By Steven Van Belleghem is a customer experience enthusiast with a mission to inspire companies to become more customer-centric.
Customer experience vs. customer service
A misunderstanding about customer experience is that it is confused with customer service. The customer experience is much broader and gives people the feeling that they are important, special. With every interaction, we can create a fantastic customer experience. Customer experience affects every division of the organization, and every employee can be an ambassador that makes customers feel good. Successful customer experience goes beyond the product.
Effective empathy (not just empathy, which is very vague in the business world) is important to providing a great customer experience. Effective empathy is a combination of rapid feedback loops combined with rapid action cycles – no months of waiting and no excuses not to act on data. Successful companies combine quick feedback and quick action.
Artificial Intelligence and customer experience:
Today we talk a lot about the productivity gains of AI and how it will change the way we work, but people will also use it to make decisions.
How people book hotels, for example. Will it still be the hotel website or a third-party platform or through an AI assistant? We will tell the AI where we are going, what our family is like and what we want in a hotel. We will no longer see endless lists and sponsored links, but rather something truly relevant to each of us. If we receive a personalized recommendation, it will influence us. We need to ask ourselves which brands will pass the AI filter and which will be blocked? What decisions must we make today to ensure we overcome this system? This is the most interesting thing about AI and customer experience today.
