0
Unless your customers trust you — and trust your use of technologies — your business may soon be on the losing side of the customer experience battle.
How do you win wallet share and loyalty today? It starts with staying a step ahead of customers’ expectations. Beyond getting personalized marketing messages, customers are looking for touchpoints that reflect their previous interactions. They want an easy checkout experience and seamless transitions between purchase channels — service that’s not only fast but proactive. See a pattern? Increasingly, “staying a step ahead” means mastering artificial intelligence (AI).
This is the reality of rising customer expectations. Shareworthy customer experiences are often powered by AI — but the biggest, most unshakable element that’s fueling them? Trust.
Customers Are Excited — and Apprehensive — About AI
First, let’s take a closer look at the technology itself. Do customers have a love-hate relationship with AI? For some, AI conjures up dystopian scenes from The Matrix, while others see a future that’s more like The Jetsons. Recent research from Salesforce shows that customers are 9.5-times more likely to say AI is “revolutionary” than “insignificant.”
While some see AI in a negative light, many have a brighter outlook. Among those surveyed in the Salesforce study, 67 percent of customers say they recognize the good that can come from AI, and 61 percent believe the technology presents positive opportunities for society.
Also: How to set realistic expectations for AI TechRepublic
In fact, customers have come to revere a variety of AI-powered technologies — but they may not always recognize that AI powers those everyday experiences. AI tends to be associated with human substitutes like chatbots, when in fact it’s more prevalent than many realize. Customers say they like/love capabilities like credit card fraud detection, email spam filters, and automatic reminders — all of which use AI. More than half of customers have grown fond of voice-activated personal assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.
Today, the human interaction with voice-enabled assistants is key to maintaining your company’s brand promise, but in the coming decade, AI, including bots, will transform every aspect of business in every industry and job function. Studies have been conducted to gauge the efficiency and the future of chatbots. One example is how chatbots are transforming the marketing lead generation and sales process. In the latest study, 50 percent of consumer and business buyers said their experience was transformed by use of chatbots.
AI-Driven experiences are winning customers over
(Image: Salesforce Connected Customer Research 2018)
The changing expectations of consumers and business buyers is predicated on fast, intelligent, and personalized engagements with an accelerated shift toward voice as the new user interface.
Connected Experiences Can’t Happen Without Trust
At CES this year, Kohler announced voice-command technology for the bathroom. The company said, “Consumers can operate the kitchen faucet, control features of an intelligent toilet, adjust the lighting embedded in a bathroom mirror, run an invigorating shower, and automatically fill a bath to a desired depth and temperature all by using simple voice-commands.”
A connected bathroom may seem benign enough, but let’s take a minute to break down the data points that are represented. First, there’s the simple fact of knowing when a consumer is home. Then there’s the data around what that consumer’s morning and evening routines are — wake time, bed time, personal hygiene habits, and so on. While a voice-command lighted mirror may be a nice feature, that consumer would need to have a considerable amount of trust built with Kohler before connecting the entire bathroom experience.
Also: Google releases AI tool to identify child sex abuse images online CNET