The AI revolution within customer experience (CX) is already upon us. Brands across industries are implementing generative AI solutions into their customer service programs, with astounding results. In fact, Gartner now predicts that automation will reduce human agent workload by upwards of 30% by 2026, while McKinsey puts that number at 50% — and that’s just from an efficiency standpoint.
How can customer service organizations apply generative AI in a way that transcends productivity improvements and instead changes the way we think about customer interactions? The answer lies within leveraging generative AI to autonomously identify and effectively execute sales motions within customer interactions, and there are three key components: Building rapport, personalizing offers and overcoming objections.
1. Building Rapport
Epsilon found that providing tailored CX increases the chance of purchase by 80%. Traditionally, finding ways to develop personal rapport within customer service interactions was costly and difficult to scale. Perhaps top performing customer service agents have a natural proclivity toward empathy, which allows them to connect on a more personal level with customers. But to scale that sense of empathy across an entire front-line customer service team is nearly impossible.
Generative AI automates the entire experience of building personal connections with customers. By leveraging natural language processing and sentiment detection, chatbots can understand the mood and attitude of individual customers just as well — if not better than — human agents. They can also leverage existing data to automatically generate responses to the customer that are highly empathetic and personalized.
By automating rapport, customer service organizations can truly replicate the experience their best agents bring to every customer interaction, resulting in higher conversion rates and more loyal customers.
2. Personalized Offers
Accenture found that 91% of buyers are more likely to engage with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. However, doing so within customer service interactions requires a special sales-oriented approach that many agents aren’t trained on. In fact, most customer service organizations haven’t invested in the requisite recommendation engines within their agent assist platforms to apply it.
Recommendations and tailored offers are where generative AI-backed chatbots shine. Chatbots can access the data regarding each individual customer within the existing customer service and E-commerce tech stacks, such as CRMs and customer data platforms. Then, chatbots can leverage keyword detection to better understand exactly what each customer is looking for at any time. This powerful synthesis of multiple data points will result in bots being able to offer a perfect product autonomously and quickly at each touchpoint.
3. Overcoming Objections
The hallmark of an effective salesperson is the ability to anticipate potential customer objections and offer responses that mitigate them. Oftentimes, this is a skill that comes largely through experience: Only after so many interactions with customers can one gain a comprehensive understanding of the types of objections customers usually raise. And it also takes time to develop a repository of effective rebuttals to those concerns to continue to move the sales forward.
Chatbots can capitalize on the collective experience of the entire customer service and sales organizations to overcome a wide array of customer objections almost immediately after being deployed, as opposed to the months or years it usually requires for sales professionals to ramp up in a new position. Organizations can develop a repository of rebuttals the bot can pull from, and then allow the bot to leverage keyword detection and its own generative powers to match and customize the perfect response to any customer objection, effectively replicating the actions of the best salesperson at a fraction of the cost in ramp time.
Generative AI’s ability to infuse more and better sales opportunities into customer interactions will revolutionize CX. McKinsey predicts that generative AI will open an additional $400 to $660 billion in additional revenue. But to realize that revenue generating potential, CX leaders need to think of AI as more than a time saver and productivity booster; it needs to be seen as their ticket to showcasing to the rest of their organization the value of customer interactions. Ultimately, in this age of AI, customer service leaders will soon come to realize that, when done well, every customer engagement is an opportunity for added revenue.
Damien Thioulouse leads AI across all domains at customer service outsourcing company Simplr, where he develops highly scalable solutions at the forefront of natural language processing and builds highly specialized proprietary models tailored to customer service. He is responsible for growing a top-notch team and creating strong ties with leading universities in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as mentoring new teammates and students.
