How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Shape the Customer Journey

Brendan Dykes of Genesys discusses how organisations can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve the customer experience.

Years ago, going on a road trip meant using an atlas to plan the route. I loved planning my journey across multiple pages, tracing the multicoloured lines and finding the best route to get me from Point A to Point B. But, once the road trip started, we usually strayed from that meticulously planned route.

Despite my wife’s excellent navigational skills, we’d miss exits, veer off main roads to see the countryside or simply get distracted by an interesting attraction along the way. Despite best-laid plans, your customers’ journeys often stray from their original routes, too.

Customer experience professionals have been almost obsessed with mapping customer journeys – optimising business processes and streamlining the passage of engagement. These maps or flowcharts are meticulously designed to guide customers effortlessly from Point A to Point B, to complete their purchase or to get help. Yet, prospects and customers still get off the planned route, choose a different path or simply get distracted.

In business, it’s imperative to guide prospects and customers to where they should be. We need to shape customer journeys – in real time – not just map them and hope they follow the directions.

Websites are built with a purpose: sell products, enable sign-up for services or provide help. Guiding users when they are distracted or lost has massive benefits for prospects, customers and the businesses with which they deal. Enabling this predictive engagement beyond the website – and across other channels – adds greater value and guides prospects and customers to positive outcomes.

Leveraging the power of AI and machine learning, using real-time insights, and proactively engaging at the right moment through the best channel for prospects, the customer and the business drives outstanding business results.

Brendan Dykes

For example, in the UK, Smyths Toy Superstores reduced their shopping cart abandonment rate by 30% and increased high-value sales by 3% by engaging customers at the right time.

Whether it’s guiding prospects who are lost on your website, helping customers avoid other distractions or enabling people to find the right answers, tools like Genesys Altocloud understand and connect them at the proper moment. And that helps prospects and customers successfully get from Point A to Point B.

Learn more about predictive engagement by downloading the Genesys Winter Innovations 2018 Guide.

Author: Robyn Coppell