Can AI Improve Customer Experience?

The other day I asked my boss what tasks my predecessor had tackled that made his work “over-and-above.” He said the one thing clients raved about was his media digest - a round-up of all the breaking news relevant to our clients. But it was a time-consuming job undertaken only when his Trello board was clear and when he had a clutter free inbox. Since I was only working on the project two days a week, he insisted I not worry about it.

I didn’t. Instead, I spent less than two hours searching Slack for a bot that would use a custom Google alert to fish out fresh media items and serve them up in a purpose-created #media channel. That was six months ago, the channel has generated hundreds of highly relevant links for our team of supporters, and I’ve spent more minutes listening to praise and gratitude for that channel than I did creating it. My colleagues think I’m productive, even though I insist the credit should go to the AI bots.

Tech giants and hackspace tinkerers alike have spent the last few years coming up with a suite of ways to generate data about users. This amassing pile of data is hiding incredible opportunities to reach new customers, impress existing ones, and find ways of reinventing whole CRM systems in search of an unparalleled customer experience.

That’s why the fastest-growing category of enterprise software is CRM - customer relationship management. Artificial intelligence is what’s behind the algorithms that let businesses automate lead outreach, fine-tune customer journeys, and make ideal decisions using the data that trickles back in from those leads.

You don’t have to be skilled up in AI to leverage its power for your business - software vendors like Salesforce embed AI directly into the services they offer. Detailed data on your users already exists - the search engines, browsers and social networks they use to find your product or service are capturing it all for you. And AI is great at making sense of all that data, so you don’t have to.

The twin driver of AI’s capacity-building is another A-word: automation. Automation lets businesses spend quality time figuring out exactly what an ideal user experience looks like - once. After that, with AI, it’s set and forget - growbots, lead-handling assistants and chatbots automatically move your leads along an ideal pathway to conversion and loyalty. CRM AI can bring grievances to your attention sooner than humanly possible, and take care of most of the work in addressing them. With the click of a button, you can toggle KPIs, measure your success, and learn from your weaknesses.

In 2017, Salesforce commissioned a new report from IDC into the impact of AI, and discovered something fascinating. Across the 1028 businesses surveyed globally, AI is already being used in 28 percent of workplaces, with a further 41 percent planning to invest AI into their workplace in the next two years. No matter what your field of work, 2018 looks set to be a big year for AI adoption.

 Over the next five years, AI is set to boost global business revenue by 1.1 trillion. This includes billions in increased revenue, decreased expenses, higher productivity and over 800,000 new jobs. In 2018, AI will increase the capacity of SMEs, generating a leap forward in a way we haven’t seen since the uptake a few years ago of cloud computing. Is your business one of the 28 percent that make up the early adopters?

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Sina Falaki writes as a millennial voice on sales, analytics, and technological trends. All opinions expressed are my own and they do not reflect the opinions of any of my current organizations. Like what you read? Share, comment, and like this article.