AI Customer Experience: 10 Ways to Implement in Your SaaS

The rise of AI is grabbing headlines across the globe at the moment and the world of customer experience is no less.

In this article, we’re going to unpack how AI customer experience can completely transform how people engage with your SaaS.

We’ll cover how the customer experience is defined, where AI comes into the picture, how it can help engage your customers, and explore some specific tactics for leveraging artificial intelligence within your product.

TL;DR

• Customer experience (CX) encompasses the entire user journey and even broader than that, the wider perception customers have of your product.
• AI customer experience, on the other hand, is all about using artificial intelligence (using computing power to solve problems) as a valuable tool to enhance the customer experience.
• Using AI and machine learning within your SaaS can bring huge benefits. Firstly, a deep understanding of your users, and their behavior patterns. Next, proactively tackling areas of friction to drive down the churn rate. Finally, the better the customer experience you deliver, the more loyal your customers will be – and the greater advocates for your product.
• How do you actually go about implementing AI within your app? There are a huge number of examples to draw from across the SaaS world.
• Whether it’s combing through large datasets to perform customer needs analysis, tweaking microcopy within your UI, using chatbots to bolster your support offering, localizing the experience with auto-translation, or boosting engagement with gamification, etc., AI can greatly improve the customer experience.
• It’s impossible to deliver this sort of experience without the right tools for the job. There are several options on the market to choose from based on your requirements, but Userpilot is a powerful one-stop shop with AI capabilities built on top of its existing features. Book a demo to learn more.

What is AI customer experience?

The customer experience (CX) is a broad term encompassing the total perception a customer has of your product and how they interact with it across all stages of the customer’s journey.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging field looking at using computing power and technology – combined with large datasets – to solve problems autonomously.

Hence, AI customer experience uses artificial intelligence to create memorable and positive experiences they will love.

The benefits of using AI technology to improve the customer experience

As a busy product manager, you might be thinking about more traditional ways of enhancing the customer experience. Why should you focus your time and efforts on understanding how to leverage artificial intelligence?

There are several clear, undeniable benefits to consider.

Deep understanding of customer behavior and needs

There’s no better way to analyze customer behavior than with artificial intelligence.

AI makes it simple to conduct complex analyses on enormous data sets and draw out trends, patterns, and insights. From there, you can easily determine customer needs without time-consuming, expensive – and potentially biased – research.

Ultimately, that’ll put you in a fantastic position to create a personalized customer experience based on real user needs.

Low customer churn

Some churn is inevitable, but let it get out of control, and pretty soon you won’t have a product to manage. AI can help you slash potential churn rates. How?

AI customer experience tools have powerful predictive capabilities. So, by analyzing large datasets, they can forecast which parts of the customer journey cause friction and identify drop-off points.

Once you know where churn is likely to occur, you can take a proactive approach to tackle it. There are a range of strategies to avoid potential churn: it’s just the case of picking which makes sense given the context.

Increase in customer loyalty and advocacy

Without loyal customers, you’ll struggle. AI-powered tools are a fantastic way for you to rapidly identify areas of concern and pose helpful solutions.

For example, a chatbot that solves a high percentage of queries frees up the time of your customer service reps. That means they can focus on the tricky cases that require complex decision-making, process improvements, and most importantly, tasks that maximize the impact on customer happiness and engagement.

All of this boosts customer loyalty. In turn, you’ll see an uptick in loyal customers who become advocates – delight your users, and they’ll do your marketing for you!

10 ways to use artificial intelligence to create positive customer experiences

Now, let’s get to the most attractive bit: how can you practically use artificial intelligence to create a positive impact for your users and transform the customer experience? Here are a whopping 10 examples to draw inspiration from.

1. Perform a thorough customer needs and wants analysis

What is this? Use AI to trawl through large datasets, analyze customer data, and rapidly identify themes, patterns, and observations. The better you understand the needs of your customers, the more effectively you can target solutions to meet them.

Example: Shulex Voc is a tool that uses AI to conduct customer profile and expectations analysis to give you insights to provide a better customer experience.

2. Generate effective microcopy to increase activation and adoption

What is this? Get in-app microcopy right, and you can boost activation, increase adoption, and reduce churn. You want to optimize for clarity and simplicity above all else – too much complexity can risk confusing or overwhelming your users.

Example: Userpilot offers AI-powered functionality that’ll help make writing engaging copy a breeze. Refine your content with various prompts, whether it’s wording suggestions, summarizing lengthy passages, or expanding on ideas.

3. Create AI-generated videos to increase customer education

What is this? Video tutorials have been proven to boost engagement, help customers understand how to better use your product, and dramatically improve the customer experience as a whole.

However, they are costly to make and sometimes you need to hire people to do the job if your team lacks the relevant expertise. With AI tools, you can create videos easily, even if you’re not much tech-savvy.

Example: Use Synthesia to quickly (and cost-effectively) generate videos you can use anywhere in your product. Just provide a script, and AI will work its magic!

4. Provide timely self-service support through AI chatbots

What is this? Chatbots were one of the first manifestations of AI to hit the market. In a nutshell, they provide an engaging way to provide self-service support, answer customer questions and understand what they’re trying to achieve. Another benefit of chatbots? They’re available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Example: Tools like Zendesk or EliseAI can help you launch AI chatbots that will suggest relevant content, videos, or documentation to help solve user issues. It’s much more engaging than trawling through a knowledge base.

5. Provide localized customer experiences in-app

What is this? Most SaaS products have a global market. AI-powered tools help localize the entire customer experience by translating your product’s copy into a language relevant to your user’s location. It’s a proven method of delivering effective personalized customer experiences.

Example: Userpilot has an AI-powered feature that handles translation automatically. There’s no need to upload fiddly CSV files. All the translations are done in-app automatically – you do have the flexibility to make manual tweaks once the translation is complete (if needed).

6. Identify pain points and friction in the customer journey

What is this? One of the most effective ways to engage customers (and ultimately improve the experience) is to focus your efforts on identifying and removing friction points and areas of frustration.

Example: Genesys uses artificial intelligence to discover dropouts, customer loopbacks, channel switches, and more. Once you know where the pain points are, you can target them more effectively and hopefully move toward a more frictionless experience.

7. Increase customer engagement with relevant in-app gamification

What is this? Gamification leverages engaging patterns and techniques from the gaming world and applies them in business. What are some types of gamification? Incentivizing behavior, progress bars, dynamic elements that celebrate reaching milestones, and in-app rewards.

Example: A tool like Upshot. uses artificial intelligence dynamically to show relevant gamification options. That could be based on user actions, behavioral patterns, and more.

8. Use predictive analysis to identify customer churn

What is this? One of the key performance indicators for any product manager should be keeping churn rates to a minimum. But you don’t want to be behind the curve. Predictive analytics can help here.

Example: AI can help you predict when a customer is likely to churn, so you can get involved fast and take preventative action. You can use a tool like Upshot to help pull that view together.

9. Perform sentiment analysis on customer data and interactions

What is this? Any good product manager should have a rock-solid understanding of their customers. Sentiment analysis is a great way to build that – and AI makes it easier than ever to make sense of customer data (whether quantitative like CSAT or NPS scores, or qualitative feedback).

Example: SupportLogic is a tool that uses AI technology (including natural language processing) to interpret keywords from customer interactions. It’ll then identify themes in sentiment over time and predict churn, and help you choose the recommendations that make sense given the context.

10. Automatically close the feedback loop to improve customer satisfaction

What is this? Gathering feedback is one thing but acting on it and informing your users about the changes you’ve made is another. AI can help you close that feedback loop, and in doing so boost customer satisfaction.

Example: A tool like Levity will help group similar responses of customers (i.e., those who answered a survey) once a given feature has been updated or tweaked and send to the relevant department. This is particularly effective when combined with a tool like Userpilot to automate in-app messaging in response to similar customer feedback.

Must-have AI tools to use to improve customer experience

As you may have picked up from above, while there are many ways to leverage AI within your SaaS to improve the customer experience… it’s simply not possible without the right tool for the job.

There are a few options on the marketplace to consider. Let’s explore what they offer and which you should choose.

Userpilot for onboarding

Userpilot is a powerful onboarding platform. With a new round of AI-powered enhancements that layer smoothly on top of its existing features, it’s easier than ever to create engaging customer experiences:

• Transform your content creation process. Writing in-app copy is tricky. Userpilot’s ‘Ask AI’ feature will quickly generate copy to populate an empty state and spark creative inspiration. You can then refine the generated copy, expand on points, or cut down to the core message.
• Personalize and localize. Give your users the best possible experience in a language that suits them with automatic localization.
• Build deep user understanding. Coming later this year, the in-depth survey analysis will help you identify trends and patterns in user behavior.

Amplitude for product analytics

Amplitude is an onboarding tool renowned for its analytics capabilities. They’re taking strides in the artificial intelligence arena with their new Predictions feature. But what does it do?

Typically, SaaS products have segmented users on their past behavior. Predictions flip this concept: it improves the workflow by forecasting how a user is likely to perform specific actions in the future. In essence, this is a complex algorithmic forecasting model.

You can use Predictions in many ways:

• Decide which groups of users to target with a specific campaign
• Tweak message frequency depending on the chance of conversion
• Adjust pricing, make special offers and targeted discounts
• Fine-tune the content of your communication to different users

Zendesk for self-service support

As discussed earlier in the article, one of the most effective uses of AI and machine learning in the SaaS world is enhancing your support offerings. Customer success has always been an expensive, time-consuming – yet important – part of the job.

Zendesk AI offers a chatbot that can answer a huge range of queries while being time- and cost-effective. Rather than scanning through documentation or scouring forums, it learns from customer queries to offer a more personalized experience to them.

Conclusion

Well, that wraps up our tour of the world of artificial intelligence and how it can be used to transform the customer experience. Hopefully, you should now have a solid understanding of how to leverage AI within your own SaaS.

We’ll leave you with this concept to mull over:

“Predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s artificial intelligence.”

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