Success in terms of customer experience doesn't just involve your ability to solve the problems of your customers, but how quickly you can solve those issues. In recent years, customers have been gravitating towards chat or even text-based methods to interact with your brand, allowing them to instantly connect with someone who can answer a question or accomplish some other important goal. 

Typically, these tools require you to make employees available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to facilitate this connection. Thanks to advancements in artificial technology this part of the customer experience may not depend on human beings at all for much longer.

Building a New Customer Experience using Artificial Intelligence

By using the types of data that many of your customers are already providing, artificial intelligence has reached the point where it can now act as an actual virtual assistant for the first time. These AI-powered virtual responses replicate natural human language in order to sound as much like an actual employee as possible. Based on specific keywords and phrases that your customers use during text or chat-based interactions, they can help answer questions, make changes to someone's account and can save your business energy and money at the same time.

Picture a situation where one of your customers has a question about their monthly bill. It's late at night, and they know they can't get a human agent on the phone - but you do have AI-powered chat functionality on your website. The customer goes to the website and starts a conversation with an “agent.” That AI-powered agent recognizes who the person is based on their name, immediately pulling up their account. Based on words used in conversation, it knows that a billing issue is the concern at hand. AI can explain aspects of a bill in detail, make changes and adjustments and even mail the client an updated copy - all using natural human language and in real-time. You can try this now on Facebook Messenger, for example, and may choose to employ it for your own business.

But more than that, concepts like machine learning also allow this technology to continue to improve naturally as time goes on. The more conversations that an AI-powered chatbot engages in, the more effective it becomes at replicating human language.

It's About Working Smarter, Not Harder

Not only do you get to have a customer-facing "employee" on the clock 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but you're saving a huge amount of money at the same time. According to one recent study, these types of chatbots will save businesses more than $8 billion per year by as soon as 2020. From the perspective of your customers, this solution is effortless. They may not even realize that they aren't talking to a human being at all. In many ways, that is the point.

In the end, it's important to understand that using artificial intelligence in ways like this is about more than just freeing you from the need to make sure that an employee is always available to chat by web or by text around the clock. It's about transforming your brand's customer experience - both in terms of what people expect from you and what you're able to accomplish. More than that, it's about guaranteeing that this new experience is available all day, every day, no exceptions - something that only this type of technology can indeed provide.