The First Step to Integrating AI in Your Customer Experience

When adding artificial intelligence to your organisation, the best first step is to create a plan for integrating AI and robotics into the omnichannel experience that you’ve already developed.

This doesn’t mean that you need to change everything about the customer experience just because you’re implementing new capabilities.

In fact, implementing robotics and artificial intelligence should be more about making enhancements to your existing strategy – not designing a new one.

But one of the most common mistakes made in AI implementations is placing the technology apart from the existing customer journey.

In these instances, interactions occur in silos, data is disconnected, and – most critically – the transition points along each customer’s experience are noticeably fractured.

Intelligence and automation should become part of your existing customer experience strategy.

No matter the maturity level of your organisation, there are a few simple questions that will aid the integration of AI and robotics into your existing strategy.

1. What are the primary goals and objectives of our customer experience strategy?
2. Why do we offer our current customer service channels and how well do they integrate together?
3. Why should we offer AI or robotics?
4. Do we know if our existing customer experience strategy is meeting customer and contact centre needs and demands? What evidence do we have? How would the addition of AI or robotics improve our deficiencies?
5. How can the contact centre collaborate with other departments to ensure that any AI or robotics initiatives are in alignment with organisational objectives?

This exercise is, in many ways, the foundation for enhancing your channel-access strategy and customer journey maps. Organisations shouldn’t implement AI or robotics everywhere they can, just because they can. Companies with the best deployments of artificial intelligence and robotics intentionally place them in spots across the customer’s journey that are most conducive to the customer already wanting to help themselves. Furthermore, they design them in such a way that the customer can easily connect with a live agent, should the need arise.

AI should:

• Appear in the channels and locations where the end users are naturally and intuitively going to be.
• Understand where the user is coming from and the best recommendation for where they’ll need to go next.
• Provide context on why the provided response is the best fit.
• Identify when AI isn’t the best solution and proactively suggest the ideal path to a resolution.

In other words, apply intelligence and robotics to situations that can be easily predicted and designed with a precise awareness of their own shortcomings and inabilities.