This innovation rests on the fact that AI brings a capability that people simply do not have: the ability to rapidly analyze large amounts of data from different sources with great precision. It’s about understanding the strengths and weaknesses of people and technology and using them as complements to each other. The AI technology can drive data analytics and predictive insights that underlie targeted offers and customer-support interactions, while people provide the human elements of caring, compassion, and understanding to better serve customers. 

AI can unlock the ability to offer personalization that serves as a differentiator, enables intelligent self-service, customer service, and powers an omnichannel approach to connecting with customers when, where, and how they prefer. Bringing people and technology together with AI for improving the customer experience creates stronger customer relationships and empowers employees, which benefits both the business and the customer. 

Incorporated within Etiya’s Digital Business Platforms are innovative AI-driven tools and capabilities, including natural language processing (NLP) and predictive analytics, to help CSPs transform their businesses, enrich and personalize the customer experience, and reduce costs. Etiya’s AI platform Cognitus enables automation between service and operations processes to give operators the ability to offer personalized services through emotional, contextual predictions, and recommendations.

The power of AI for improving customer experience

Etiya sees the success of AI for improving the customer experience intertwined with its ability to enable companies to better know their customers. Using AI for a Know Your Customers, or KYC, approach for improving the customer experience encompasses analyzing customer data to gain actionable insights from a variety of sources including services, subscriptions, usage data, demographics, and behavior. It also incorporates social listening to reveal customer sentiment. This data has a variety of applications, from modeling churn predictions to supporting more precise segmentation and creating higher-performing marketing campaigns.

For example, Etiya’s Deep Learning Digital Twin Generator can bring AI personalization for improving the customer experience to the next level with targeted recommendations for customers on digital channels or in-store. The tool can build a digital twin based on similar customer behaviors—for specific customer segments, even microsegments or individual customers—anchored in what products or services they need, and how they have reacted to past offers. The digital twin provides predictive information that can feed into personalized offers based on contextual or behavioral patterns, to address specific customer needs, support smarter decision-making, better customer interactions, and intelligent recommendations.

Etiya’s AI algorithms provide predictive and prescriptive customer service recommendations and tailored solutions to address specific customer experience issues. For example, if a customer previously had difficulty with achieving resolution through call centers, proactively offering self-service or assisted service through online channels or with chatbot tools can be a better (and automated) solution. This can both save time and alleviate customer experience friction by predicting what channel and customer service solutions the customer prefers—and by connecting it to a robust knowledge base for automated self-service or by applying a smart agent match to connect them to an empowered Customer Sales Representative (CSR) who is most skilled to solve a specific problem.

AI can also help CSPs pinpoint potential customer problems and predict churn before it happens. Intelligent insights provide CSPs with precious time to respond quickly and improve customer satisfaction, identify the best offers for cross-sell and upsell campaigns, and design tailored loyalty offers and programs—all of which can help avoid customer churn. By personalizing the customer experience with AI, CSPs can gain other benefits including increased sales, service usage, and customer loyalty. All of this is powered by enriching and improving the customer experience with AI-generated and personalized predictions and recommendations.

AI and automation for improving the customer experience

AI-powered automation for improving the customer experience is transforming the roles of both people and technology across all enterprises, including telecom. It’s driving a shift from disparate systems with finite or limited functionality toward seamless integration into a single, centralized system underpinned by automation for specific, focused functions. This shift is blurring the lines between individual systems and creating one customer-centric solution, which also means a shift to more comprehensive platforms, such as Etiya’s Digital Business Platforms.