Nowadays, consumers expect more personalized and efficient service from the businesses they engage with. In spite of the negative myths around artificial intelligence (AI), many businesses have already found the technology to help them to meet these expectations and build long-lasting customer relationships in the process.

In this post, I will take you through 4 ways AI can improve your customers’ experiences and help you to stand apart from the competition.

1. Offer more personalized experience

One of the most significant benefits of AI is how much it can learn and teach you from the data you already have. Using AI and, for instance, your customers’ past purchases or wishlist, you can learn their tastes and make better recommendations.

Spotify uses machine learning to train their algorithms that can learn from the music their subscribers are listening to, gain valuable insights, and create personalized playlists for each of their millions of users.

You can also analyze your customer data and learn from their buying patterns over the years. A bank may, for instance, be concerned about an expensive purchase being made on an ordinarily frugal customer’s credit card. With machine learning, they may be able to detect that the same customer makes similarly priced purchases around that time every year, indicating, for example, they are spending for an anniversary, birthday or annual vacation, meaning the purchase isn’t a cause for concern.

2. Give 24/7 support

Thanks to the internet, many businesses now need to be able to offer 24/7 support. AI-based technologies, like chatbots, can allow for this and even augment any call center operators the company may employ.

With chatbots, customers can get answers to commonly asked questions, like the cost of shipping or to troubleshoot simple technical support issues like how to reset their internet router. They take the burden off the customer support team, leaving them to deal with more complex matters.

3. Save them time

AI also allows customers to access support and get the information they need more readily. Chatbots can engage with your customers in real-time, eliminating the wait commonly associated with other traditional customer service models, such as toll-free numbers.

With computer vision, you can eliminate issues before they even arise. For instance, robots enhanced with computer vision can identify damaged products before they can be sold to your customers, reducing the likelihood of customers having to waste their time returning a faulty item. Snap and search functionalities reduce the time between finding the product they like and buying it, while machine learning you can analyze their behavior and figure out their preferences, like which restaurants or products they like and offer them recommendations, saving them time on having to look for what they need.

4. Protect them

With computer vision, companies can better moderate their visual content for inappropriate and offensive images or videos. 

Momio, a social network geared towards pre-teens, used Clarifai’s NSFW computer vision model to comb through the millions of images that are uploaded to their site and remove any objectionable content before it could get in front of the eyes of its impressionable audience. Parents can, therefore, allow their children with peace of mind.

AI is can even help healthcare professionals to save lives. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh were able to train a model to accurately identify the participants in their study who had made suicide attempts or had such thoughts, by analyzing images of their brain activity when presented with certain words, like “distressed” and “death.” With this technology, mental health professionals could use MRI scans to identify at-risk patients promptly, so they can get the care they need.

Overall, AI is more than just a tool to improve profit or get customers to buy more. It is a technology that can help you to delight your customers, making their experience with you even more enjoyable, so you can make them brand evangelists that stick with you in the future.