becoming a key differentiator for innovation and customer delight.
- Insight boost. AI streamlines the process to uncover insights, enhancing customer personalization and retention.
- Support power. Short-term AI investments in support, troubleshooting and debugging offer significant opportunities in CX.
A key to success with any customer experience and customer engagement strategy is personalization, and artificial intelligence is enabling huge gains in this area for many organizations. So much so, that AI customer experience personalization could quickly become the competitive differentiator for organizations that seek to drive innovation and delight customers.
“Personalization is the cornerstone of any CX strategy — especially as consumers become more dependent upon a truly personalized, customized experience,” noted Eric Carrasquilla, EVP and GM of customer experience at CSG. “With this sort of investment, the possibilities are endless.”
The immediate benefit of AI customer experience investments in customer engagement is insight, Carrasquilla said. AI streamlines the insight process to uncover all the “nooks and crannies” that might go unnoticed by a human analyst. The more informed an organization can be about its customers, the better it will be at personalizing their next experience, satisfying them and retaining them.
Top AI Customer Experience Benefits in the Short Term — and Long Term
Beyond increased insights, the AI customer experience investments that should make the biggest payoffs in the shortest time for CX all come down to support, troubleshooting and debugging, explained Natalie (Nat) Onions, vice president of customer experience at Customer.io. “Hitting a blocker in any product can make or break your experience, and AI is opening up huge opportunities to help users take the right preventative measures as they work, and to assist them with support when they run into trouble.”
Onions said she is always on the lookout for CX to be proactive rather than reactive. “So I’m excited to see how AI investments may get us to the point where we can use predictive modeling to highlight where users may run into trouble based on the work they have started,” Onions said.
In the meantime, Onions said the firm is evaluating best practices for using AI internally and externally throughout the company. Recently, Customer.io launched an internal program and created a new role responsible for researching and implementing the best AI strategies and practices. In conjunction with this program, it also launched an "AI Helper Bot," with the intention to test this technology for troubleshooting internally before implementing it for customers.
“While we are embracing AI, we are being cautious and deliberate in our approach,” Onions said. “It can be difficult to balance the pressure to implement AI publicly with the desire to provide the best possible customer experience. However, it is important to us that we are intentional about the channels we launch for our customers and the ways in which we protect their experience.”
Related Article: AI Customer Experience Ushers in a New Era of Engagement
A Flood of Interest in Generative AI
The public release in November 2022 of ChatGPT started a flood of interest in the AI applications known as large language models, or generative AI (GenAI). GenAI products are creating a “seismic shift in customer service delivery and offer significant new opportunities,” according to research firm Gartner. “However, many of these solutions are not yet ready for production use. The areas undergoing change include operational improvements, agent performance, application design, self and assisted service, journey design and development, and user experience monitoring.”
Organizations that invest in GenAI for their customer engagement strategies should look for clear ROIs in the short term, and for investments that create new competitive opportunities in the long term, said Bern Elliot, vice president and distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner.
Believing there is no time like the present, AI is used now throughout the different platforms at CSG that touch every part of the customer experience. For example, CSG Encompass uses AI to streamline orchestration processes for telco services and networks; CSG Forte uses AI to gain insights into transaction processes and analytics to reduce fraud; and CSG Xponent leverages AI to turn previously static journey maps into tangible lived experiences, Carrasquilla explained.
Related Article: Why Real-Time Feedback Is Crucial for Modern CX Strategies
Determining ROI of AI Customer Experience Investments for Engagement
When assessing the ROI of AI customer experience investments in engagement, the best metric to pay attention to is customer retention, Carrasquilla said. Simply put, if you’re retaining customers, you’ve created a culture worth sticking around for, and loyal customers fuel a customer-powered culture, he stressed.
Customer.io uses a different metric to determine ROI.
“Our support costs are the primary metrics I have been using to pitch and position AI investment,” Onions said. “With our current reliance on people-powered support — either through 1-1 interactions or building self-serve material — scaling while improving operational efficiency is something that AI opens up a huge amount of potential for. I typically rely on our margin by tier as metrics to prove out new initiatives, as this is the best way to model change and assess potential.”
Still, Onions said she also pays close attention to customer experience feedback and observations. While good margin and operational efficiency are inputs for good ROI, it’s vital that the CX doesn’t suffer as a result, she said.
“If you’re able to save money on headcount through implementing AI, but the result is that customers are no longer happy with their engagements, you will ultimately lose trust and happiness with the thing that powers your business — your customers,” Onions stressed.
Current Realities and Future AI Customer Experience Investments
Customer.io is still in the early stages of testing AI within the business and using these results to consider how it might apply successes to the customer experience.
“So far, we have seen that our internal AI-powered help bot has reduced the waiting time for troubleshooting among our teams, which ultimately impacts the customers positively because we can help them much faster,” Onions explained. “We are also finding that less-technical team members can rely on AI to provide a strong customer-friendly response to complex questions with a new level of confidence and reliability.”
The next step in the journey for Customer.io will be to explore a customer-facing version of this technology, likely embedded in the firm’s in-app help center or live chat tool. While Onions doesn’t know the timeline for this yet, she said her expectation is to see a drop in the number of tickets that come through to the support team in need of 1-1 interaction. The use of AI will enable customers to get their answers to the most common questions.
“Speeding up the support side of CX will be a great result to have AI bring home for us,” Onions said. “I can’t speak to any live results for customer-facing AI investments. But I am hopeful for the future and happy with our decision to scale these efforts in a principled way.”
Lessons Learned From Early Investments
One of the biggest lessons that Carrasquilla says he has learned is that the best customer experience plays out in multiple channels.
To be a holistic organization, you have to begin by acknowledging multiple consumer preferences, Carrasquilla explained. Some people will always opt to phone customer service, while more tech-savvy customers will start with search and ChatGPT for an initial answer before approaching the brand at all. A well-rounded customer experience will enable all of these experiences, no matter which channel they take place on, and emphasize putting the consumer first.
Meanwhile, at Customer.io, Onions said the firm has been intentionally slow and careful about not rushing into AI customer experiences until the firm has high levels of confidence and internal competence in building and supporting systems that revolve around this technology.
“While this means that there aren’t any reflective lessons that I can share today regarding the impact of AI investments, I am confident in sharing that my biggest takeaway so far is that taking our time to reach excellence is what will allow us to eventually launch an AI-powered offering that immediately boosts our CX, and has a fast impact and quickly gives us ROI,” Onions said.
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Start with use cases, build a community of practice, prioritize use cases based on meaningful criteria, develop pilots or MVPs to obtain experience, Elliot advised.
“Do not start with the more difficult strategic projects,” Elliot said. “Start with those offering easier, clearer ROI. Gain experience and credibility first.”
