13 ways AI will improve the customer experience in 2024

Most business leaders today don’t need convincing about the power of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report 2024, 65 percent of CX leaders see AI as a strategic necessity that has made previous CX operations obsolete and dated.

Read that again.

But many businesses are still learning how to use advanced AI to improve the customer experience (CX). Luckily, we’ve got a few ideas on how you can leverage AI for CX to provide faster and more personalized customer interactions.

What is an AI customer experience?

An AI customer experience is the practice of using AI technology—such as machine learning, chatbots, and digital agents—to deliver fast, efficient, personalized, and proactive experiences at scale. Essentially, an AI CX leverages intelligent technology to improve customer experiences, enable CX teams to work more productively, and help the business save costs.

13 ways AI can improve the customer experience

Here’s how an artificial intelligence customer experience can increase customer satisfaction and enable teams to operate more efficiently and, in turn, boost your bottom line.

1. Enable great customer service experiences at scale

Leveraging AI for customer service effectively allows businesses to manage higher support volumes at scale while maintaining customer satisfaction and building customer loyalty.

For example, AI can arm agents with insights to personalize every customer interaction. Liberty London, an iconic UK premium department store, uses Zendesk AI to identify and label customer intent (what an issue is about), sentiment (if it’s positive or negative), and language so agents have greater insight into each customer’s needs.

Additionally, businesses can deploy bots across email, social media, live chat, messaging apps, and more to scale their support across channels. Bots can also enable service teams to manage growing support volumes, especially during times when they might need to scale quickly, such as during the holiday season or a product launch.

2. Provide fast, 24/7 customer support

Customers expect fast, convenient, 24/7 support from humans or bots. According to our CX Trends Report, 51 percent of consumers say they prefer interacting with bots when they want immediate service.

Using conversational AI, digital agents can provide natural, human-like conversations at any time, such as over the weekends or late at night when your agents are off the clock. These chatbots help agents improve customer support by quickly responding to common questions, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues.

In addition to providing always-on support, AI can also help your agents deliver speedier replies. Intelligent tools like macro suggestions provide agents with prewritten responses to customers based on the conversation’s context. There’s also generative AI for agents that instantly expands content, creating a complete reply based on just a few words. These features can help your team achieve faster first response times, decreased handle times, and shorter wait times.

3. Onboard CX teams faster

When it comes to getting new customer service agents up to speed, AI has some tricks up its sleeve. AI can act as a virtual assistant, giving new hires real-time tips and feedback while navigating customer service training. For example, AI can shift the tone of their replies to be more friendly or more formal. It can also surface similar support tickets so agents can see how other teammates replied to the same question.

4. Improve efficiency and productivity

AI tools enhance agent efficiency and productivity by simplifying workflows, with AI-powered chatbots handling requests and automated processes tackling repetitive tasks. These tools reduce agents’ workload, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks and complex customer issues.

Intelligent routing and triage features use AI to analyze incoming conversations to understand customer sentiment, language, and intent. That increases routing accuracy while reducing ticket escalations. Skills-based routing further optimizes customer service by directing tickets to agents based on their expertise availability, conversation priority, and more.

Gianna Maderis, principal customer experience manager at Zendesk, understands how important AI can be in boosting efficiency for businesses of all sizes: “I think automated triage is something any business can benefit from. We’ve seen time savings of 220 hours per month by eliminating manual triage.”

5. Deliver hyper-personalized interactions

AI can act like a personalized concierge for every customer, understanding their history and preferences and allowing agents to better understand their needs.

For example, the sustainable e-commerce brand Grove Collaborative uses AI-powered insights to enable agents to deliver personalized conversational service. Instead of replacing human interaction, AI acts as a support tool, providing agents with the context needed to deliver efficient and more tailored customer experiences to every customer.

6. Anticipate customers’ needs and potential issues

AI can use data—like order history, behaviors, and preferences—to anticipate customer needs and identify potential problems. This allows you to generate proactive solutions and improve customer retention.

For example, fashion retailer Motel Rocks implemented Zendesk AI to streamline their customer service operations with intelligent triage and sentiment analysis. Zendesk AI automatically classifies incoming messages based on the customer’s intent and emotional tone, allowing agents to grasp the situation and prioritize responses efficiently.

Additionally, the AI assigns a simple emoji to represent the overall feeling—negative to very positive—providing a quick visual cue to prepare the agent for the interaction.

7. Provide AI-powered quality assurance

Traditional quality assurance in CX often relies on human evaluation. But AI-powered quality assurance can objectively score agent performance, identify customer sentiment, and pinpoint areas where real-time coaching is needed based on data gathered from customer interactions. This allows businesses to identify trends, proactively address issues, and personalize training for agents to ensure they deliver exceptional customer experiences consistently.

8. Analyze customer data to predict and prevent

AI-powered tools enable customer support teams to track and analyze unstructured data—like customer sentiment—to see who’s at high churn risk and immediately give them attention. AI algorithms use predictive analytics with natural language processing (NLP) to look at thousands of different keywords from customer interactions. It can then provide quick recommendations and automatic alerts to help you monitor and analyze customer sentiments to predict case escalation or customer churn.

Using sentiment analysis can also help you analyze customer feedback to better understand how customers feel about their experience with your brand. This enables you to identify where there might be challenges so your reps can swing into action to prevent churn.

9. Present customers with special offers

AI can be a great tool for presenting customers with relevant, appealing, and timely special offers. By analyzing customer data like purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics, AI can identify products or services they may be interested in.

For example, AI can recommend sale items that the customer previously viewed or similar products to their previous purchases. AI can also use real-time data to trigger promotions. For instance, an abandoned cart might trigger an AI-powered bot to send a discount code to the customer who left an item behind, enticing them to complete the purchase.

10. Improve workforce management

Our CX Trends Report found that almost 80 percent of CX leaders are eager to increase their budget for better agent management tools. Many are starting to use AI in workforce management. Workforce management tools can automate tasks, provide data-driven insights, and enable decision-makers to plan their staffing needs proactively.

For example, Zendesk WFM uses predictive AI-powered forecasting to generate staffing forecasts based on historical data and customer behavior, so you know how many agents you need and where you need them. Meanwhile, automatic agent scheduling saves you valuable time, and real-time tracking provides visibility into agent activity and adherence timelines.

11. Reduce operational costs

Integrating AI into your customer experience can significantly reduce operational costs by automating low-value tasks, deflecting inbound interactions through self-service, and eliminating the need for additional tools, training, or staff. AI excels in task automation, content recommendation, and predictive analysis to anticipate customer needs. Investing in AI during economic shifts can help teams manage increased ticket volumes and deliver fast, personalized service without increasing spending.

12. Create more consistent brand experiences

With generative AI, businesses can create a chatbot persona that matches their brand identity. This helps to maintain a consistent tone and personality across all customer interactions. It also makes your brand stand out, enhancing your brand image and increasing customer satisfaction.

Additionally, agents can use AI to adjust their tone during customer conversations. For example, Zendesk offers Tone Shift, a tool that allows agents to instantly adapt the wording of a message to sound friendlier or more formal, depending on the situation.

13. Enhance knowledge management

Self-service is a key component for delivering exceptional digital customer service.

AI-powered knowledge management tools help you keep knowledge base content updated and relevant. For example, Zendesk offers Content Cues, an AI tool that streamlines help center content management by identifying low-performing articles and prompting updates. As a result, teams can effectively address common questions and customer needs with self-service resources, deflecting potential service requests.

Generative AI can further streamline content creation by taking a few bullet points and instantly expanding them into a complete help center article. Agents can also shift the tone to friendly or formal with just one click.

Examples of AI for customer experience

Now that we’ve covered how AI can enhance CX, let’s check out some real-life examples of AI improving customer experiences for businesses.

Transform your CX with Zendesk

Welcome to the future of AI for customer experience. Incorporating AI into your customer experience software enables you to do more with less. From helping customer service teams deliver exceptional, personalized support to improving operational efficiency, Zendesk AI is shaping the future of intelligent CX. Harnessing the power of AI is the “intelligent” choice—now and in the future.