Customer Experience and Artificial Intelligence – a match made in heaven?

Many of you reading this article will experience being a customer and providing a service for customers. Whether you are customer facing, most businesses that utilise Gamma solutions are – in some way – dealing with end users. This can lead to a sense of frustration professionally: how can you provide the level of service that you would expect if you were in the customer’s shoes? From top to bottom, empathy – that lovely human ability – drives an organisation’s ability to provide a great customer experience. From onboarding a customer to saving someone wanting to cancel their service, it is the human aspect that underpins everything. Or, to put it in much simpler terms, it takes one to know one.

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What does any of that have to do with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its relationship to CX (Customer Experience)? Well, it all boils down to this: how on earth can a chatbot or even a rudimentary conversational AI experience empathy? Having correctly identified empathy as the crucial cog around which CX pivots, it stands to reason that placing customers in the hands of soulless machines would be an anathema to everything a CX expert stands for. And yet, we see businesses doing this all the time. It’s not even new – before the chatbots we had pre-recorded voice menus driving customers mad on the phone. One wonders how many customers were lost going elsewhere, simply looking for the empathetic embrace of a human agent?

Even in 2019, 74% of consumers expected to deal with a chatbot. This does not mean they expected to like it, but at least they were aware it could happen. As time has gone on, technology has improved and we are now at the edge of what some have called the Fourth Industrial Revolution – in which AI will take over a great number of repetitive, more process driven roles. Counter-intuitively, one of these roles is customer service. Apart from the empathy aspect, much of the customer experience landscape involves taking a customer through a variety of unchanging processes – indeed, this is why many customers can now order products entirely by themselves online.

Sales CX expectations are very different to complaints or problems CX expectations of course, and this is mainly where the problem lies. As with truth, sometimes solutions lie somewhere in-between two extremes: in this case, all human, or no human – save them all or replace them all? How about a middle ground solution in which both work together?

74%

of consumers in 2019 expected to deal with a chatbot.