What are the common challenges and pitfalls of customer engagement automation and AI in retail?

Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate recommendations and misunderstandings, frustrating customers. Ensuring the data is clean and up-to-date is essential. Integration is another challenge. Combining new AI tools with existing systems often isn't smooth, leading to glitches or data silos. Seamless integration ensures that all systems work together efficiently, providing a better customer experience. Paying attention to these details helps automation work smoothly and effectively.

I find it's paramount to handle customer data responsibly, respecting privacy and ensuring compliance with laws local to your country. Misusing data or failing to protect it can lead to legal issues and loss of customer trust. Ethically, it's important to ensure AI decisions are fair and unbiased. Transparency about how data is used and how AI makes decisions builds trust. Balancing innovation with ethical considerations helps maintain customer confidence and avoids potential legal problems.

Part of the challenge we've seen in customer service/engagement is the trend toward human CSRs being 'robotized' by the scripts they have to adhere to . . . while the AI's are being trained to be increasingly empathic. If your company is enabling seamless transitions from AI to human agents, make sure you have the training in place to empower your humans to be genuinely helpful.

An experience I've had is getting stuck on an automated call with options that do not seem to apply to my issue I'm having and the inability to escape the endless loop of the same options repeated by the recording/automated agent to talk to a human representative. It makes the customer frustrated as they don't understand why they can't talk to a person who could address their issue faster.

In my experience, certain automated campaigns and messaging should include a concurrent segmentation of manual operations and processes. ie An automated campaign can include messages to a CX/CS team or the customer's unique sales person. I've used this strategy in onboarding campaigns by incorporating automated messages to the CS/CX team as a reminder to mail out a welcome package, to place a "check-in" phone call, and messages to the customer's sales person to remind them of specific customer onboarding/journey touchpoints and timelines. This leverages automation to lessen the burden of manual tracking and remembering, but incorporates timely moments of human interaction with clear, well-defined purpose.

You can have a human touch WITH or WITHOUT AI. Tech doesn't remove a human touch necessarily. In the same way, sometimes a human touch can be given, without any empathy or sense of care! The rule likes in actually designing interactions to help people. And sometimes this means minimising "empathy" markers, as what someone wants is speed, not a therapeutic conversation

Balancing technology with human touch is key in customer engagement automation. Retailers must ensure smooth transitions to human agents and use friendly language to maintain empathy and understanding.

Satisfaction is one thing. Customer delight is another. When it comes to engagement, we really are in the world of ensuring we meet people's expectations, but also ensure moments of joy in those

Customer sentiment and employee sentiment are inextricable, and data underscores this connection. Both can sense when they're undervalued. That is to say, when the human element is - in the search for ever-greater efficiency- reduced and filtered to little more than a data point or trendline on a dashboard, the dynamism that exists between people is at risk. And this drumbeat reverberates top-down, hollowing out the company's connection to customers, and the employees' connection to the work itself, as KPIs like response times and re-open rates begin to measure more how we disconnect with customers and employees. As a data enthusiast who is a customer advocate, I approach AI with exuberance and skepticism, a sword and a shield.