The Role of AI in Delivering A Winning Online Customer Experience
As customer behavior shifts massively online in the wake of the pandemic, several brands are competing for attention. The play has shifted from offering great products and services in the quest for creating enduring customer loyalty. There is now a pressing need to transform the experiences customers have with the brand. As customer touchpoints proliferate and interactions and transactions start adding up, there is huge potential to embrace AI to digitally transform and revolutionize customer experience – successfully and consistently across channels and throughout their purchase journeys. 
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The need for delivering winning online customer experiences
Customer experience has become a top priority for businesses. Although pre-COVID, they had to drive efforts in delivering unmatched customer experiences across offline channels; in the post-COVID world, the focus is majorly on delivering unmatched experiences online across web, email, mobile, and social media channels.
Here’s why there is a pressing need for delivering winning online customer experiences in 2021 (and beyond):
Accelerated proliferation of channels
In the post-COVID world, there is an accelerated proliferation of channels through which customers engage with brands and companies. Organizations will have to meet these new demands and provide uniform superlative experiences as customers expect at every such touchpoint in their journey.
The realm of personalization
Today’s tech-savvy customers expect businesses to personalize experiences for them based on their unique needs, profile, characteristics, and where they are in the purchase journey. Not only do they expect personalized products and services; they also expect companies to personalize marketing and sales campaigns and want to avail of unique cross-sell and up-sell opportunities that best align with their current needs and sensibilities.
Customer analytics
As the world progresses towards an experience-driven economy, customer experience has become the single most important strategic driver for success. Since the cost of acquiring a customer is 5 times that of retaining an existing one, there is an urgent need to gather customer data across Customer Journey Mapping, Market Mix Modelling, Campaign Optimization, and Customer Segmentation and use that data to transform the overall customer experience. This has become the best way to know the customer and establish a unique relationship that is difficult to replicate.
How AI helps
The digital transformation of customer experience is becoming a primary strategic driver for organizations. To lead the charge in the experience economy, organizations must be able to leverage the right mix of strategy, technology, design, and skills to help deliver truly transformative experiences for their customers. AI encompasses a gamut of modern capabilities, making it an essential tool for delivering hyper-personalized, exceptional customer experiences. Here’s how AI can help in delivering a winning online customer experience:
Ensures real-time decision-making
Given how quickly data related to the customer changes, organizations must be in a position to take quick and effective decisions. AI allows for decisions to be taken based on the most recent data that is available with near-zero latency. Using AI, organizations can not only take on-the-spot marketing or product-related decisions to deliver hyper-personalized content or offers; they can also take decisions to prevent fraud and risks and ensure the customer experience is interruption-free. AI also allows for real-time, actionable insights to be used to define future interactions with customers.
Delivers a full gamut of customer insight services
AI delivers the full gamut of customer insight opportunities: right from data ingestion to end-to-end insights from operational and behavioral data. Using concepts such as data engineering, data visualization, data science, and edge engineering, AI can unearth insights from every byte of structured and unstructured customer data: videos, images, text, voice, and more. Using these insights, organizations can better understand customer needs, apply trend analysis, and customize online experiences in a way that best matches their expectations.
Enables superior customer engagement
AI, through the use of chat-bots, also allows the brand to deliver unmatched customer engagement. Such AI-enabled intelligent interactions can not only pave the way for personalized assistance; they also ensure the most convenient and consistent experience possible. Since they have the ability to answer simple questions and solve problems, they lead to increased customer satisfaction. With the rapid evolution of AI’s capabilities in NLP and contextual understanding, even more complex and nuanced conversations can now be enabled. Customers can avoid wasting time in reaching out to expert service desk executives and have their problems solved in a jiffy. Quick, effective, and engaging service helps to augment the experience they have.
As customer experience becomes a critical business priority, AI helps in delivering a superior experience at every touchpoint of the customers’ journey and revolutionizing the end-to-end customer experience. Using AI, organizations can drive real-time decision-making, deliver a full gamut of customer insight services as well as enable superior customer engagement. A winning online customer experience can not only improve customer satisfaction; it can also deliver results via better customer engagement, deeper relationships, higher order values, and improved revenue growth.
