How AI Will Impact the Customer Experience in 2024

Artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini (previously Bard), are being used everywhere. While many companies are taking a low-risk approach and dipping their toes into the AI world, the consensus is that AI is and will continue to make a big splash in business as we know it.

As a customer experience specialist, I want to focus on how AI is affecting how companies service their customers. The impact of AI in customer service can already be seen in areas like request routing, prioritization, content creation, summarization, localization, sentiment analysis, chatbots, and more. Today, I want to focus on three of these areas that I see being the biggest game changers.

AI content creation for customer experience

When it comes to content creation within the customer experience world, AI models can help companies scan ticket repositories and documentation, identify top customer-impacting issues by volume/frequency/severity/etc., and create easy-to-use guides. These guides can be in the form of documentation, knowledge-based articles, and even professionally produced videos.

When products are improved, AI tools can rapidly update this collateral to remain up to date. This can be particularly useful for companies with frequent updates to their products as AI-generated content can augment human-created materials and help facilitate a self-service experience for customers, which is what 79% of customers expect organizations to provide. By providing up-to-date and relevant guides to customers in whichever format they prefer, companies can deflect cases and mitigate customer issues before they reach the support team.

AI summarization for customer support

If a ticket does get to your support team and transfers from one agent to another over shifts, days, or even weeks, it can drag out the overall time as each new agent must read through the case history before engaging. Summarization AI tools can be huge in this process by analyzing the full case history and providing a brief two to three-sentence summary within seconds. This can bring the agent up to speed quickly regarding what the case is about, where it is, what the next expected step is, and who the owners of those steps are.

Some tools also provide references to similar, resolved cases, along with recommended responses. Together, this can drastically cut down the time to respond to and resolve tickets, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

AI chatbots for customer experience

Chatbots, of course, create a unique opportunity for businesses to interact with customers at any time, no matter if it is during peak hours or at 1 AM when your business is closed. It provides a self-service opportunity for customers to find answers to typically basic issues via an automated chat agent before a live customer service team member starts to engage with them.

These AI-driven engines use documentation, previous case history, training materials, and personalized insights on the requestor (such as which products they own) to engage intelligently with the specific customer. This strategy can be helpful for common support inquiries while it frees up valuable team members to handle more complex cases.

With the emergence of AI as an enabler of an exceptional customer experience, companies that embrace the opportunity to utilize AI are finding new and innovative ways to serve their customers. I am personally very excited about what this technology can do for all industries and the impact it can have on customer experiences for all types of businesses around the world.

If you liked this article, be sure to check out:

• 7 Ways Your Business Can Use ChatGPT to Drive Efficiency and Productivity
• Tips for Boosting Customer Service and Your Bottom Line
• How AI Is Changing How SMBs Do Business