Search
Close this search box.

Struggling With AI Adoption? Here’s Why It Matters Now

Artificial intelligence, as the next wave of technological advancement, has redefined how businesses operate. It has become a powerful resource that provides benefits such as recommendations and predictions into lead conversion, customer retention insights, and even organizational strategic improvements. Once an out of reach, picturesque scenario for businesses, pure automation, and powerful recommendations are now a realistic possibility thanks to AI’s new-found affordability.

However, despite companies realizing what the promise of AI holds, they still often fall short when applying it, which stunts momentum towards transforming the way they do business. Many corporations underutilize AI, and lack the initiative to support the widespread adoption throughout all portions of their business. What causes acceptance to move at such a glacial pace? In large part, organizations struggle to adopt AI as a realistic opportunity because they are unable to understand the value of what it can do and what their individual business transformation should look like. As AI becomes a more widely accepted and implemented technology, we will witness its power to transform a business’s capabilities. In this article, we will look at three examples of AI-powered technologies that can positively impact how companies adopt AI, transform their business, and boost customer retention.

Why AI? Understanding Relevant Use Cases

Many organizations have seen the need to adopt AI over the coming years. However, while adoption rates seem to be increasing, some organizations still question if AI is actually beneficial to their business and employees. Fear of the unknown has stunted the paradigm-shifting nature of business-focused AI as organizations don’t understand where to start or what it can do. In reality, AI has the potential to disrupt time-consuming core business processes such as generating reports, scheduling, and email campaigns. Many of these logistical tasks are becoming increasingly viable under the AI umbrella.

Case Classification in Salesforce

AI has transformed how customer service departments interact with their customers by utilizing tools such as Case Classification in Salesforce. As one of the world’s largest CRM companies, Salesforce has provided a way of using existing components to seamlessly integrate AI into a company’s case resolution practices. Case Classification allows companies to unify their case management across the many engagement channels that they may offer, from email-to-case creation to web-to-case creation. AI powers Case Classification by using predictive intelligence to provide recommendations for checkboxes or drop-down values based on past data that the system has received. This, in turn, allows the system to determine important indicators in a case, and reduce the amount of time for a support agent to close the case.

Timely, Intuitive AI Chatbots

AI Chatbots, another powerful tool, utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) to operate as independent communication conduits between a customer service center and the customer. Unlike a traditional chatbot, AI Chatbots have the ability to understand language and process it outside of its pre-programmed commands. This gives them the ability to continuously learn based on the inputs they are receiving over time. Chatbots can be used to guide the customer through something as simple as ordering a sandwich from a local eatery, or as complex as a B2B sales process. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) is a leading source of factual information around COVID-19 and has recently built an AI Chatbot to answer questions regarding the virus. This enables the WHO to deflect the large numbers of inquiries pouring in via phone calls so that they can focus on performing additional research and crisis coordination, while still resolving questions without having to expend any resources. By allowing Chatbots to provide the answers to general questions, the organization has the ability to focus on providing more urgent and time-sensitive information while not leaving individual inquiries waiting for a response.

Connect and Improve the Customer and Employee Experience with AI

As organizations shift towards the adoption of AI, more aspects of their business will become connected. This in turn will allow them to collect larger amounts of data, giving them clearer insights and guiding direction on business innovation. We are currently witnessing this automation revolution across all markets, as AI adoption is mainly focused on improving customer service, predicting performance for workload automation, and enhancing marketing strategies. However, these focused strategies don’t encapsulate the rapidly evolving capabilities of what AI can accomplish. Artificial Intelligence is not only limited to changing how a business automates mundane tasks (such as recommendation lists), but it can also drive progress towards a more collaborative, innovative, and competitive environment.

While AI is impacting how an organization defines business transformation, it simultaneously is impacting the employee experience. AI is creating valuable connections on cross-functional teams now more than ever. By facilitating clean, valuable data and generating insights for increased operational efficiency, teams are able to communicate and engage with each other to create an intelligent experience organization-wide. Artificial Intelligence is also creating a level of personalization in learning opportunities for employees by using deep learning to understand where, when, and how an employee has advanced along their skills development path. Deep learning also provides the ability to pinpoint where an employee may be excelling or falling short within a certain skill set and provide recommendations on training that could help improve these skills. This is a powerful way to generate repositories of data for companies to better understand their employees, just like they are trying to understand their customers. Improving the employee experience not only increases an employee’s productivity and potential, but it also improves the customer experience, thus creating a virtuous cycle for the company overall.

AI Drives Customer Engagement and Retention

Customer engagement and retention continues to be the highest value-capturing aspect of AI technology. Most customer service managers fail to drive the “Always On” experience that customers are seeking in their buying journey. While consumer experience was previously not always a measurable outcome, AI has introduced more promising and improved techniques to monitor the amount of customer churn and the overall lifetime value of a customer. By providing virtual assistants and intelligent automation tools, organizations can ensure that they increase case resolution speed and drive customers towards a digital experience that is improved by both the speed and quality of AI case management. Reducing the amount of time to handle a case, and providing a quality, personalized service will ensure that the customer experience will result in improved retention.

Stitch Fix Supports Customers with an AI Experience

One such example of a company using virtual assistants to aid consumers in the buying experience is Stitch Fix and their virtual designers. The virtual designers provide consumers first with a guided shopping experience, and then with suggestions on products that fit the individual’s style preferences. This is a preventative approach to case management, which allows the virtual assistant to decrease purchase time, while still allowing human interaction and decision making. By tailoring the experience with AI, the customer journey starts with a higher satisfaction rate and should remain elevated as long as Stitch Fix continues to provide that level of customer service.

Get the Help You Need to Leverage AI Technologies

AI initiatives will create competitive advantages across markets like nothing we have ever seen before. By proactively investing in the capabilities of AI, you will ensure that your processes become more efficient, your employees improve their skill sets quicker, and your customers increase their engagement within your product offerings.

Are you doing enough to transition to technology’s newest frontier? Reach out and let’s discuss AI adoption.