Customer experience (CX) is a composite of consumers’ perceptions, feelings, and responses while interacting with a company. Unlike other departments, which have relatively brief interactions with consumers, customer support has much longer and impactful relationships with them.
Consumers usually want empathy and help from customer support, which you might struggle to provide due to time differences, distances, and lack of experienced staff. This is where technology, such as AR and AI, can help.
A consistent customer platform that supports end-to-end CX makes interactions between you and your audience meaningful and transparent. AI is increasingly becoming a critical enabler in such platforms. It is considered one of the eight essential technologies in business.
The Accenture 2017 Technology Vision Report says that AI is the new user interface (UI) and it will soon become your company’s digital spokesperson.
It already helps user experience (UX) by curating content; applying machine learning to ensure optimal outcomes; collaborating across experiences and channels; making complicated technologies easier, thereby helping new capabilities emerge; and learning from human interactions and adapting accordingly.
AI technology can help customer support in myriad ways.
Field service personnel can use AI-powered mobile apps to deliver personalized service, by accessing information from anywhere. Chatbots or artificial conversational entities (ACEs) can be used for customer support or marketing tasks.
Chatbots are AI programs that simulate interactive human conversation. They are artificially intelligent and can recognize sentiment through conversational AI.
Chatbots can stay online 24/7 and chat for several hours without human help. They provide quick real-time, personalized solutions to customers. They are cheaper to acquire and easy to install. One chatbot can attend to multiple customers at the same time.
Chatbots may not be able to answer out-of-context, general, or complicated queries. However, sophisticated chatbots with AI capabilities can overcome such challenges.
AR is a combination of the real-world environment and computer-generated content that enhances physical experiences.
AR technology can be used as embedded sensors or bar codes to activate digital automation, gauge customer engagement, and capture consumer data. It makes CX richer, innovative and exciting.
AR also provides excellent experiences to customers who aren’t present in the store. It is also revolutionizing advertising and promotion.
AR can be used to train customer support personnel. For example, support staff can view and learn more about various products and their different versions using AR without even seeing them in real.
You can use AR in phone and tablet apps to assist customers. For example, if customers hold their phones close to the faulty product, the AR components in the app will identify parts. This helps customers to send the name and model number of the malfunctioning part to you, which makes problem resolution faster.
AR will help customer support in overcoming communication barriers and enable support personnel worldwide to assist each other.
AR via web or phone in contact centers would mean live customer support, regardless of the customer’s location. You can also collect precise customer data.
If you aspire to attract and retain great customers, employ advanced technologies, such as AI and AR. This will help build conversational CX platforms that make customer support easy and efficient.