Don’t Hold Your Brand Back – Use AI Agent

No tool can do as good a job as you and your customer experience team – but it doesn’t have to. What you’re looking for is not a replacement for human agents, but an add-on that will boost your team’s efficiency.

On average, only 1.5% of ecommerce visitors actually buy something after browsing a store. Just 3 out of every 200 visitors will exchange money with you, even if your site is optimized and offers good prices. Every touchpoint matters, and automation in customer experience can help you boost these statistics.

Ecommerce is a difficult market. You’re competing in many areas, and all of them need to be optimized and continuously improved to provide a white glove experience and grow sales:

• The design of your online storefront
• The speed with which your store loads
• Merchandise on hand and pricing
• Product descriptions and all other content on your site
• Availability of convenient payment and delivery options
• Terms of service and return options

All these elements contribute to customer experience, but there's one crucial aspect that can tie them all together and significantly boost your overall performance: top-tier automated service.

With AI-powered customer service, you can:

• Provide real-time, 24/7 support in the customer’s language
• Instantly answer repetitive questions about products, shipping, and policies
• Collect valuable insights from customer interactions to improve your store
• Quickly identify and resolve issues across your site
• Offer personalized recommendations to increase sales
• Easily scale support whenever there’s a short-term spike in sales

And it’s more than likely that you already have all the resources that you need to transition into AI-powered customer experience.

Customer experience is easy to improve with the right technology

There is a large gap between the kind of experience that customers expect, and the kind of experience actually provided by many ecommerce stores. This creates an opportunity to differentiate your store from those that still suffer from issues that scare off customers:

• Delayed responses to their questions
• Ineffective communication channels
• Issues that remain unresolved for too long
• No follow-up after the sale

Customers aren’t quick to return to stores that have treated them with such poor experience. With the right tools, you can create a safe haven where they get the experience they deserve.

It’s clear that modern ecommerce is really all about relationships – it’s built on every relationship between you, the seller, and a person that buys from you.

The responsibility for this relationship lies with the customer experience department. To make this work easier and boost overall results, adding AI in the right places can be a life-changing improvement.

The right way to integrate AI into customer experience

Most ecommerce businesses have already embraced automation in their customer experience workflows to some degree. Automation is nothing new in this space. 

What’s new is the increasing integration of AI into CX operations and tools. Customer experience departments are perfect for AI integration because:

• They have extensive documentation and knowledge bases
• Many repetitive interactions are already handled in a structured, almost robotic manner
• There's a wealth of data on customer interactions to train AI models

When you integrate AI into your customer experience technology stack, you can benefit from:

• Significantly improved efficiency
• Enhanced scalability
• New opportunities to boost revenue potential

AI in CX makes perfect sense, but there are many myths floating around that make it seem too risky:

• “AI lacks the human touch”
• “Customers always prefer to interact with a human”
• “AI can’t handle complex issues”
• “AI makes mistakes and misinforms customers”
• “AI is a way to replace human agents”

And these are mostly wrong. 

Customer experience doesn’t always require a human touch. In some cases, buyers actually prefer to talk to an AI – for example, when they’re buying special medicine or skin care products. 

Automation can’t handle the most complex customer issues – that much is true (for now). However, you don’t want it to handle those issues! You use automation to free your agents’ from dealing with repetitive, simple cases. They can focus on the difficult issues and emotional customers, where a human touch is actually needed.

With how developed the technology is, a properly integrated, appropriately chosen AI agent won’t make mistakes. The right technology, i.e. an AI that’s been trained from the ground up to serve in ecommerce, will have strong guardrails that prevent any unintended misinformation.

Lastly, automated solutions are not a way to replace your workers. AI enhances the productivity of human agents, it doesn’t replace them! Humans are irreplaceable. 53% of consumers prefer to chat with live agents, however 46% are perfectly fine if the agent uses AI in the background to improve the interaction. AI saves time, helps agents resolve cases faster, increases customer satisfaction, provides 24/7 availability for all customers, and generates real-time insights from the CX frontlines for improvements needed in your store. 

You already have all you need to integrate AI into customer experience

Complexity in your CX operations isn't a barrier to automation – it's an advantage. The more developed your infrastructure, the more value you can extract from automation.

Most ecommerce operations have a robust foundation:

• Comprehensive SOPs covering order fulfillment, returns, customer inquiries, product knowledge, and quality assurance
• Customer interaction databases
• Detailed knowledge bases about products, store policies, and terms

These are not obstacles to automation. They're valuable resources that are perfect fuel to make AI more useful. The richer your existing customer experience infrastructure, the more potential you have to leverage AI for improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Automating customer experience is easier than ever

We’re at a stage where integrating AI into your operations is pretty much plug&play, like connecting your console to your TV (okay, perhaps slightly more difficult, but still very easy).

Take the example of InPost Italy. Anna Janik, the company’s International Customer Care Director, was looking for a solution that:

• Instantly delivered customer information without agent intervention 
• Seamlessly plugged into their existing tech solutions 
• Offered robust analytics to identify and track trends quickly
• Was built specifically for ecommerce

Integrating the Zowie AI-powered platform generated an immediate impact. InPost Italy's incoming support phone calls dropped by nearly 30% seemingly overnight, and the new chatbot quickly became the preferred support channel among InPost users.

Without automation, you need to somehow make sure that your agents are available 24/7 or disappoint customers with the option to leave a message that will be resolved later. There goes your chance to secure a purchase from someone who needs a reply instantly.

Automated CS is there whenever, wherever your customers need help, providing 24/7 support to all customers and consultants, even when agents are unavailable. And it’s efficient, like in the case of Avon, where Zowie achieved:

• 36 seconds average first response time
• 89% of questions recognized and 61% resolved by AI
• Only 20% of chats pushed forward to reach a human agent

By boldly pushing forward with automation these leading brands, like many others, were able to boost all key CS metrics and, most importantly, increase customer satisfaction.

Don’t hold your brand back, the time for AI is now

You already have a strong foundation to let AI into your customer experience operations. Now is a great time to do it, because it’s still early and many brands still haven’t made this transition. AI-powered can elevate your customer experience to new heights.