Forget keeping up with the Joneses, today it’s all about keeping up with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
AI assistants now live in our back pockets, and smart speakers now run our homes. This makes home life simpler and smarter than ever before. But it also puts businesses in an ever-lengthening race to keep up. After all, when you have smooth, AI-driven experiences at home, you come to expect the same from businesses.
Advancements in AI, while cool, make it harder for businesses to impress us. From personalisation to immersion, to streamlined experiences from the word go, businesses are getting smarter. Our experiences may not be as slick as the ones we got with our devices, but they’re getting better. Brands should now be harnessing the evolving power of AI to revolutionise Customer Experience.
The quiet personalisation creep
For businesses, AI is being used to power personalisation. From adverts to recommendations, and personal greetings to location-relevant offers, ecommerce is getting personal.
It’s not magic that the tech you were looking at on Amazon yesterday is splashed across your Facebook feed today. Nor is it a coincidence that you see a constant drip-feed of news articles that centre on your interests and political leanings. Businesses are getting better at using your data, and AI algorithms are remembering the items you’re interested in. In fact, technology and data mean that almost every advert you see online panders to your personal interests and styles.
Our customer journeys are becoming more tailored to us, and it’s not just the big fish like Amazon leading the way. Nowadays, pretty much any website will suggest targeted recommendations based on your online activity and page views. You most likely don’t even notice the levels of personalisation websites have become capable of. Yet they greet you by name, know your location, and act depending on your customer status, new or returning.
Pay no attention to the AI behind the curtain
All this fancy personalisation isn’t even the smartest part of the AI behind the business curtain. For example, the personalisation mine is now running deeper as biometric technology continues to grow. Businesses can use this branch of AI as a shiny new tool to learn what we look like, understand our actions, and recognise our differences.
At home, your iPhone can be unlocked by scanning your face. Retail quickly followed suit, and you can now pay for things with just your fingerprint. And this is only the beginning – your face is now being used to display relevant digital ads to your demographic as you shop around a store.
Online and offline are beginning to merge together. Amazon Go has already demonstrated how to harness AI to optimise and automate the checkout experience in the physical world. It won’t be long before purchasing online and purchasing online are near-identical. You can view items almost tangibly through augmented reality, you can chat to a chatbot for immediate assistance, and a single click can complete your purchase. All around you, everything is getting faster, more convenient, and more AI-infused.
A view to the future
As businesses get more savvy when it comes to AI, you can expect your experience as a customer to transform. Rather than navigating a website, you’ll be conversing with it through machine learning chatbots. Rather than clunky two-factor authentication processes, you’ll be able to complete transactions using voice as your unique identifier.
And rather than dealing with slow customer service, you’ll have companies immediately knowing who you are, your service history, and what mood you’re currently in – using a touch of AI and sentiment analysis.
Put the past behind you
First, we had to keep up with the Joneses. Then, the world became obsessed with keeping up with the Kardashians. Now, the only thing brands need to worry about keeping up with is AI.
Today, we as consumers have information at our fingertips. It’s available to us immediately, on any passing whim. So, when it comes to businesses, we demand the same level of service and speed. We’ve grown to expect effortless interactions with tech. When a business falls short of this expectation, customers take notice.
In the past, we might have had to – shock horror – wait for things. Even recently, we’ve all been frustrated by poor technology integration, and painfully slow customer service. But when businesses harness the power of business AI, customers can fall down the rabbit hole into the wonderful world of real-time service. A world of service that’s quick, efficient and effortless.