How to Use AI to Create a Customer Experience That Keeps People Coming Back

If you run a business, you know how important it is to keep customers happy. A good experience doesn’t just make a customer happy, it keeps them returning for more. Imagine you can resolve a customer’s problem without wasting time or checking up on them once in a while, while making them feel valued.

A good customer experience is what sets businesses apart today. Luckily, the emergence of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is making it easier for businesses to improve Customer Experience more than ever.

Now that you understand the importance of keeping customers happy, how do you do it with AI that works, scales, and builds absolute loyalty?

Customer Experience Is More Than Customer Service

Many business owners think customer experience starts and ends with their customer service team. While customer service is very important, it is not enough to give customers a worthy experience that keeps them returning.

Customer experience begins from the moment a lead hears or reads about your brand until they become a buying customer after journeying through three essential stages, which are:

• Awareness: This is the stage where a customer becomes aware of a problem. They don’t know the solution yet, and they are not actively searching for one at this stage. They begin to learn more about their problems.
  
• Consideration: At this stage, a customer is interested in a solution and is already searching and exploring their options based on factors like the product’s features, the cost, how easy it is to use, and many others.
• Decision: The customer has made all considerations and is ready to buy based on their findings.

As a business looking to improve customer experience, you want to journey with clients through these three phases to ensure they have the best experience. This includes your website, your emails, your onboarding flow, your pricing page, and even your return policy. In short, every step of the customer journey counts. And that’s where tools like customer journey mapping come in handy.

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Customer Experience

Here are five amazing ways the use of artificial intelligence can improve customer experience for your business:

Provide 24/7 Customer Service

Whether human or robot, customers just want answers when they need them. While it may be difficult for humans to work efficiently 24/7, AI can. You can make this happen by incorporating conversational AI into your systems. It has been programmed to assist customers with their problems when you are away. With this, your customer doesn’t have to wait till the next business day before their complaints are resolved.

Instant Response

Nothing annoys a customer more than a delayed response. Sometimes humans can be overwhelmed when complaints are too much, and this might affect response time. With the use of artificial intelligence, customers can get quick answers to common questions with little or no waiting time.

Personalized Experince

Artificial intelligence can make customers feel valued by giving them a personalized experience. It gives each customer a feeling that they are the most important person to the business. It studies their data to offer personalized recommendations that will suit their needs, making them feel very important and happy.

Automated Follow-ups

When confronted with multiple tasks, even the best human customer service representative can forget something as simple as new month greetings or seasonal wishes. With AI, messages can be scheduled to go out at intervals. This is also very good to gather customers’ opinion about company’s product and services. With this, businesses can know if their customers are truly satisfied.

Efficient Ticketing

In the event that the AI customer service rep can’t resolve the customer’s complaint, it quickly escalate the complaint and send them to the right department for quick resolution.

Why You Need Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping helps you understand the path your customers take from being strangers to becoming loyal users or buyers. With this, you are able to identify where they feel excited, where they feel stuck, and where they might churn your business.

If you’re a SaaS founder, this could mean checking how people move through your sign-up flow or use your dashboard. For a small business owner, it could be tracking how someone browses your website, asks a question, and makes a purchase.

With this knowledge, you can identify your areas of weakness and improve to boost your customer service experience.

Don’t Guess, Ask Them

With a customer mapping tool, you don’t deal with assumptions. Instead of guessing, you can ask them to let you know how exactly they feel about your business. With a customer satisfaction survey tool like QDegrees, you can ask simple questions like How was your experience today? or What could we do better?

QDegrees allows you to send surveys at different times. You can send surveys after customers make a purchase, after they contact the support team, or even after they log in. The primary objective of these surveys is to get honest feedback in real time when the experience is still fresh in their minds.

Measure What Matters

It is impossible to control what you can’t measure; that’s why tracking customer experience metrics is very important to improve customer experience. You can measure customer satisfaction using any of these three means:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This tells you how likely someone is to recommend your business to others.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This shows how happy someone was with a specific interaction.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): This tells you how easy or hard it was for a customer to complete a task.

QDegrees allow you to track all these metrics in one place, giving you an overall view of how your customers feel and where you need to improve.

Tips For Customer Experience Management

Most business owners think customer experience management is complicated and can only be done by big organizations with huge budgets and complex systems. This is not entirely true. Although customer experience management can be complicated, you can make it easy using these tips:

• Respond to customers or leads as quickly as possible.
• Do not overpromise and underdeliver.
• Personalize your emails with their first name.
• Keep track of their last transaction, order, or issue.
• Checking in once in a while, even if they’re not complaining

These tips are important because they make people feel seen, heard, and valued.

Hire Customer Experience Consultants

Sometimesyou need an outsider to show you what you have been missing. That’s where customer experience consulting can help.  Hire a good consultant who can help you examine your processes, find the gaps, and bring improvement without.

Conclusion

Customers just want to be seen, heard, and valued. If you, as a business owner, focus on giving them a good experience from start to finish, they will keep coming back and even recommend your business to others.

Start by understanding their journey. Don’t act based on an assumption, optimise your processes with artificial intelligence. Ask for feedback regularly. Use tools like QDegrees to bring it all together. Remember, a happy customer doesn’t just come back, they bring others with them.