How can service firms use AI to enhance customer loyalty and retention?

AI will be a massive advantage to the companies that use it to enhance the customer experience. It can answer questions almost instantly, provide key usage data, and handle routine tasks. As suggested here, the equation of success combines computers and humans, as detailed in Race Against the Machine by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Therefore, organizations should be cautiously optimistic about the impact of AI but always think about how they can continue to embed the human element of the customer journey to drive great experiences.

Salesforce, the large tech company, introduced new service and marketing cloud features that humanize the customer experience with AI-powered conversational intelligence. These technologies help service teams and marketers create more personalized experiences that drive lifelong customer relationships. The company is also offering user-friendly mobile offline access to relevant information and customer data platform innovations. In a conversation with Lidiane Jones, executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce Digital Experiences, she pointed out, “Seventy-six percent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs, yet only 34% feel like companies actually treat them as individuals.”

AWS Contact Lens offers advanced conversational transcription for phone calls, real-time sentiment analysis and supervisor alerts to deliver agent coaching and full-text search on call transcripts. With machine learning, AWS Contact Lens will be supported for customers using Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect. With this information, companies can track customer sentiment and trends of customer conversations in real-time. This will help get feedback, which in turn, will lead to better on-target coaching to agents for improvement.

New Service Cloud Voice telephony partners Google Cloud and Genesys will give customers more choice in how they use Service Cloud Voice and enable AI-powered recommendations and automated workflows for their teams. Google Cloud and Genesys will introduce telephony connectors that integrate phone and customer data, automate call transcriptions and notes and enable agents to receive real-time suggestions, while they’re on a customer call. For example, a service agent at a retailer can receive recommended next-best actions to process a return or upsell a warranty, making the conversation more personalized and useful to the customer.

Bose, a leader in premium audio products, is deploying Salesforce Customer 360 to expand its robust direct-to-consumer business, providing personalized and tailored marketing and service experiences that delight customers and build loyalty. “Customer experience is at the center of everything we do,” said Jim Mollica, chief marketing officer at Bose. “With Salesforce, we will be taking our digital footprint to a different level–making it easier for customers to immerse themselves in the brand and delivering highly personalized, premium shopping and service experiences. We know this is critical to enhancing customer satisfaction and building loyalty.”

Companies spend a small fortune on creating video presentations. There’s the need to find and hire actors and a film crew. D-ID is changing this model. With AI, companies can create compelling and captivating corporate training and internal communications videos in just seconds. Videos can be made by using any image, including pictures of employees, outside spokespersons or availing themselves to the millions of images available online. The images are accompanied by text and realistic audio to create customizable photo-realistic avatars and can easily be edited and updated.