June 12, 2025
The Role of AI in Customer Experience
Positive customer experiences aren’t just a nice-to-have for businesses – they can have a major impact on your bottom line.
In fact, research from PwC shows that:
👉 73% of consumers believe customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions
👉 65% say positive customer experiences are more influential than great advertising
👉 42% would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience
But how can you consistently delight your customers without significantly increasing your headcount? Simple: by investing in AI-powered customer experience (CX).
What do "AI customer experiences" actually look like? 🤔
The phrase “AI customer experience” refers to delivering more efficient, proactive, and personal customer experiences using various artificial intelligence-related technologies, including:
Chatbots
Digital customer support agents
Machine learning
Not only does AI help businesses improve their customer experiences, but it also allows them to scale CX. However many customers you serve, artificial intelligence can take the strain—without forcing you to hire a bunch of new support staff.
Limitations of traditional customer support ☎️
Traditional, human-powered customer service, whether phone-based, email-based, or in-person, has a major limitation: it’s reactive rather than proactive.
When you think about it, this is inevitable. You’ve only got so many employees. Chances are, they’re already pretty busy handling customer queries and solving problems—let alone trying to anticipate issues that haven’t even happened yet.
Under this traditional approach, there’s little you can do to level up your support offering, other than hiring more employees. It’s super inefficient.
On the flip side, AI customer experience allows you to predict future issues based on a customer’s behavior, helping you fix problems before they’ve even arisen.
And when a customer does need your support, AI agents can do a lot of the hard work for you, freeing up human staff to add real value to your business.
Types of AI solutions to enhance the customer experience 🤖
There are various AI-based technologies you can use to improve your customer experience, from support tools (like chatbots and AI call handling services) to predictive solutions like recommendation engines and sentiment analysis software. All of these play a key role in helping customers find what they’re looking for – whether that’s a specific product or service, or an answer to a question.
Chatbots
A chatbot is a computer program that uses technologies like generative AI and natural language processing to simulate human conversation with customers.
They’re great at answering FAQs and pointing customers toward valuable information on your website. And when they can’t resolve an issue, they can elevate it to a human employee.
Virtual assistants
In the world of customer experience, an AI virtual assistant is a digital tool that answers customer queries through text or voice-based conversations.
Virtual assistants can handle multi-step tasks. For instance, if a customer calls to enquire about a service, a virtual assistant can capture their information and schedule a meeting with a human employee.
So they’re kinda like chatbots, but smarter.
AI call handling
Struggling to deal with a high volume of customer calls? You need an AI-powered call handling service, which uses artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology to handle key customer support tasks like:
👉 Capturing leads
👉 Taking messages
👉 Booking appointments
Like with chatbots and virtual assistants, if your AI call handling service can’t resolve a query on the spot, it’ll pass the issue along to a human support agent.
Recommendation engines
Recommendation engines have various use cases. But, from a customer experience perspective, they use a customer’s previous actions – like their browsing history and past purchases – to steer the customer toward relevant products, services, or promotions.
This leads to a more streamlined path to purchase. And the easier it is for customers to find what they’re searching for, the happier they’ll be.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis uses a customer’s words – spoken or written – to understand how they feel about a given topic. This can help your support agents (human or AI-powered) to provide better, more personalized support. To give a simple example, if the customer sounds super stressed, your agents can adopt a more calming, reassuring tone.
9 ways AI can deliver better customer experiences ✅
By enabling businesses to support customers round the clock via their preferred channels, AI makes it easier to deliver high-quality customer experiences at scale. But it’s not just about scalability – AI customer experiences are also more personalized, relevant, and consistent. All of which ensures customers know what to expect every time they pick up the phone to you or strike up a conversation with a chatbot.
Provide always-on customer support
Arguably the most obvious customer experience-related benefit of AI is the ability to deliver 24/7 customer support. Even if a customer gets in touch outside of business hours, your AI agent will still be on hand to serve them. AI tools can also deal with multiple queries simultaneously, reducing wait times and improving the overall customer experience.
Answer FAQs faster (and more accurately)
Chances are, your agents answer certain questions over and over again. Wouldn’t it be good if you could answer those questions without eating into your human employees’ valuable time?
With AI supporting your customer experience, you can. AI tools can answer FAQs without the involvement of a human agent. And you can also use generative AI to create knowledge base content at scale, helping you write even more answers to frequent questions.
Train support agents more effectively
A lesser-known benefit of artificial intelligence in customer experience is the ability to train your human support agents more effectively.
For instance, AI can analyze customer interactions to identify the types of queries that are least likely to be resolved in a single “contact” with your support team. That way, you can provide better training on those specific issues, meaning more customer queries will be solved first time.
The end result: you’ve improved the customer experience while boosting productivity 💪
Anticipate customer needs with predictive analytics
Think of predictive analytics as a crystal ball that helps you anticipate customer issues before they arise 🔮
For instance, when a customer visits the services page on your website, you might reach out to them (automatically) via chatbot to help them choose the service that best fits their need – or put them in touch with a human agent if they require more support.
This means customers are less likely to pay for the wrong package, thereby reducing the risk of complaints down the line.
Enable super personalized interactions
Personalization is one of the key “ingredients” in improving your customer experience. According to McKinsey:
👉 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions
👉 76% feel frustrated when interactions aren’t personalized
Without artificial intelligence and other automated technologies, it’s pretty much impossible to achieve personalization at scale – there just aren’t enough hours in the day for your team to deep-dive into the history and preferences of every customer who gets in touch.
But AI can do all the legwork for you, either by delivering personalized experiences through AI support agents, or through providing human agents with personalized customer data when they need it.
Share relevant offers with customers
What’s better than giving a customer a 10% discount on their next purchase?
Easy: offering a 10% discount on their favorite product or service, at exactly the time they were starting to consider placing another order.
Personalized offers like this help you boost your conversion rate, increase retention, and keep your customers happier – all of which adds up to a better customer experience. But you can’t do it without an AI tool to analyze a customer’s order history and purchase frequency (at least, not at scale).
Create more consistent brand experiences
With traditional, human-powered support, there’s always a risk that the customer experience will vary based on which agent a customer speaks to.
Artificial intelligence solves this issue. You can customize the “personality” of an AI chatbot or voice agent to perfectly align with your brand – and every customer who gets in touch will have the exact same type of experience.
This sort of consistency makes your business look more professional.
Get agents up to speed on past interactions
Most businesses have a ton of information about their customers.
Trouble is, it’s often spread across multiple platforms – like CRMs, email inboxes, and manual spreadsheets. This makes it hard for support agents to find key data in a hurry.
Once again, AI can help by summarizing past conversations and sharing the context behind previous interactions, helping human agents serve customers more effectively.
React to customer sentiment in real time
AI is capable of monitoring customer feedback across multiple channels simultaneously, helping businesses to:
👉 Identify likely issues before they escalate
👉 Respond quickly to positive and negative comments
👉 Track customer engagement and sentiment
Best of all, it happens in real time through the power of artificial intelligence. So when a problem occurs, you can take instant action to put out the fire.
Real-world examples of AI for customer experience 🌎
Artificial intelligence is no longer the technology of the future. Businesses like yours are using AI right now to deliver enhanced customer experiences and save time for human employees. AI helps businesses in a wide range of industries; if you receive a high volume of customer queries, it can definitely help you too.
Example #1: Southern Indiana Driving School
Jamer Hanner, owner of Southern Indiana Driving School, had hired a bunch of live receptionists in 50+ years of business experience. He even experimented with human-powered answering services. But he was never totally satisfied due to a combination of:
👉 Employee turnover
👉 High costs
👉 Inconsistent customer interactions
That all changed when he switched to AI call handling from Rosie.
“After using Rosie AI, I fired my live answering service yesterday because Rosie provides more accuracy, faster responses, and 24/7 availability – all at a fraction of the cost."
—James Hanner, owner of Southern Indiana Driving School
Example #2: Carvana
Automotive e-commerce platform Carvana used AI to identify and run A/B tests on its website. These tests resulted in various improvements to the online car-buying process, helping Carvana achieve a ~5% uplift in the number of cars reserved for checkout.
Example #3: Tryg
Insurance company Tryg launched Mia, a conversational, AI-powered virtual chat agent that initially helped customers carry out insurance claims. It worked so well that the company expanded Mia’s offering to assist customers searching for information about specific insurance products and services.
In a single year, Mia handled 200,000+ conversations, of which around 80% required zero support from human agents.
Ethical considerations in AI customer experience ⚖️
Artificial intelligence is unquestionably a good thing for businesses – but there are some ethical considerations you should bear in mind to ensure customers feel positive about their interactions with AI. It’s important to make sure you’re being transparent about how and when you use AI in customer interactions, and always respect customers’ concerns around security and privacy.
Be transparent about AI usage
Where possible, make sure customers know when they’re speaking to an AI agent rather than a real human. This sort of transparency will help you build trust with your audience.
Respect privacy concerns
While personalization is a key element in improving the customer experience, it can also come across as creepy when misused. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here – you’ll have to test various approaches to personalization to see what resonates with customers (and what doesn’t).
Regularly update AI tools
Don’t treat AI customer experiences as a one-and-done exercise. Once you’ve invested in your AI toolkit, review the individual tools regularly to ensure they’re still fit for purpose and are delivering on your customer experience goals. If a specific tool is generating a bunch of negative feedback, consider phasing it out.
The bottom line ✍️
AI customer experiences look different from one industry or business to the next. But the most effective implementations share a few common qualities, such as:
👉 Meeting customers via their favorite communications channels (email, phone, live chat, etc)
👉 Delivering personalized interactions without feeling invasive
👉 Helping human agents provide better support through better training and smoother access to customer data
To get it right, you need to choose the right AI-powered tools. If your business receives a high volume of customer calls, you should definitely check out Rosie’s AI call answering service – it’s 10x cheaper than a human answering service and 10x better than voicemail.
But don’t take our word for it.
See for yourself by creating your free Rosie account – your first 25 minutes of call handling are on us!
FAQs
Why does customer experience matter?
Customer experience matters because it directly affects how customers interact with and perceive your brand, thereby influencing factors like customer loyalty, retention, and conversion rates. The better your customer experience, the more positive feedback you’ll receive, which can help you attract even more customers – it’s a virtuous cycle!
How can AI improve customer retention?
AI can improve customer retention by helping you deliver more personalized customer interactions. For instance, you can cut churn and increase repeat business by sharing targeted promotions with existing customers when they’re likely to be considering a new purchase. Furthermore, AI-powered predictive analytics can help you identify potential customer issues before they turn into serious complaints and cancellations.
What are the benefits of using AI-powered customer service?
There are wide-ranging business benefits to using AI-powered customer service, including:
Increased efficiency and higher productivity
The ability to personalize customer interactions at scale
Reduced customer complaints through proactive support
Faster response times and a higher rate of first-contact resolutions
Lower overall costs, with less need to hire a large human support team