The Age of the
Customer-Centric CIO

By CIO.com
CIO.com delivers the latest tech news, analysis, how-to, blogs, and video for IT professionals.

Chapter 3: Make Way for Technology to Improve CX

Many of today’s most widely anticipated technologies—AI, machine learning, and chatbots, among others—have the greatest potential to transform customer experience and launch organizations down the path to customer-centricity.

For example, AI and machine learning are central to turning the data deluge collected from myriad systems and customer touchpoints into actionable insights and personalized recommendations that will strengthen relationships and deliver competitive advantage. AI and machine learning are central to uncovering patterns that reveal customer behavior, including predicting what they might do next. With an AI-empowered unified customer view, Sales can predict what opportunities are most likely to close and get recommendations on how to finalize those deals. Customer Service can use the intelligence to resolve issues before they happen, and Marketing can create predictive customer journeys and custom experiences that will transform customer interactions. IDC predicts that by 2019, 40% of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by some sort of cognitive computing or AI effort.

Chatbots, in particular, have a lot of potential to shake up traditional customer interactions. Fast becoming a regular feature on leading websites, chatbots can be used to gather information and provide answers to customers in a relatively fast and straightforward manner, which elevates customer service. Among the “2019 State of the CIO” respondents, 19% are actively investing in customer experience technologies such a s chatbots and mobile apps.

There is good reason for all the interest: Juniper Research predicts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per year by 2022, up from $20 million in 2017. Servion predicts that AI will power 95% of all customer interactions by 2025 and will do so so effectively that customers will not be able to “spot the bot” any longer. Looking out into the not-so-distant future is Gartner, which predicts that 85% of customer relationships will take place without human interaction by 2020.