One in three customers said they would walk away from a beloved brand after having just one bad experience. Clearly, you don’t get many chances to get your customer experience right.

If you want to stay at the top of your game, you need to innovate. AI and chatbots are changing the customer experience landscape.

According to Gartner, 25% of customer service operations will rely on a virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology by 2020. What’s more, organizations report an increase in satisfaction rate after implementing this technology.

With AI-powered chatbots, you can understand your customer’s behavior through each conversation. These insights can help you improve your customer experience

How to Leverage AI and Chatbots to Improve Your Brand’s Customer Experience

Chatbots and AI can change the way you interact with your customers. In this article, we’ll discuss more such ways in which AI and chatbots can help you improve your customer experience.

1. Enable Self-Service and Self-Checkouts

Imagine walking into a store, grabbing your favorite t-shirt, and just heading to a self-operating kiosk to pay your bill. Sounds convenient, right? Providing your customers with such a hassle-free experience is possible with AI.

Amazon is experimenting with this technology to enable self-service and enhance their customer experience. No lines, no checkout — this is what Amazon Go stores are all about. Amazon is calling this “Just Walk Out” technology.

They use deep learning algorithms along with computer vision to provide shoppers with a unique shopping experience. To enter the store, all you need to do is use the Amazon Go app. While shopping, whatever you pick up is added automatically to your Amazon virtual card.

Even if you change your mind and put back a few items that you had originally purchased, their technology is swift enough to update your card in a matter of seconds.

The technology used in these stores is fascinating. They use infrared sensors, RGB cameras, and depth sensing cameras to track what a user is doing in the store. With the help of the data collected, they can identify each user and what they’re doing inside the store.

If their inventory management system is not able to identify a specific item picked by a customer, they utilize information that they have about the customer. Their technology can look into past purchasing history and the currently picked up items. Based on that, it can predict what a customer is likely to have picked up.

Image via Amazon

2. Encourage Purchases

Customer expectations and behavior are changing. You need to implement innovative sales strategies to encourage people to purchase from your brand.

That’s why big brands are leveraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and chatbots to increase conversions. Using these digital tools can help people interact with your brand, learn more about your products, and eventually decide to purchase from you.

Automotive company, General Motors, decided to bet on digital solutions to optimize their customer service and increase sales. They partnered with Aivo to create a new, effective sales channel for Chevrolet vehicles and improve web conversions from multiple regions.

Using digital solutions by Aivo helped them automate operational processes, improve accessibility, and enhance customer service and sales.

They deployed a smart bot that recognizes purchase intention during conversations and shows the user a quote form for lead generation. The bot then transfers this information to the CRM department so that they can nurture leads and convert them into actual sales.

Image via Aivo.co

3. Create Personalized Content 

We live in a time where we don’t need to search for things online that we may need. From Netflix to Spotify, all platforms provide you with suggestions based on your previous interactions.

Image via Netflix

With the help of AI, you can leverage data to understand what your customer actually needs and likes. This can come in handy to create personalized content that people actually want to read. Once you figure out what your customers are looking for, you can even send targeted messages.

In 2018, Tommy Hilfiger used this strategy for their new project, “Reimagine Retail.” Using AI, they tried to get insights about new industry trends, resurfacing trends, and the general sentiment around their brand’s products.

The insights from these projects were then given to their fashion designers so that they could base their next collection on the findings.

Many other big companies are jumping in on this trend. But even small and medium-sized businesses have much to gain from it. 

Cortex can help you take your content and social media strategy to the next level with AI and machine learning. It takes data from thousands of different brands to find out what kind of visual content  will be most effective for your target audience.

For this, it groups different elements on the basis of images, copy, and primary image colors. Using these groups, it creates custom content sets that can help you develop an effective social media strategy. It includes information like the content of the post, how often you should post it, and when you should share it.

4. Provide Shopping Assistance

Many retail stores have a personal shopping assistant to help out during the shopping process. It’s great to have someone help you find the best clothes in the store that will fit you right. A little assistance goes a long way to improve the overall shopping experience.

With AI and chatbots, you can transform the way you provide shopping assistance to your customers. Take a leaf from Macy’s AI-powered shopping assistance program. Using their On Call mobile shopping service, customers can ask any questions they have related to a product or facilities.

You can even ask questions like, “Where is the men’s clothes department?” For this query, the assistant would send you the exact location of the department so that you can find it easily.

Users can also ask questions about the availability of a product and its features. For each query, the assistant sends customized responses so that the customers can continue shopping without any hassle.

Image via RetailWire

Conclusion

AI and chatbots can change the way we look at shopping. From virtual assistance to self-service, the applications of AI and chatbots are may.

Not only can they elevate the customer experience but they can also make the process of content creation and marketing more organized and effective.

If you want to have skin in the game, it’s time to start investing in AI and chatbots. You can use the ways listed above to make sure your customers get the best experience.