Table Of Contents

The Need for Artificial Intelligence in CX 2

Three Building Blocks for the Application of AI in CX 4

How AI is Being Applied to Improve CX 8

How to Use AI for CX Measurement

Use AI to Better Understand CX Data 13

Use AI to Make Your CX Metrics Actionable 20

Tips to Implement AI for CX Measurement 26

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The Need For Artificial Intelligence
In Customer Experience
“By 2020, 85% of customer interactions
will be managed without a human” -
Gartner
Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world. But
most companies still force these evolved customers
onto engagement paths that are steeped in legacy and
instantly feel outdated.

Artificial intelligence can be successfully employed to

provide an intelligent, convenient and informed customer
experience at any point along the customer journey. This
will result in re-imagined customer experiences and end-
to-end customer journeys that are integrated and more
personal, so that they feel more natural to customers.

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Customer experience is a customer-facing roles cannot
competitive driver of growth when be expected to understand a
successful and the greatest source customer’s entire history and
of risk when failing. Data insights derive their own insights from it
are one of the primary tools for in real time.
customer experience enhancement.
• Automated systems cannot be
CX datasets are messy, and the hand-programmed with rules
customer behaviors are chaotic. to handle every conceivable
The rules are undefined and the customer history.
success criteria are ambiguous.
Delivering a coherent experience
This complexity in CX datasets is across all enterprise touchpoints
precisely the reason why AI can requires finding patterns across
unleash so much value across the an overwhelming number of data
customer experience: points. This is prime stomping
ground for AI.
• Salespeople, call center agents
and employees in other

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Three Building Blocks for the
Successful Application of AI in CX
The successful application of AI in customer experience requires 3 fundamental capabilities:

• Data Unification
• Real-time Insights
• Business Context

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Data Unification
Data unification is a must for any type of behavioral analytics.
AI thrives on information—the more the better.

A new generation of data unification tools make this daunting

task fast and relatively pain-free. Customer journey analytics
platforms provide this service for a fraction of the cost of the
dedicated data services providers of yore—even delivering a
level of data integration free of charge.

The tedium of pulling together dozens of data sources is now

just background noise. Expect timelines of days not weeks,
with simpler data sources integrated within 1-3 days.

It’s a far cry from the expansive data engineering initiatives

that likely still haunt your dreams.

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 Real-time Insights
For AI to impact the customer experience, insights need to be
conveyed in the moment and through the customer’s chosen
touchpoint. Integrating with these touchpoints is the key to
effective, in-the-moment engagement.

Most leading SaaS platforms have APIs and consider 3rd-

party integrations to be a critical component of their value
proposition.

The truth is that, in addition to elegant SaaS data streams,

most enterprises must rely on myriad on-site, home-grown
and legacy touchpoint data sources such as product interfaces,
payment platforms, point-of-sale systems, customer care
systems and many others. This reality creates a challenge for
delivering real-time insights and are still very much a custom
affair.

Customer journey analytics platforms are now filling this gap to

deliver comprehensive, real-time touchpoint integration with
minimal investment.

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Business Context
For a simple, isolated interaction, AI is able to in shaping customer behavior. That requires
deliver results by simply knowing that an email is an awareness of both the journey that these
an email and a campaign is a campaign. Our web touchpoints helped to shape and the KPIs which
analytics and CRM platforms take advantage of this were subsequently impacted by that customer
inherent luxury. behavior—whether related to revenue, profitability,
customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction
But in holistic, cross-channel journey analytics, or other factors driving high-level business
the assumption that touchpoints will be the same performance.
across enterprises and customers is an antiquated
notion. Armed with that information, AI systems can do
more than find the “next best action” or the
Customer journeys are as unique to individual optimal audience.
businesses as fingerprints. Every company has their
own set of touchpoints and a distinct method for With proper business context, AI can
employing those engagements in their customer find touchpoints and tactics
experience. which actually shape the
customer behaviors
For AI to deliver value, it must be given some For AI to deliver
behind the business’s
context. Context means more than simply primary measures of value, it must be given
designating a certain interaction as an “inbound performance. the context or the
call” and another as “order fulfillment.”
significance of the
The AI must know the significance of these events interaction in shaping
customer behavior.

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How AI Is Being Applied
to Improve CX
1. Customer Service Gets A
Gigantic Makeover
AI’s biggest impact undoubtedly will engagement scenarios.
be to transform customer service They are designed to simulate human
by making it automated, fast and interactions and provide immediate,
hassle-free. Salespeople, call center personalized responses 24*7.
agents and employees in other This eliminates frustrating delays
customer service roles cannot be and errors in customer service,
expected to ingest and understand a particularly for handling customer
customer’s entire history prior to each complaints.
conversation. But, artificial intelligence
Virtual Assistants - Virtual
is now making it possible to leverage all
assistants utilize AI to obey
this information--and more.
commands or answer questions.
Here’s how AI applications are giving Online retailer Spring was one of
customer service a makeover: the first to start using Facebook’s
Messenger Bot to offer a personal
Chatbots - Chatbots are AI-based shopping assistant. It helps
conversation agents that are being shoppers find what they are
used in many different customer- looking for by engaging them in
simple conversations.

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2. Predictive Personalization - Going From
One-Click to Zero-Clicks
Artificial intelligence is helping businesses create experiences that consumer behaviors to predict and deliver goods to homes before
naturally integrate with consumers’ everyday lives. they even realize they are running low. Self-driving cars will use
their knowledge of preferred routes and in-vehicle entertainment
Consumers will no longer change their pattern of communication drawn from past behavior to optimize daily commutes and long
when interacting with brands in order to satisfy their needs. roadtrips.
Intelligent prediction and customization will make customers feel as
if every product or brand experience was tailored just for them. Even asking for help will become easier, as AI infused with
emotions will make customer experience interactions smoother and
Companies will be able to assess individual shopper inventories and
streamlined across channels.

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3. AI-enabled Customer Analytics Discovers
High-Impact Customer Insights
Optimal customer experience is achieved when a business Artificial intelligence-enabled customer journey analytics can
remembers a customer and treats them with attention, respect find answers to important CX queries like:
and consideration throughout their unique customer journey.
• Which customer behaviors are early indicators of
Mining insights across billions of unique customer journeys impending outcomes such as churn?
using traditional analytics methods and tools is a laborious and
slow process, which tends to confine it’s usage to a small set of • What CX actions have your team taken that have been

pre-defined problems. successful (or unsuccessful)?

The power of AI-enabled customer journey analytics is • Which customers/prospects should you engage with to

that it can sift through a much, much larger and more maximize the impact of your outreach?

complex data space and thereby uncover many more

business opportunities—even opportunities you didn’t
realize you should look for. As a result, you can spend your
time prioritizing these insights instead of manipulating the
underlying data.

AI-enabled customer journey analytics finds every single

relationship in the data that exists—without expressly
being told to look for it.

It can predict the likelihood of future behaviors

with high accuracy, while simultaneously finding the
drivers and inhibitors of customer performance.

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 CASE STUDY

Black Diamond Uses AI For

Personalized Engagement
SKI-EQUIPMENT RETAILER BLACK DIAMOND right items to website visitors, rather than waiting
REALIZED THE VALUE OF USING AI FOR until they checkout to make suggestions.
PERSONALIZED ENGAGMENT LONG BEFORE
ITS PEERS. They use sophisticated analytics to glean insights
from a customer’s purchasing history, and combine
The company knew that the old-school customer
it with weather conditions and other relevant data
experience, which required hours of browsing to find
to make product recommendations in real time.
the best product, was not going to cut it anymore.
This effort has reaped rewards for Black Diamond,
Skiers often know exactly what equipment they need increasing sales significantly and dropping cart
to stay safe and compete, such as avalanche airbags. abandonment rates.
Black Diamond predicts these needs and pushes the

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How to Use AI for CX Measurement
There are two fundamental ways in which artificial intelligence can be used to impact customer experience
measurement. AI can help you to:

• Better Understand Your Customer Experience Data

• Make Your CX Metrics Actionable

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Use AI to Better Understand
Your Customer Experience Data
Customers today interact with Most customer experience
companies in a variety of ways, leaving measurement programs are still heavily
a massive trail of experience data in the dependent on customer surveys as a
form of call recordings, chat transcripts, single source of customer experience
comments on websites, and more. They measurement.
even produce data on social platforms
like reviews, posts and images. The most impactful uses of artificial
intelligence are therefore in understanding
With this rich amount of experience the different types of customer data
data, you would think that CX gathered and making better sense of it.
professionals would be digging through
all of it to measure customer experience.
However, that is largely not the case.

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1. Employ AI-based Text Analytics
to Analyze Customer Feedback

A large quantity of unstructured text-

TEXT ANALYTICS
based customer feedback today goes
unanalyzed because it is tedious to mine Multiple Text Sources Provide Rich Customer Insights
text data. While a traditional rules-based
text analytics is currently used by most
text analytics platforms, it is not very
efficient as it requires considerable time
Efficient way of
and skilled resources. SOCIAL CALL analyzing
Moreover, these rules need to change as MEDIA CENTER unstructured data
the subject or language changes and often
companies need to maintain one rule or Adds context & color
model per data source.
to information
Rules need to be manually enhanced all received from CX
the time and the system can sometimes metrics
become so complex that the rules start to
break down.
SALES SURVEY Enables you to
NOTES COMMENTS respond quickly to
service issues

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1. Employ AI-based Text Analytics
to Analyze Customer Feedback (con’t)
Text analytics adds context and color to the information better. Sentiment and intent can be particularly useful
you receive through your customer experience metrics. for a number of use cases, such as determining why
Take, for example, the Net Promoter Score, which is customers churn.
a popular CX metric that captures your customers’
Recent developments in the field of deep learning hold
happiness by asking how likely they are to recommend
promise when it comes to the more difficult aspects of
your product or company to others.
sentiment analysis, such as detecting sarcasm.
Simply knowing your overall Net Promoter Score won’t
tell you why you are receiving it or, more importantly, “Airline X never responded to my
how to improve it. The ‘why’ comes from customer complaint. I love being ignored.”
comments, social media posts and online reviews—all
of which are quite difficult and labor intensive to mine Traditionally, a machine would have a hard time
without AI. interpreting this statement as one intended to express
the negative sentiment of sarcasm.
The use of artificial intelligence in text analytics is based
on algorithms that learn to understand language without However, researchers at the Indian Institute of
being explicitly programmed to do so. Technology in Bombay, for example, have recently
developed deep learning algorithms that do the hard
While it’s difficult to accurately determine sentiment task of detecting sarcasm in text.
and intent using rules-based text analytics approaches,
AI-based text analytics platforms perform much

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2. Speech Analytics with Auditory Cues
Today, the utilization of speech data is largely confined to call Deep learning algorithms are bringing a revolutionary change
center recordings or transcripts. These transcripts only capture in how speech is transcribed to text. These approaches are
what was said, missing entirely the auditory cues that indicate much more accurate for understanding emotions, intent,
how it was said. relevancy and topics addressed. They are also able to process
significantly larger amounts of data much more quickly.
For instance, did the customer raise his voice? Was there an
angry tone or an emotional breakdown? Speech contains These algorithms provide all the auditory cues that you need
valuable insights into customer sentiment and behavior that to reveal valuable insights from customer feedback, so you can
are lost if the call is not recorded or only a transcript is made take action to improve customer experience throughout the
available. customer journey.

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3. Emotion AI

“By 2022, your personal In customer experience, this can

make all the difference. Let’s
device will know more say a machine learning program
about your emotional can detect that you are stressed
state than your own out and plug in a call-center rep
faster, reducing your wait time.
family.” — Gartner
The increase in empathy this
The ability to understand and would generate could stop you
accurately predict your customers’ from churning or possibly lead to
emotions is precious to you as a additional business by way of an
customer experience professional. upsell or cross-sell.
Until recently, that was only
possible if the customer told you
how she felt. But with the advent
of what is now being called
artificial emotional intelligence or
Emotion AI, machines can detect
emotions from multiple channels—
just the way humans do.

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3. Emotion AI (con’t)
Sensors Turn Emotional Experiences Into Objective Data mPath, an MIT Media Lab spin out, can wirelessly measure
changes in skin conductance (subtle electrical changes across the
When it comes to customer feedback, emotional signals skin). These signals can indicate emotions such as excitement,
can provide valuable insights based on changes in facial stress, frustration, engagement or confusion. mPath aims to
expressions, tone and pitch of voice, body language, and even provide AI-based technology to scientifically measure customers’
neurophysiological activity conveyed through biometric markers. experiences even when they don’t describe it themselves.

VIEWERS EMOTIONALLY REACT TO CELEBRITIES. WHEN

LEONARDO DICAPRIO FIRST APPEARS ON SCREEN IN ‘THE
DEPARTED’ SENSORS REGISTER A SPIKE IN VIEWER’S SKIN
CONDUCTANCE. IMAGE SOURCE: WWW.BUILDEMPATHY.COM

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4. Transform CX Surveys Into an Instrument
for Real-time Customer Engagement
A recent trend among CX AI could help you mine that data
professionals is to make customer in real time to detect sentiment.
surveys shorter, more robust Customer service teams could then
and more efficient. The typical use it during a customer call to ask
customer survey is a one-sided follow-up questions, resolve any
static information sheet that leaves complaints, accept compliments,
no room for customization or thank customers or offer sincere
conversation. It is not able to adapt apologies, as the case may be.
based on where the customer is in
their journey.

Artificial intelligence has the

ability to transform the customer
feedback survey into a context- AI has the ability to
aware instrument for customer
transform the customer
engagement. You could, for
feedback survey
example, design the survey to let
users upload audio, video or images. into a context-aware
instrument for customer
engagment

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Use AI to Make Your CX
Metrics Actionable
Most organizations struggle to show how the customer This is because they are unable to distill the data
experience metrics they collect impact business they collect into actionable insights. In the following
performance or how they are using it to improve sections, we show how AI can make a real difference by
customer experience. making customer experience metrics actionable.

20

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1. Find Insights Across Customer Journeys
Customer experience professionals AI-based customer journey analytics tools
need to measure customer feedback can be used to rapidly and easily integrate
gathered across end-to-end customer customer data from a variety of sources to
journeys from multiple sources like achieve a single customer view. This view
customer surveys, social media platforms, reveals actionable insights from customer
call center recordings, etc. Often they experience data that enables you to
need to provide this feedback to other take direct actions that will maximize
departments, such as operations, finance, benefits for your organization, improve
and others. your customers’ experiences, take your
customer experience measurement
However, most of this data resides program to the next level, and make your
in organizational silos and customer organization more customer-centric.
experience teams are not equipped to
extract it, much less find insights from it.

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2. Detect Emerging Customer
Experience Issues
Customer Experience teams using AI-enabled customer journey analytics
traditional analytics methods often fail can find every single relationship in the
to detect small and emerging customer data that exists (without expressly being
experience problems. This may happen told to look for it).
because the issue may fall outside the
radar of the customer experience metrics It can predict the likelihood of future

they are monitoring. Sometimes, an behaviors with high accuracy and find

anomaly may occur that represents an the inhibitors of current customer

entirely new and unexpected pattern of performance. As a result, you can spend

behavior, so the customer experience your time sharing and prioritizing actions

team won’t know to look for it. based on these insights instead of
manipulating the underlying data.
The power of using an AI-based customer
journey analytics tool for customer
experience measurement is that it can sift
through a much larger and more complex
data space to uncover unanticipated
issues or anomalies.

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3. Train Employees Utilizing CX Metrics
Customer feedback offers rich data to train customer Using real-time analytics through an AI-based tool,
service employees. However, this feedback is typically customer experience teams can effectively train employees
utilized long after it’s given and without much context. on how to handle customer complaints in a way that
When the training is sporadic, it tends to lose much of its satisfies customers and helps retain them.
effectiveness.

Artificial Intelligence can help here too by utilizing the

insights gleaned from customer feedback—often in real
time.

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 CASE

Humana Uses AI to Improve Customer

Service & Train Employees
Health insurance provider Humana has thousands of customer service employees handling daily
customer complaint calls. Humana knows that every call is an opportunity to create a favorable
impression with a customer and generate valuable feedback for employee training.
Humana’s customer experience Despite all this, they acknowledge the So Wilson tried an AI-based real-time
measurement program garners a method has shortcomings. conversation analysis tool that gives
significant investment of money and real-time prompts for employees and
effort. They measure CX metrics like Says Geeta Wilson, the Vice president notifications on how to change their
NPS, CSAT and VOC through emails of Customer Experience, “Every human behavior.
and focus groups. assessment is always going to have
some margin of error. Even if you’re The results for Humana included a
Calls to their contact center are really good at that as a company, you’ll significant increase in both NPS and
recorded and randomly assessed for always be off.” issue resolution.
quality.

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4. Enable Users to Query Data from Interactive
Dashboards Using Natural Language
AI can help you increase the scope, scale and visibility Artificial intelligence can help here, as well. AI-based tools
of your customer experience measurement program by are now being developed that enable users to find CX
presenting your insights in a visual, interactive dashboard. insights using natural language processing. This enables
This will keep your stakeholders and employees engaged users to get answers much more rapidly, so that they can
and ensure that the customer experience measurement resolve them faster.
program is poised for growth and success.
For example, let’s say you are a customer experience
An AI-based customer journey analytics tool, for instance, can manager for a restaurant and you know your food ordering
help create a consolidated visual interactive dashboard that app went down for a few hours. Instead of struggling to find
presents all your customer experience metrics in real time the appropriate data, if you could simply ask, ‘How many
and monitors them over time. It also links these metrics to key customers were affected by the app outage today between
customer journeys. 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.?’ and get the right answer back, you could
then deal with the issue more rapidly.
But your job isn’t done after creating a dashboard. How
many times have you provided an executive with access to
a dashboard, only to have them ask for further analysis or
explanation by a member of the analytics or CX team?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could ask a question and the

dashboard could answer? After all, it does contain all the
insights!

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Tips to Implement AI for Customer
Experience Measurement
Utilize Multichannel Customer Data From are harder to detect and more difficult to control before it’s
too late. With AI, analyzing unstructured data is far easier.
All Possible Sources Therefore, make it a habit to monitor your customer experience
Before you begin collecting and analyzing customer data, have a metrics on a regular basis through interactive dashboards.
plan in place for where you will be getting that data from. Make
sure you are utilizing all possible sources of customer data in all Measure the Impact of AI on CX
its forms—text, speech, images, videos and emotions. Measurement
It is also crucial to collect customer experience data throughout Once you start using the artificial intelligence methods
the end-to-end customer journey and not just at the time of previously described, it is important to track the results in terms
onboarding a new customer. of their impact on customer experience measurement.

In this way, AI-based customer journey analytics can help you It will take time to see the results, as a lot of these processes
rapidly integrate multichannel data and present a complete have traditionally been black boxes and some, like employee
picture of your customer training, are hard to quantify. Tracking, measuring and providing
feedback is crucial, so that the algorithms can be trained to
Analyze CX Metrics Regularly provide better insights.

Many companies make the mistake of looking at customer

experience metrics on a monthly or quarterly basis. Historically,
this may have been because unstructured feedback is difficult to
analyze. But this infrequent analysis also means that problems

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 Contact Us
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Customers’ Journeys
Pointillist makes it easy for CX professionals to uncover and
optimize the journeys that matter to your customers, so you can
improve customer experience results and impact the KPIs that
matter most to your business.

• Quickly understand customer behavior across all touch-points

& channels over time

• Uncover and predict high-impact customer journeys

• Drive personalized, multi-channel customer experiences

Unlike other journey analytics solutions, Pointillist lets you connect

the dots between customer interactions and business goals in
seconds, rather than days or weeks. By using artificial intelligence
to reveal high-impact journeys and predict likely behavior,
Pointillist is like having a personal data scientist that’s always on
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