Using AI To Move Beyond Customer Experience To Intelligent Experience

Thank you for reading my latest article Using AI To Move Beyond Customer Experience To Intelligent Experience. Here at LinkedIn and at Forbes I regularly write about management and technology trends.

To read my future articles simply join my network by clicking 'Follow'. Also feel free to connect with me via Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , Podcast or YouTube .

Digital transformation is increasingly impacting every aspect of our lives, including many aspects of the way we deal with and interact with businesses.

Today’s consumer expects companies they buy from to be instantly accessible and to have an in-depth understanding of their problems and requirements. This reflects the growing importance many of us place on customer experience (CX). CX is more than just good service; it’s about creating a friction-free journey across every customer touchpoint, from marketing outreach to the quality of products and services and after-sales support.

Today, businesses are learning that technology can play a larger role in optimizing not just customer experience, but all of the performance metrics a business cares about, including employee experience, profitability, and more. This concept is “Intelligent Experience” (IX).

This means leveraging data, artificial intelligence (AI), and platform, to provide personalized, friction-free IX on-demand and at scale.

Let’s take a look at how this can be done.

What Is Intelligent Experience?

To help find the answer to this, I recently talked with Marc Fredman, SVP and chief strategy officer at CCC Intelligent Solutions.

Marc told me, “We define an intelligent experience as the orchestration of the best possible outcome for any technology-enabled experience across a whole variety of different factors.”

This means it isn’t simply about improving interactions between a business and its customers. It’s about creating an ecosystem of interactions that leads to the best possible outcome at every touchpoint for every person and company involved.

Importantly, it also means recognizing that businesses don’t work in isolation. The process of supplying and servicing companies often involves a network of partners, and their ability to deliver a strong customer experience impacts our own. Think of a vehicle repair facility, for example, where experience is impacted by the performance of its parts suppliers and their insurance company partners, as well as its own quality of service.

In many ways, this represents a paradigm shift from customer service, primarily focused on satisfying the immediate needs of a customer, to a predictive ecosystem leveraging technology and data. This lets a business anticipate and mitigate pain points, understand customers as individuals, and do it all at scale, while also optimizing for employee satisfaction and their own business performance.

Of course, AI, with its ability to optimize and personalize any interaction, has an important role to play in this. Its ability to analyze fast-moving datasets, often in close-to-real-time, and deliver personalized experiences is critical to the IX model.

Individuation And Optimization

Fredman identifies individuation and optimization as the key pillars when it comes to enhancing experiences with technology.

Individuation is about addressing the unique and specific needs of the customer or user, whatever stage of the journey they are at. Determining their specific challenge or problem involves moving past generic solutions and fine-tuning an action, response or experience to solve a particular problem at hand. And then getting better and better at doing it again and again.

Optimization is about managing the complexity around each customer or user problem to achieve the best possible outcome. This involves a balancing act, ensuring that every element of a response is aligned in order to create the best experience.

Once again, AI can be used to automate processes that revolve around identifying individual problems and optimizing solutions in order to solve them as efficiently as possible.

“If you’re not thinking about making every experience more intelligent, and you’re not starting to think about building systems around that, then you’re not going to be able to take advantage of what’s possible today,” Fredman tells me during our discussion.

Intelligent Experience in Action

So, we’ve established that the value of IX lies in applying cutting-edge technology in order to create seamless and frictionless personalized customer journeys, better experiences for employees involved in an interaction, and better outcomes for businesses involved.

As an example of the paradigm in action, he highlights processes implemented in his own industry, specifically around the property and casualty (P&C) insurance economy.

Resolving claims following vehicle accidents is a complex and lengthy process with responses or actions from the insurer, as well as repairers, suppliers and others taking place more than ?20M times every year in the US.

By coordinating the ecosystem response through a cloud platform backed up with AI, insurers, repairers, automakers, parts suppliers and more can perform optimally every time, streamlining and personalizing the resolution process. At each stage, the most impactful and efficient actions and responses can be predicted to create a great experience while also meeting individual customer preferences.

In a recent whitepaper authored by Fredman, he highlights data, ecosystems, and AI as the three “seismic transformations” that have given businesses this capability.

Bringing these together into a platform enables a systemized approach to be developed, ultimately leading to happier and more frequently returning customers, happier employees and better business outcomes.

And though the insurance industry provides an ideal testbed due to its complexity and the multitude of different human factors involved, Fredman believes this approach will soon be commonplace everywhere.

“I think you will see every industry go in this direction because AI, ecosystems, and other advancements, ?will continue to be more and more pronounced,” he tells me.

“Regardless of what industry you’re in, this is the future … you’re going to want to get closer and closer to those individual customer needs, and you’re going to also want to be able to optimize all that complexity around it … I think everybody can benefit from this type of thinking.”

Here, you can download the white paper: Customer Experience Is No Longer Enough: Intelligent Experience Shapes Interactions That ‘Just Work’ Better for Everyone, Starting with the P&C Insurance Economy. www.cccis.com/ix

You can see my entire conversation with Marc Fredman, Chief Strategy Officer at CCC Intelligent Solutions, here .

About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the fields of business and technology, with a passion for using technology for the good of humanity. He is a best-selling author of over 20 books , writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations.

He has a combined following of 4 million people across his social media channels and newsletters and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world. Bernard’s latest book is ‘Generative AI in Practice ’.