How AI Can Help Maintain Seamless Customer Experiences in COVID-19

Before the pandemic, only about 18% of Americans worked from home in any capacity, but with the pandemic, it has become the norm for many people.

Technology has played a huge part in making the WFH dream a reality for many businesses amid global lockdowns. But while advancements such as cloud storage, big data and SaaS enabled remote working, maintaining high quality customer experiences during COVID-19 has been far more difficult.

Since there are no immediate signs of going back to the traditional ways of conducting business and customer experience is crucial to the survival of any business, the only option is to further embrace technology. Here are four ways you can deploy AI into your WFH model to enhance your customer experience:

1. Ensuring real-time support

With WFH, there will be the need to enhance other ways of interacting with your customers, since you’re no longer operating from a physical workspace where they can visit and lodge complaints. As a result, you may have to handle larger call volumes and emails, and it won’t be easy to handle all the queries and address customers’ pain points in real-time if you leave all the tasks for your human personnel.

Asking customers to fill request forms on your site won’t suffice. Customers can’t visit your store for a one-to-one discussion; everything has to be done online. They are from different geographic locations, they are in different time zones and they all need you to resolve their concerns promptly.

Human error can be the basis of confusion and frustration when employees are bombarded with these problems. If you deploy an AI-based ticketing system, it becomes relatively easy to ensure that customers know when they will be attended to and enforce a maximum response time that can’t be above 72 hours.

When your customers know the time frame to have their pain points addressed, they have a better sense of attachment - they know that you care and will even understand the circumstances that warrant any delays.

Another thing you gain by deploying AI-based systems is to enable personalized responses to customers. AI, machine learning and big data enable you to gather data on your customers, get to know them individually, follow up with their purchasing history, know their demographics and personalize responses to their pain points. You no longer have to rely on a one-response fix-all approach.

Since you are operating at scale, AI-based systems such as Chatbots can ensure that you handle customers’ pain points in real-time and at scale too, which can be difficult with ordinary human labor, especially with the WFH model. With AI-enabled real-time support, you can hear everything your customers are saying, and your employees can concentrate on more critical tasks that will add more value to both the customer and the organization as a whole.

2. Eliminating redundancy

WFH must completely focus on how to improve customer experience; there must be no room for employees to engage in unnecessary back-office tasks that can shift their focus away from the main issue. By integrating advanced AI, your support teams have the opportunity to concentrate on important tasks, since they will be doing less administrative work.

AI enables your support team to be more productive, initiate creativity and ultimately improve the customer experience while implementing the WFH model. There has always been the fear that deploying AI will lead to the loss of jobs, however, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Watson AI Lab, AI has only automated jobs with repetitive tasks.

WFH requires great support from IT as well as other tech fields, and AI is essential in this aspect.

3. Improved cybersecurity of employees’ personal devices

A lot of employees on WFH make use of their smartphones to ensure fast execution of some tasks; these devices need protection from threat actors and accessibility from unwarranted individuals. AI is being deployed for protective measures such as fingerprint pattern sensors and facial recognition.

There are also AI-based developments towards ensuring the security of data stored in these devices by recognizing malicious behavior and dealing with them quickly.

4. Collaboration among employees

One area WFH has created a gap is the ease of communication among employees that was easy in the physical workspace. Employees need to know what’s happening around them and with the members of their different teams.

A seamless customer experience depends to a large extent on how employees can collaborate; they need to have prompt information on any issue that crops up to enable them to address it quickly. The rise in AI-driven digital collaboration tools is helping to resolve these issues.

By deploying AI, employees on the WFH model can easily have contextual insight that they may not even have during the in-person meetings they used to have in the physical workspace. You can create virtual sessions with video conferencing tools where employees can discuss and resolve issues. This enhances productivity and ensures an improved customer experience.

Final thoughts

The fear that AI will take over jobs is unfounded; the WFH model needs the integration of AI for success. Customers want a seamless experience, and you can only make this happen by leveraging AI, especially now that most employees don’t see the need to return to the physical workspace.