The customer experience guides the direction of many key performance indicators (KPIs). Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and churn and retention rates are all KPIs directly related to the customer experience. Knowing this, it’s surprising that more organizations are not leveraging artificial intelligence to provide their customers with a fully automated experience. What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence (AI) is software or hardware created to complete tasks that would normally require human intelligence. Examples of AI are everywhere–from the iPhone assistant “Siri” to facial recognition software. For those of us on the business side of things, AI has the potential to collect data, aggregate content, make predictions, an optimize a wide array of functions. Chat bots are just one example of how you might have seen businesses use this technology, but it is the tip of the iceberg of AI’s capability. While AI has been a part of our everyday lives for years, we still see a hesitancy on the part of businesses to more fully incorporate AI into their business solutions. One of our recent Rapid Research Response polls suggested only 46% of organizations currently provide a fully automated onboarding and engagement experience for their customers.
This is a big missed opportunity. Investing in digital infrastructure has the potential to benefit both you and your customers in impactful ways and put you at the forefront for digital transformation.
Digital transformation involves the use of technology to radically improve performance or the reach of businesses.” - Brooke Lester, Remedi Electronic Commerce Group
We at TSIA spend a lot of time talking about embracing digital transformation, and increasing the use of AI in your organization is a practical way to do just that. While you typically see AI discussed as a customer support function, we’ve talked in past webinars that there are use cases for every avenue of business.
Tracking KPIs With AI
Providing a comprehensive, automated experience is great for your customer, but it also allows your organization to gather invaluable telemetry. Where in the process are customers commonly getting stuck? Which are your most used automated functions and how might that correlate with customer needs? Is there a point of confusion or contention repeated across your customer base that you need to address? With data like this, you’ll be able to decide on and track specific KPIs that most directly correlate to your goals as a company. We can see the impact of having that data firsthand. 100% of te respondents to our above poll who provide a fully automated experience correlate onboarding milestones/progress to KPIs. On the other hand, only 50% of the companies who do not provide an automated customer experience are correlating progress to KPIs.
KPIs are crucial to the long-term health and success of a company, and so creating KPIs around every area of business should be top priority. We’ve written blogs on top KPIs for Customer Success, Managed Services, and Field Services, and encourage members to take time to craft their own. The use of AI better allows you to hone in on whether or not you are reaching your desired goals, and also gives you the ability to see exactly where you’re falling short.
Creating Action Plans from KPIs
Correlating your customer's progress to specific KPIs is great, but it won’t have an impact on the customer experience until the are used to provide actionable prescriptions to your customer. We found that 100% of the respondents who correlate onboarding milestones and progress to KPI’s also provide personally prescribed next best courses of action.
So what is the benefit of providing action plans to customers? It allows you to double-back with your customer in a way that is tailored to them. If you are not tracking where in the onboarding process you lost the customer, how will you know how to bring them back? Using the insight gathered from an AI engagement gives you the ability to provide customers with the specific tools or information they need. Also, it will feel to them as though you are giving personalized attention that will no doubt improve their experience with your company.
Using AI and KPIs to Improve the Customer Experience
Although the majority of respondents to this survey are not using a technology platform to provide their customers with a completely automated onboarding and engagement experience, those that do recognize the value.
- AI allows you to track all aspects of customer engagement and build a comprehensive data set.
- Creating and tracking KPIs from AI generated data enables you to figure out how to improve the customer experience.
- Providing customers with personalized actionable prescriptions increases your customer’s value realization.
Those prescriptions, when applied, have great potential to improve your customer’s experience, your KPIs, and your place in the digital transformation.