As Forrester has long asserted, the revenue impact of good customer experiences is no small consideration, and can be quantified via their "CX Index" methodology for gauging customer experience effectiveness. For the median big-box retailer in their surveys, a single point increase in CX Index score yields about $244 million in annual revenues. For traditional retail banks, the figure is $124 million. Wireless service providers? $278 million.
And yet, the Age of the Customer poses a seemingly insurmountable challenge for brands competing on the basis of customer experience. On the one hand, the explosion of available information has conditioned consumers to expect instant gratification, consistency across myriad engagement channels, and an acute awareness of their personal preferences and history to ensure effortless interactions. At the same time, said explosion creates a deluge of information that personnel and technology alike struggle to tame and leverage in service of operations resembling customer-attentiveness and efficiency.
In a recent report, Forrester's Kate Leggett assessed the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in today's contact center landscape, and the ways it looks to transform the customer experience for the long term.
Managing Big Data and implementing cross-functional standardization is certainly attainable today, but the future of customer experience mastery demands AI. According to Leggett, brands must view customer service as a continuous cycle that extends throughout the life of a customer's journey, and evidence suggests that while business users see AI as presenting great value for many aspects of an organization, customer experience and support may benefit above all.
Attainment of the popular conception of AI (i.e. having all characteristics of organic human intelligence) remains a long-term pursuit, but the state of the art offers a path to customer journey mastery that empowers brands to meet and surpass modern consumer expectations—with proactive, personalized engagement, preemptive solutions, and analytics that are not merely descriptive, but prescriptive. Among other solutions, this is manifest in NICE's Real-Time Personalization technology, which enables businesses to optimize hundreds of millions of customer decisions to drive more effective customer engagements (and thus more robust bottom lines).
On Thursday, September 14, Leggett will join NICE for an exclusive presentation, "Artificial Intelligence and the Customer Journey of Tomorrow." Register today and join us to learn how AI stands to turn the aspirations of innovative customer experience professionals into reality.