In Part 1 of this series, Limitless Capabilities, we showcased what business and customer experience leaders are facing in choosing from our world’s many Artificial Intelligence solutions.
The main points we highlighted were how AI is an already crowded space that continues to grow daily. Each new solution promises to be the answer to your CX needs. This answer often claims to be able to solve all your challenges in very little time and even less effort.
Knowing this factors, how do leaders make choices with AI that decrease risk, increase profits, and ensure their organization is creating long-term CX gains?
Starting with Values
The first step is to revisit or more firmly define your business values. This step is critical for any business at any time, but it becomes even more important when you’re looking to “outsource” part of your business to a technology solution.
Think about it. Technology solutions, especially those based on AI, have few bounds. You can find several AI solutions to address almost any issue. But like with any ecosystem with resource constraints like budget or employee availability, you must prioritize needs to apply these solutions efficiently.
Revisiting your business values reminds you why you are in business in the first place. Values reconnect you to what your company stands for. They are your built-in priorities; they can and should serve as a part of your compass when you’re considering any business decision.
Prioritizing Business Needs
Once you’ve defined your values, it’s time to align them with your business needs. This starts with reviewing and prioritizing those needs. Every company has a long list of to-dos or requirements they’d like to conquer to attain business success. These can range from making a process or system more efficient to maintaining the current systems and keeping the lights on.
Take a look at this long list of needs and prioritize them. First, use your business values to rank items on your list. Then, consider applying classic measures like ROI and cost-benefit analysis. The goal is to have a concrete view of what needs to be done now, soon, or later.
Once you have this prioritized list of needs, turn your focus to your customers.
Enter Customer Intentions
We’ve written and spoken about customer intentions at length. CX by Design Founding Partner Diana Sonis provides more information and examples in How to Talk With Customers Through Your Website.
For our purposes, the main idea is this: take a fresh look at your business priorities and see if these align with your customers’ intentions for doing business with you in the first place.
You may find that something is a business priority, but it doesn’t impact your customers. Perhaps this finding will change the importance of a need or force you to define the business requirement in more detail.
Either way, by working through this step, you ensure and expose the overlap between your business and your customers. You are gaining a clear perspective of where the two needs overlap and where your company does or doesn’t solve this overlap.
When you have this refined list of priorities and a clear view of the overlaps and gaps between your business needs and customer intentions, only then can you consider AI solutions. Why? Because technology has to serve humans.
Using AI to Solve CX Gaps
By now, we hope you see that selecting an AI solution can be made easier and more effective once you align with the priorities you need AI to solve.
You may find that your biggest priority lies in enhancing your online customer service platform. From here, you can research AI solutions targeted at filling this need.
Or you may find your focus lies in making back-office operations more efficient to free up time to serve your customers more effectively. This finding will elicit an entirely different search for AI solutions.
Without first understanding business and customer needs, you risk spending a lot of money and time on solutions that won’t help you reach your goals.
Long-Term CX Success with AI
There is one issue this post hasn’t addressed: how do you ensure you’re creating long-term CX gains with AI?
There is a lot of advice available in this realm.
For example, if you look for solutions to write content and communicate with your audiences directly, you’ll want to ensure tone and language match the style and language used across your brand. 1
Another example would be if you notice purchase rates for your online store decreasing while “add to cart” rates remain consistent, you might employ investigative AI solutions 2 to dig into the customer’s online shopping experience.
In any AI solution you select, you’ll want to start small and pilot the solutions based on your CX strategy 3, guarantee your customers’ privacy is protected at all costs, and ensure you use relevant and up-to-date data to power your solutions 4.
But here’s the thing: none of these actions guarantee long-term CX gains. After all, technology only takes one so far, no matter how many CX best practices you employ.
Back to CX Basics
The secret to long-term CX gains with AI is the same as long-term CX gains without AI. Here it is:
Solve for the intersection of your business values and customer intentions to guarantee long-term CX gains.
However, once you solve this intersection, you still aren’t done. You need to re-evaluate periodically by spending time with your teams and setting up customer feedback loops to stay in tune with customer intentions continuously.
In this way, you’re prepared when the next new technology promising to change your business comes your way.
You also decrease your risk while saving time and money by avoiding unnecessary technology solutions.
Finally, you create loyal customers who repeatedly return to you with their business.
Moving On to Meaning
The conversations happening around CX and AI are only beginning. We encourage you to stay the course with your CX and business strategies. There are AI solutions that will solve your problems quickly and efficiently. Other solutions will look attractive but will not be worthwhile for you.
Our goal is to help you choose the right solution while continuing to move toward long-term success. But our goal is also more than that. It’s about using business to create the world we want to see. And that’s what we’ll touch on in Part III of this series.
1. Petrova, Lillana, CustomerThink, Extend the Customer Journey with AI
2. Srivastava, Sudeep, appinventiv, How Will AI Improve Customer Experience in 2023?
3. Kokes, Andrew, Forbes, The Future Of Excellent CX: Leveraging Enhanced Generative AI
4. Britt, Phil, CMSWire, 5 Best Practices for Using AI in Your CX Strategy
