Previously in Pt 1, we discussed the increasingly important role consumer psychology plays as a qualitative lens for analyzing AI driven, quantitative data to improve customer experience.
In Pt. 2 here, we will explore CX personalization with AI and behavioral psychology, and the future of contact centers where technology, marketing, sales, personalized customer support, and customer experience all come together.
An easy example of AI enabled personalization is how streaming services such as Netflix have been personalizing recommendations, based on what each person previously watched, with a success rate over 80%.
Personalization can influence user experience and increase brand loyalty. To amass a higher level of personalized customer experience, however, an in-depth understanding of consumer behavior is needed.
Whether it is to create personalized messages for different customers, shape consumer behaviors, or drive customer satisfaction and loyalty, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic elements all play a part in customizing CX in a complex and sophisticated manner.
Combining AI with behavioral psychology is a powerful tool for a contact center to personalize experience for both the internal workforce and external customers. This can transform a contact center into a hub for innovation, a greenhouse for improving customer engagement, and a frontline where AI, marketing, sales, personalized customer support and customer experience all come together and coalesce.
“[L]eading organizations will empower employees to work in a way that meets their personal and professional objectives. Employees will have control over their hours and schedule; be routed interactions where they are best able to succeed; and receive personalized training and coaching recommendations. Their knowledge, experiences, and interests will benefit customers as they resolve complex issues, influence purchase decisions, or discuss shared values such as sustainability. This will increase engagement, reduce attrition, and manage costs.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083068/customer-experience-horizons/
The same article explains how workforce personalization paves the way for customer experience personalization:
“The contact center will be a hub for customer advocacy and engagement. Offering the richest sources of real-time customer data, the contact center becomes an organization’s eyes and ears to provide a single source of truth for customer insights. Having a complete perspective of experience across the entire journey, the contact center will increasingly advocate for the customer across the enterprise. For many organizations, the contact center is already an innovation test bed. This trend will accelerate, as technologies like generative AI rapidly find application across a variety of use cases to transform productivity and strategic decision-making.”
For instance, an AI assistant used by Morgan Stanley financial advisers puts personalized search and customized content at their fingertips, tailored for each client.
“Large language models will enable a new era of personalization. Machine learning techniques already turn each customer’s pattern of digital interactions into a unique behavioral ‘fingerprint,’ and recent AI advances will now enable these fingerprints to include speech and text interactions.” https://hbr.org/2023/08/using-ai-to-build-stronger-connections-with-customers
For contact centers, CX personalization can grow from real-time script recommendations, routing customer’s inquiry to the right agent, to AI monitoring calls in real time, and many other personalized features for communicating individually with images, videos, and verbal messages. By leveraging AI to share behaviors from similar customers, sales representatives can instantly cross-sell or up-sell with discounts, package deals, or customized offers, since customers usually respond better to personally catered offers. This all comes from understanding how customers arrive at purchase decisions – behavioral psychology.
An individual customer’s purchasing behavior or buying choices are based on or triggered by thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, values, and emotions. Customer experience, customer support, marketing and sales in the AI age can be directly adjusted for each customer, thanks to the power of AI data prowess and behavioral psychology.
“As brands adopt more data-driven strategies, consumer psychology is increasingly probing the why and how behind the wealth of data that is now available about online behavior, customer preferences and purchase decisions. New approaches in psychology promise to unlock valuable consumer insights.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-to-use-digital-consumer-psychology-to-stand-out-from/377206
AI soon can predict trends and customer behaviors, in addition to revealing present behaviors. The combined power of real-time behavioral psychology and AI data analysis can provide an in-depth understanding of consumer mindset, background, pain points, dreams, wishes, and desires. This will give any contact center or customer support service a huge leg up in PROACTIVELY satisfying customers and improving customer experience.
For true leaders in the CX space, they can go even further: LEADING consumers, even before customers realize what they want.
As AI is rapidly progressing from conversational AI to generative AI, and predictive AI, it can instantly let us know what customers want. Behavioral psychology and the human touch will personalize CX at every customer touch point along the customer journey.
“Rather than view customer interactions as queries to be resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible, brands will increasingly view every touchpoint as an opportunity to deepen the relationship and grow lifetime value. Organizations will proactively share knowledge and anticipate customer issues; they’ll become trusted advisors and advocate on behalf of the customer. Both digital and human engagement will be critical to building loyal ongoing relationships.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083068/customer-experience-horizons/ emphasis added.
Organizations can apply the insights of consumer behavioral psychology to marketing, advertising, PR, messaging, sales, customer support, and continuous improvement of AI models and applications. All these can help companies foster brand loyalty and compete better.
When priority is set – human centered, customer centered experience – everything else falls into its proper place: data, AI, insights about consumer psychology, consumer behaviors, consumer expectations, and how to meet their expectations with true leadership.
Consider the ENTIRE customer journey and customer experience when adopting AI, and keep in mind that customers expect more personalized support, NOT cookie-cutter mechanical voices.
“Customer experience (CX) is a leading driver of brand loyalty and organizational performance.” “According to NTT’s State of CX 2023 report, 92% of CEOs believe improvements in CX directly impact their improved productivity, and customer brand advocacy. They also recognize that the quality of their employee experience (EX) is critical to success. The real potential for transforming business, according to 95% of CEOs, is bringing customer and employee experience improvements together into one end-to-end strategy. This, they anticipate, will deliver revenue growth, business agility, and resilience.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083068/customer-experience-horizons/
For AI to be scalable in the long run, the quality of CX is based on the quality of education, skills, and tech fluency of the human workforce at contact centers.
©Jerry Briggs all rights reserved.
We at ApexCX are here to help you Apex your CX continuously. As a leader in the CX space, ApexCX helps customer-facing companies excel with both technology and human-centered, customer-led CX assessment, design, implementation, and contact center management, from end to end. If you need further discussion, please contact us. Thank you.
