Even when using AI, give customers a concierge-level experience.
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It doesn’t matter what business or industry you are in, B2B or B2C, customer service and customer experience (CX) are essential to surviving. Competitors will try to take your business. Often, they sell the same or similar products or solutions and use pricing strategies to lure customers away. So, the goal is to separate yourself from the competition. To de-commoditize your business, you must offer value, and that’s where CX comes in.
Many business leaders believe AI can improve the customer experience. One of the mistakes they make is thinking it can handle most, if not all, of the customer experience.
But it can’t! And, more importantly, it shouldn’t!
Even if it could take care of most everything related to CX, there’s danger. Once you take the relationship out of the experience, and by that I mean the communication between customers and employees, you are a true commodity. There’s no relationship. There’s no differentiation. One of the ways companies choose to differentiate is through price, because everything else is the same.
That brings us to insights from John Kim, CEO of Sendbird, who joined me on Amazing Business Radio to talk about AI and how it is impacting CX, both positively and negatively, and how you can give customers a concierge-level experience.
Tools like AI and CRM Are Built to Manage Transactions, Not Understand Customers
According to Kim, much of the tension in customer service today is that most of the solutions are designed around the transaction, not the customer. Kim says, “CRMs store data, ticketing systems track issues, chatbots handle queries, but almost none of them were built to build a relationship.”
Technology is improving, but it still doesn’t measure up to what Kim calls the gold standard in CX: a hotel concierge. The concierge remembers your name, anticipates your needs and makes you feel like you are known. This has always been impossible to scale, until now.
AI can help. AI remembers everything, and when an employee, be it sales, support or any other customer-facing role, needs help remembering, AI is there. Customers’ names, past purchases, comments they’ve shared and more go into an engine that can communicate directly with customers or provide employees with the information they need to make customers feel remembered and valued. This is AI supporting relationships and helping any type of business deliver concierge-level service.
AI Lets Humans Do More of What They Are Expected to Do
Even though Kim’s company has an AI solution, he’s clear in an area that concerns many people. AI will not make humans irrelevant. On the contrary, he believes humans are here to stay on the planet, but AI can help them be better at what they can only do as humans.
“What AI ultimately does,” according to Kim, “is really unlock our time and cognitive loads so we can give full attention to another person.” The example he used was a doctor or nurse spending time with patients. Many doctors and nurses spend a significant part of their time on administrative tasks, such as data entry. But with AI, mundane, repetitive work disappears, allowing doctors and nurses to spend more time with patients. Kim believes this is our future, using AI to unlock and support human potential.
AI May Not Be Lowering the Cost of Customer Service
Reasons to use AI include greater efficiency, increased productivity and lower costs. According to Kim, “While businesses are frantically trying to lower the cost of serving customers, the cost for the customer to be served is actually increasing.”
My take on this is that companies use AI to deflect from human-to-human interaction. When it doesn’t go well, it costs the company money in the form of deflecting customers and more time spent on the phone with an agent whom the company is trying to eliminate. According to my annual CX research findings, 57% of customers say AI-powered self-service solutions frustrate them. Furthermore, only 50% of customers say they have successfully resolved an issue without the help of a human. That means we have a long way to go, so in the meantime, don’t eliminate human-to-human service. Augment it with AI. There may be a cost reduction for simple issues, but the benefit comes from the revenue derived when unhappy customers have their issue or complaint managed so well it gets them to say, “I’ll be back.”
Final Words
The companies that win in this AI-fueled world will be those that use technology to eliminate friction and enable employees to create meaningful interactions with customers. When you combine efficiency with empathy, you don’t just give customers an answer. You create a connection, similar to the way a concierge gets to know the guests at a fine hotel.
The winning companies know that AI doesn’t replace the human connection. Instead, it enhances the relationship. In short, AI is not the experience. It’s the enabler of the experience!