Customer experience is a cornerstone of customer loyalty. It’s the first thing you think about when you think about your company or brand name. But what about customer expectations? When customer expectations are not met, customer experience can be affected. That means the focus should not just be on customer experience but also, on customer expectation management.
How Has Artificial Intelligence Evolved Customer Experience?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made it easier for companies to manage customer expectations. AI-based solutions help in minimizing customer frustration and can effectively improve the customer experience. Customer frustration is one of the top reasons customers drop off or switch to a competitor.
AI is a technology that can be used in multiple ways to improve the management of customer expectations. AI is essentially a machine that learns and performs tasks on its own. It’s been around for decades but has only recently started impacting the business world.
AI can help businesses in many ways:
Monitoring real-time operations
AI is fast becoming a key player in the field of logistics. It can help companies monitor real-time operations, ensuring that goods and services are delivered on time. Moreover, it can also be used to monitor supply chain activities and identify potential bottlenecks before impacting service quality.
Fostering customer loyalty
AI-powered chatbots are now being used to create personalized experiences for customers. These chatbots can answer customer queries, manage reservations and provide customized recommendations. In addition, they can also be used to maintain communication with them at all times, which will increase customer loyalty to your brand.
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Improving customer service quality
With the help of AI, businesses can now understand how customers perceive their services and how their experience could be improved further. For instance, if there’s a chance that customers would feel dissatisfied with your product or service, AI can detect it early on and suggest appropriate solutions for improvement. This approach helps businesses deliver superior customer experiences without hiring more employees or spending additional money on training programs.
Identifying upsell opportunities
Typically, if customer success managers (CSMs) want to find upsell opportunities for their customers, they’ll have to identify them manually. But with the help of AI, CSMs can get alerts on when’s the best time to have an upsell discussion with their customers. And they can also use this data to show their customers why this opportunity benefits them.
Enhancing customer relationship management
Manually identifying when to contact your customers is a time-consuming task for CSMs. And oftentimes, can cause them to miss alerts. AI can help CSMs understand when’s the right time to reach out to their customers proactively and can potentially prevent an account from churning.
Learn More About Your Customer From Your Data
AI can help you learn more about your customers by analyzing their behavior patterns, preferences, and other details that can help you provide them with better service.
Managing customer expectations
The traditional approach to customer success is reactive — you respond to customers when they contact you. But AI can help you be proactive and anticipate your customers’ needs. It can alert you when a customer product usage drops, what customer segment is likely to stop using your product, etc. And with the data you’ve collected, thanks to AI, you can help set realistic expectations with your customer from the start.
Always stay in touch
With the advancement of AI, many CSMs can always stay in touch with their customers with timely, automated touchpoints. Customers just reached a new threshold? AI will notify you with real-time alerts, which CSMs can then use to automate their personalized responses.
Conclusion
With artificial intelligence‘s growing capabilities, we believe it won’t replace a human touch, but that it’ll help companies be more efficient in helping their customers succeed. From expectations to success, we’re excited to see the growth it brings to not only your customers but your business as well.
Shivani is a talented CS manager with the skillsets to elicit, scope and manage end-to-end B2B SaaS project delivery. She has a keen interest in depicting her learnings in customer success by writing resourceful blogs and articles.
Published July 28, 2022, Updated August 07, 2024
