Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences with AI-Powered Experience Continuum

Customer experience (CX) will define business winners and losers going forward.

You can create a new logo or modernize your building or increase headcount – and it will make little to no difference unless you make customers feel like you care about them. At the end of the day, the quality of the interaction makes the biggest difference for business success.

For B2B companies, this increasingly means harmonizing AI and human interaction.

I’ve long believed that growth comes at the intersection of technology and humanity. I will always champion this because I’ve seen the impact when both are entwined for the greater good. It starts, however, with humanity. Here’s a story about that.

When I worked for Marketo, I stayed at the Marriott three to four days a week in San Mateo, California. Every day, Mimi would be working in the lounge. She knew my name. She asked about my family. Our conversations were bright spots on long days. While I had many hotel options, our connection created a fierce loyalty to the hotel itself. Then came a visit when Mimi wasn’t there.

It turns out the hotel had changed hands. My stay was fine, but never again extraordinary – until two years later when the hotel was taken over by Oracle. While the building was modernized and made even more beautiful, the best part was that Mimi showed up one morning in the concierge lounge to serve breakfast. After all that time, she greeted me and handed me the green tea I always used to ask for. She remembered. She, for me, was a huge part of the customer experience. We talked as though we had just seen one other even though years had passed. The “Mimi Moments” I had always treasured were back.

CX as a Competitive Advantage in B2B

Qualtrics XM Institute studied the topic of B2B CX in its 2023 survey of 155 CX practitioners at companies with 1,000 or more employees. The survey found that “customer experience is a significant or critical priority for 65% of B2B organizations,” followed by product experience. In a perfect world, CX would sit at the top of the list for brands, but the study goes on to reveal that competing priorities is a problem: “Sixty-nine percent of practitioners cited other competing organizational priorities as a significant obstacle to their organization’s CX management efforts, followed by poor integration across systems (61%) and technology limitations (53%).”

One company relentlessly creating a new standard for exceptional CX using AI is NICE – most likely one of the largest global tech companies you’ve never heard of (yet). For the ninth time, Gartner named the company a leader in its Magic Quadrant™ for CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service). Its 8,500+ employees are scientists, engineers, and thought leaders who are devotees of customer satisfaction. When you have that many smart people working on something, you know the status quo is going to be turned on its head. And it is.

NICE’s tech solutions create frictionless, digital experiences throughout the customer journey. It’s like getting all green lights while driving through Washington DC where about 10 traffic lights a mile is not unusual. Instead, NICE enables resolution along the micro-moments that create an enduring relationship between people and brands through data-driven self-service and empowering agents with personalized tools.

In short, NICE is breaking down long standing silos. You know the drill: calling a company to resolve a problem and getting transferred five times with the heart-driven hope that you’ll find a solution in under two hours. The prevailing policy of “not my job” at many companies has a lot to do with silos. This won’t cut it for customers anymore. Modern expectations, whether it be customer-agent interactions or digital self-service, demand fluidity and time efficiency. Silos are like a period at the end of a sentence: they stop people. Keeping the customer relationship in flow is where you want to be to compete and win.

The New Story of Technology and CX Explained

The future of customer service is experiencing a triple play: Cloud platform technologies are enabling all-encompassing platforms which allow unified management of every interaction, including attended, unattended, digital and voice. Secondly, AI for customer service has matured. Gen-AI created immediate accessibility to all – we could all see the possibilities because we could use it to explore ideas. This type of AI is trained on complex interaction data, uniquely equipping it to decode the complexity of the interaction. Lastly, consumer expectations are higher than ever, and they’re pushing the entire industry to innovate faster and smarter.

Helping customers effortlessly navigate channels and anticipate their needs means making the entire experience personalized and seamless for customers along different touchpoints. Just like the proliferation of television channels, there are many options for customer interaction: contact centers, chatbots, emails, social media, text messaging, and phone, among others.

Barry Cooper, President of the NICE CX Division, describes this as the “experience continuum,” where interactions are more complex and fluid between agents and AI, creating greater harmony and flow for customers.

No More Silos

The concept of the experience xontinuum is fascinating to me because, having been a Chief Customer Officer leading a global team, the number one challenge for me was silos. As an example, let’s say sales is closing a deal and a transition to the account success team is about to go live. Eventually, they might hand it back to sales to expand the account and then there’s the customer support team solving ongoing customer problems. The focus for everyone should be retention. Yet, all those handoffs and various platforms oftentimes demanded that customers repeat themselves – who they were, their business goals, the problem at hand – depending upon the team. Understanding each customer’s journey as an experience continuum could be the first step to eliminating disjointed handoffs, departmental silos and platform silos.

After all, it’s the experience we expect to have – or hope to have – and the connections we build along the way that creates brand association and preference for people.

Imagine if a chatbot could bring that feeling forward so customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Using technology, data, and AI, NICE has found a way for brands to finally realize the dream of knowing a customer’s expectations and recreating them again and again, thereby expanding both customer satisfaction and revenue potential.

• CXone: An all-encompassing platform for CX journeys, CXone is the most complete platform for the entire CX journey and the needs of all CX stakeholders.

• Enlighten: Enlighten is the world’s first and only AI solution built specifically for the CX world, trained on more than 30 years of CX interaction data, uniquely equipping it to decode the complexity of new CX interactions. Using the latest generative AI and NICE’s CX data and applications, Enlighten is trusted AI for business that ensures full alignment with business goals and brand messaging. Operationalized as part of CXone, Enlighten is embedded into every stakeholder’s daily activities, humanizing the conversation for business, employees, and consumers alike, no matter how the journey begins or wherever it flows.

What if Customers Considered Your Brand a Close Friend?

We trust friends. We share stories with them. They “get” us and we “get” them. We don’t have to constantly tell them who we are. They just know. Like Mimi. She was the face of the brand to me. She made my experience at the hotel special and memorable.

Understanding customer behaviors makes brands responsive to evolving customer needs. NICE utilizes customer data the right way at multiple points throughout the customer journey, keeping the human touch at the forefront. This leads to genuine engagement. Take a deeper dive into AI and customer service on my show CXOSpice where Barry Cooper, President of the NICE CX Division, predicts some surprising trends in CX and how brands are using it to outperform competitors.

How are you using AI to create “Mimi Moments” for your brand? Share in the comments so we can all learn together.