In today’s business landscape, it’s more important than ever to forge deep and meaningful customer relationships. If you don’t, buyers will seek out your competitors, who are only a call or click away. In fact, 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience.
Is the spark missing from your customer relationships? Have you been struggling to reignite it? The answer isn’t flowers, a trip to Cancun, or weekly counseling sessions. You need a grand gesture that will truly knock their socks off — that’s right, I’m talking about artificial intelligence.
With AI, you can create highly personalized experiences that make customers feel valued and known. You can guide them through the buying journey seamlessly, minimizing headaches and customer service issues. Quite simply, using AI is the best way to show customers that you care.
If you don’t use AI to improve experiences, you’ll fall behind your competition. In a recent study, 86% of CEOs said AI is mainstream technology in their office. Did I create enough FOMO for you yet? Read on to learn some of the best ways you can use AI to deepen your customer relationships.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a machine’s ability to mimic human intelligence to perform tasks. AI can iterate to improve its performance based on the information it collects. Many top SaaS (software as a service) solutions use AI to increase productivity and scalability.
Why Should I Use AI in the Customer Experience?
Imagine a world where contact center agents can bid farewell to mind-numbing tasks and embrace their superhero alter egos. Thanks to the power of AI, those mundane tasks can be zapped away faster than a speeding bullet! With AI automation, contact center agents can focus on the most important aspect of their jobs: the customers. No more battling endless data entry or searching for information. AI swoops in to save the day by speeding up processes, eliminating repetitive tasks, and giving agents more time to meet customer needs with lightning-fast efficiency. Faster responses, happier customers, and agents with newfound superpowers — it's a win-win situation!
How Do I Train an AI Model?
Training an AI model may sound like a daunting task to take on, but not with Invoca! Our Signal AI Studio offers no-code UI that speeds you through the process of training a custom AI model. You simply tell it the insight you want to measure, and Signal AI Studio shows you transcribed examples from your calls that either fit or don’t fit that insight. It learns with every response, creating a new AI model in no time.
Custom AI models from Signal AI Studio can accurately detect virtually any insight or topic from conversations, including:
- Caller Intent: Detect if the caller is a sales lead, current customer, new or existing patient, or job seeker
- Caller Interest: Determine the specific product or service the caller is interested in, if they are looking for help with an online order, or need support with a product issue
- Conversation Outcome: Detect if the caller made a purchase, booked an appointment, received a quote, or canceled a service
- Call Events: Discover important events like if the caller asked to be called back or to speak to a supervisor
- Voice of the Customer (VoC) Insights: Detect if the caller asked about pricing or a specific product feature, discussed a competitor, or lodged a complaint
Learn more about how Signal AI Studio works here
Quick Stats About AI in the Customer Experience
According to Businesswire.com, a staggering 73% of consumers believe that AI can have a positive impact on their customer experience. This statistic underscores the growing acceptance and anticipation among customers for AI-driven solutions to enhance their interactions with businesses.
A study done by Aberdeen and IBM revealed 33% of users are more likely to be satisfied as a result of the personalized experiences that AI can provide. By leveraging AI-powered solutions, businesses can deliver faster and more accurate responses, offer proactive support, and improve overall customer service, resulting in higher satisfaction levels.
Servion Global Solutions predicts AI will power 95% of all customer interactions by 2025, including live telephone and online conversations. This projection shows the growing reliance on AI technologies to handle customer interactions across various channels. This will have profound implications for businesses and their ability to deliver efficient, personalized, and seamless customer experiences.
These stats collectively emphasize the potential of AI in revolutionizing the customer experience. AI's ability to personalize interactions, enhance responsiveness, and improve satisfaction rates positions it as a valuable tool for businesses to meet customer expectations and gain a competitive edge. By leveraging AI technology, companies can create seamless, personalized experiences that delight customers and foster long-term relationships.
6 Ways AI Can Transform Customer Experiences
1. Use Conversation Intelligence to Create Seamless Conversion Paths
To earn brand loyalty, you need to create seamless conversion paths for your customers. This will allow them to quickly find what they need and make purchases without headaches. Though many brands are tracking online conversion paths, they’re not attributing conversions from one of the most critical channels — inbound phone calls. According to a recent study, 62% of marketers fail to attribute revenue to inbound calls.
Conversation intelligence tools give you visibility into the role phone calls play in the conversion path. Solutions like Invoca allow you to understand which of your marketing channels, campaigns, and webpages are driving phone calls. But conversation intelligence goes beyond just telling you that phone calls happened — it uses AI to understand the intent of each call and surface actionable insights from the conversations at scale.
With your conversation intelligence solution, you can identify your “problem” webpages — the ones that are driving customer experience issues and abandonment. A pattern may have already jumped out at you, but to make sure you’re correctly diagnosing issues, you should dive into the call recordings and transcriptions.
With call recordings and transcriptions, you can see exactly what your customers are saying when they call you. You can sift through your transcriptions manually, or you can set up AI signals to automatically detect certain words or phrases. For example, you could set up a signal that identifies when customers ask questions about pricing or when they mention an issue with your website. This will allow you to scale your process and identify patterns more quickly.
By digging into your recordings and transcriptions, you can identify the inefficiencies in your conversion paths that are frustrating customers. You may find that a certain product page doesn’t offer enough specifics for customers to make a purchasing decision, you may learn that your checkout process is long and overly complicated, or you may discover that your online shopping cart is stalling out from a server or backend issue.
To more precisely spot frustrating online experiences that are driving low-value phone calls, you can also integrate Invoca call data with website experience analytics platforms like Decibel and Fullstory. By combining web experience analytics with conversation data, you can fix breaks in the online conversion funnel and also optimize for certain purchases where driving a phone call presents significant revenue opportunities. The result is that every customer gets the seamless experience they deserve and you drive more revenue and higher conversion rates. Learn more about how Invoca works with website experience analytics here.
These issues can cause significant abandonment and churn if you leave them unchecked. With AI-powered conversation intelligence, you can quickly identify these problems and make data-driven improvements to create seamless experiences that build customer loyalty.
2. Capture First-Party Data from Phone Conversations to Personalize Customer Interactions
Today’s consumer expects personalization in nearly every buying experience. In fact, 72% of shoppers act on marketing messages only when they are customized to their interests.
To deliver meaningful personalization, you need to collect rich data from your audience so you can learn who they are and what they need. But restrictions around third-party cookies have made capturing customer data more difficult. To solve this challenge, marketers are tapping into more of their first-party data and using these rich insights to inform personalization. First-party data sources include data from CRMs, website visitors, social media followers, email subscribers, and transaction records.
But marketers shouldn’t overlook one of the richest sources of first-party data available — insights from inbound phone conversations. In these conversations, consumers are literally telling you their intent, product and service interests, sentiments about your brand, and more.
AI-powered conversation intelligence solutions like Invoca capture these insights at scale. With Invoca you can integrate these conversation insights with your customer profiles in tools like Salesforce, Adobe Audience Manager, Google Marketing Platform, and more. Once you’ve enriched your consumer profiles with conversation intelligence data, you can start to deliver deeper levels of personalization.
AutoNation, America’s largest auto retailer, uses Invoca to personalize customer interactions. AutoNation sends buyers customized marketing campaigns touting the type of features they mentioned over the phone. For example, if the customer expressed interest in safety features, AutoNation’s can retarget them with ads and landing pages showcasing this value proposition. AutoNation also gives its sales agents access to those insights, so they can tailor the conversation to win the sale. This creates a seamless omnichannel experience that makes every customer feel acknowledged and valued as they move from online interactions to phone conversations and back again.
3. Automatically QA All Sales Calls to Ensure a Consistent Brand Experience
Customer experience expectations are at an all-time high — 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone. To earn brand loyalty, you need to ensure every customer interaction is on point. But consistently delivering high-quality brand experiences can be a challenge — especially for franchises and multi-location businesses.
Phone calls are a critical piece of the brand experience in many industries. In our recent study, 68% of people said phone calls were their preferred way to communicate with businesses. To forge deep relationships with your customers, you need to ensure every phone conversation lives up to your brand’s standards.
If you’re like most sales teams, you’re listening to calls and applying a manual QA process to ensure your agents are meeting your brand experience standards. But there are many flaws to this approach — manually QAing calls is expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with human error. In addition, your QA team is only able to listen to a small sample size of your agents’ calls, which may not be a reliable indicator of total performance. They may have caught some of your best agents on their worst days or vice versa.
What’s the solution to this challenge? Take a wild guess. That’s right, artificial intelligence. With tools like Invoca for Contact Center, sales teams can use AI to automatically and objectively score agent performance on every call. No two sales organizations are the same — that’s why Invoca for Sales allows you to set your own unique criteria to score sales agent success. For example, you may want your sales agents to start with a greeting script, mention an upcoming promotion, and then ask the caller to schedule an appointment. The call scorecard uses AI to automatically detect which of these criteria are met on each call and assign a corresponding score.
With automated QA, you can ensure that every phone conversation at every location lives up to your brand’s standards. Your agents will also receive instant and objective feedback about how well they’re performing. This will allow them to quickly make pivots to better serve and delight your consumers. As a result, you’ll build brand loyalty and keep customers coming back time and time again.
4. Easily Locate Teachable Moments and Up-Level Contact Center Agent Coaching
In addition to scoring calls, Invoca provides the tools contact center managers need to improve their coaching. For example, Invoca's AI automatically records and transcribes every call — these transcripts are searchable and available to both managers and agents immediately after calls end. With these resources at their disposal, managers can easily find coachable moments to help reinforce lessons. Agents can review their past performance and self-coach.
In addition, Invoca offers in-platform coaching, so managers can @mention agents in call transcripts and notify them in real time. Agents can then quickly view the feedback and make the right adjustments for future calls. This is a more targeted way to give feedback, and it allows for more consistent coaching beyond regularly scheduled 1:1 sessions.
5. Anticipate Customers’ Needs and Potential Issues
Invoca AI empowers teams to extract valuable insights from phone conversations at scale, enabling them to stay ahead of customer needs and expectations. You can see a powerful example of this in our case study with Spectrum Retirement Communities, a leading senior living provider. By leveraging Invoca's AI-powered conversation intelligence, Spectrum Retirement Communities was able to analyze call recordings and transcripts to identify specific concerns and questions related to COVID-19. This allowed them to make informed decisions and implement necessary changes to their facilities and operations, ensuring they could proactively address customer needs during those challenging times. As a result, they kept residents safe, secured 160 positive reviews, and achieved a 20% reduction in resident turnover. Check out the video interview we did with Spectrum’s National Director of Sales and Resident Experience, Jeff Adruino, and hear for yourself what we were able to accomplish together!
6. Measure Customer Sentiment Throughout Conversations
A key aspect of improving the call experience is making sure agents handle customer inquiries effectively — that means keeping tabs on caller sentiment. When it comes to analyzing sentiment, most speech analytics tools only track the overall sentiment of a call, flagging a call as either “positive” or “negative.” But many marketers say that call-level sentiment isn’t particularly useful or actionable.
We believe that the real opportunity lies in the ability to track caller and agent sentiment separately, and monitor how it changes throughout a conversation. So we built our sentiment analysis solution to not only track the individual sentiment of the caller and the agent separately, but also how it changes throughout the call. This makes it possible to monitor how effective agents are at turning a callers’ negative sentiment into positive, as an example. You can, in turn, use this data to collaborate with your contact center team to deliver better customer experiences.
The Future of AI for the Customer Experience: Automating CX With a Human Touch
In the quest for improved customer service, AI has emerged as a valuable tool to streamline processes and enhance workflow. However, as the title indicates, customers don't want to interact solely with robots. While automation can, well… automate mundane tasks and improve efficiency, the human touch remains crucial for delivering exceptional customer experiences. Striking the right balance between automation and human interaction is essential to delight customers. By leveraging automation to handle repetitive tasks and allowing human agents to focus on complex and personalized interactions, businesses can provide the best of both worlds. This harmonious blend of automation and the human touch ensures that customers receive efficient service without sacrificing the warmth, empathy, and problem-solving skills that only humans can offer. Ultimately, achieving this balance is the key to creating delightful customer experiences that leave a lasting positive impression.
Additional Reading
Want to learn more about how Invoca’s AI can help you improve customer experiences? Check out these resources:
