Strenthening Customer Experience through Artificial Intelligence: An upcoming Trend.

• Author: Batra, Madan M.

INTRODUCTION

The core thinking behind this paper is that (1) artificial intelligence can improve customer experience, (2) customer purchase journey is an important part of the customer experience that is impacted, and (3) if artificial intelligence is incorporated effectively by business firms into their operations, it should improve company competitiveness.

The organizational focus on customer experience (CX) has been rising given the current consumer empowerment which consumers have acquired through easy access to free social media, as well as rapid digital and technological advancements and disruptions (Batra, 2017). Among other things, free access to social media gives the customers power to express their negative experiences with brands and corporations easily, thereby jeopardizing the goodwill and reputation of those corporations. This potential threat has made it necessary for businesses to acquire a better understanding and grip of customers' purchase journeys. The technological advancements in artificial intelligence have facilitated this corporate task. This is one way as to how artificial intelligence has begun to strengthen the customer experience. This paper focuses on the elaboration of the role of artificial intelligence in strengthening customer experience and aligning the customer's purchase journey. This description may assist future researchers in articulating investigative associations between the different dimensions of artificial intelligence and customer service excellence. The practitioners may benefit in strengthening their understanding of how to utilize the technological advancements to strengthen customer experiences.

This essay is carved out as follows. First, the nature of customer experience and its emerging role in today's consumer empowerment era is discussed. Then, the changing nature of the customer purchase journey is discussed given the omnicommunication and omni-distribution channels that utilize digital and social media, and that are heavily used by today's marketers. Then, the relevant dimensions of artificial intelligence are discussed. Last, the role of artificial intelligence in strengthening the field of customer experience and in aligning customer purchase journey is articulated.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer experience as an academic concept is the latest version of the earlier related areas of academic focus on organizational customer service excellence, customer centricity and customer focus. The earlier versions of customer focus also included the buying process models (for example, the popularized conjunctive, disjunctive, lexicographic and ideal brand models for evaluation of the purchase alternatives), service quality, market orientation, relationship marketing, and customer relationship management (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). Some salient aspects of the customer experience at both macro-and micro-levels are briefed below.

At the macro-level, the current customer experience (CX) industry has three types of players and stakeholders that include (1) executives, practitioners, managers and frontline employees, (2) digital product suppliers and vendors; and (3) consultants, experts, educators, researchers, and bloggers. All these three types of stakeholders have been playing a significant role in addressing the challenges of customer experience industry and in advancing the field of customer experience.

The CX has an evolutionary challenge at the firm (micro) level, as well. Both the consumer empowerment and technological advancement, lately, have been significant, rapid, disruptive and overwhelming. The customer-experience focus in a growing organization is continual and evolutionary; it does not happen overnight, and it is a result of strong, continual and supportive organizational belief and employee commitment. Further, it requires a significant commitment of an organization's resources based upon which the organization goes through numerous evolutionary stages--moving from a CX-tactical organization to a CX-focused organization to a CX-adaptive organization. It is important to grasp and understand the CX industry's best practices at each stage, so that the practices become enablers of moving ahead toward an effective and efficient customer-experience organizational focus (Batra, 2018).

Further, numerous rapid technological as well as digital advancements in artificial intelligence have enriched the field of customer experience with multiple CX tools and analytics that have begun to become mainstream. Some of the popular CX tools and analytics include root cause analytics, Gallup's human sigma tool focusing on employee engagement and customer engagement, Bain's popular net promoter score system, statistically advanced data mining methods, text analytics, descriptive analytics, prescriptive analytics, voice of customer software programs, voice of employee software programs, voice of business software programs, voice of process software programs, customer journey mapping, customer satisfaction index, and customer effort index. The premier consulting firms (such as McKinsey & Co., Accenture, Bain & Co., and MaritzCX) in the USA have lately been persuading large corporations to utilize these illustrative tools to strengthen their customer experience programs. The illustrative application of artificial intelligence on customer experience is articulated in the subsequent sections.

CUSTOMER PURCHASE JOURNEY

Customer experience as a holistic multi-dimensional concept focuses on a customer's cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial, and social responses to a firm's offerings during the customer's entire purchase journey (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). The customer-focused organizations have begun to analyze their customers' purchase journeys in details as they are challenged by the modern-day buying processes that have much fragmented because of the multiple communication and distribution channels available/accessible to customers. Further, some of these channels such as social media are beyond the direct control of organizations, which makes it difficult for organizations to understand the nature of customer purchase journeys.

Customer Purchase Journey Mapping (CPJM) is a measurement and strategic tool that is utilized to analyze the customer purchase journey. A customer purchase journey map is an outcome of the blending of consumer empowerment and technological disruption and is studied at both macro-and micro-levels because of much variation in technological disruption. The originality of CPJM comes from its service quality blueprinting in its earlier format; however, now, it is in a somewhat different format as is elaborated below.

Customer purchase journey mapping incorporates three dimensions, namely, past, current and future customer experiences; within each dimension exist three stages labeled as pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase; customers encounter numerous touch points in each of the three stages which may be within or without the control of the business. The total customer experience can be conceptualized as a "dynamic process" of customer purchase journey.

This iterative and dynamic CX process flows from the pre-purchase stage (need recognition, search of alternatives, consideration) to purchase stage (choice, ordering, payment) to post-purchase stage (consumption, usage, engagement, service requests). This process also incorporates past experiences (previous purchases) as well as the external influences (climate, economy, culture, unemployment). In each of the three purchase stages above, customers may experience numerous touch points, not all of which are typically under a business firm's control...