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The Importance of AI for Customer-Focused Businesses

Artificial intelligence (AI) serves a variety of purposes in different industries, from automating redundant tasks to improving business decision-making. As a customer-focused business, the goal is to enhance customer experiences and ensure that customers feel satisfied with what you have to offer them, and AI can help with this.

According to a Gartner study, 85 percent of a business’ interactions with a customer will not involve a human representative. This shows how important it is to make use of AI for handling and improving customer interactions with your business.

Personalized Customer Experiences

AI, through the means of automated analytics and business intelligence, enables businesses to provide personalized customer experiences. This is particularly useful for retail businesses, which can offer personalized discounts and recommendations to customers for improving sales. Salesforce states that 75 percent of customers will want to shop with a business that offers a personalized experience by 2020.

Image Source: Betaout

In addition, AI can help retailers identify which products customers are most likely to buy. This can be achieved by analyzing past customer purchases, commonly browsed products and customer behavior. For e-commerce stores and retail businesses, the implementation of an AI system is the next step toward an improved customer experience.

Improved Value for Customers

Customer service is an integral part of any business, particularly customer-focused businesses. In order to maximize the value for customers, you need to provide excellent customer service. For this, you need to be timely, informative and considerate when you respond to customer queries and feedback. According to ReviewTrackers, approximately 52 percent of customers will expect a response to their feedback within seven days, and 21 percent of these expect the response to be within 24 hours! These numbers show that customer support is not just about saying the right things and providing the right information—it is about doing so at the right time as well.

Considering this time-sensitive nature of customer support, it can be impossible for a business to respond to thousands of customer queries within a short time. AI provides a solution for this problem through automation. You can automate responses using AI to make them quicker and more efficient. Contrary to popular belief, AI is not just about a program answering the same types of questions and using the same set of answers it has. Instead, AI has grown significantly in the past few years and can now provide intelligent and accurate responses to customer feedback in real time.

An example of the use of AI in customer support can be taken from Digital Genius, which automates their chat software using fact data and historical chats to generate real-time responses that are meaningful and relevant.

Image Source: Medium

AI can help customer-focused businesses in various ways by providing a systematic mechanism for personalizing and improving customer experiences. Through the use of AI, businesses can improve their efficiency, generate better responses, reduce customer service costs and automate their processes.

Bio

Erica Silva is a blogger who loves to discover and explore the world around her. She writes on everything from marketing to technology, science and brain health. She enjoys sharing her discoveries and experiences with readers and believes her blogs can make the world a better place. Find her on Twitter @ericadsilva1.