How to integrate AI into your existing CX infrastructure

Today’s online shoppers expect quick, efficient, and personalized experiences. Therefore, building and maintaining a top-notch customer experience (CX) is paramount.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing e-commerce, empowering direct-to-consumer brands to elevate their CX by automating inboxes, troubleshooting, categorizing tickets, and analyzing interactions. Those that have embraced AI are reaping the rewards.

When it comes to integrating AI into your CX, you might picture a daunting process. However, with sufficient preparation and the right vendor, it can go smoother than you expect.

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Read on to learn how to fuse AI into your CX infrastructure and discover why Yuma AI is the ideal partner.

Step #1: Evaluate your current CX infrastructure

It’s important to first take inventory of what you have, so take a deep dive into your existing processes and tools. Be sure to:

• Audit your support channels: List every platform you use to interact with customers — email, live chat, phone, social, and otherwise. Assess how these channels are performing. Are some more popular than others among customers? Are some causing friction for your support team? This information will help inform where to automate.
• Review your systems: Review your systems and processes to identify workflows. Does your team rely on third-party apps like Recharge, Loop, or ShipBob for subscriptions, returns, and shipping? If so, your AI platform should also connect to these services. If you don’t yet have clear internal processes, you may want to start by defining those. Without well-structured instructions for each scenario you wish to automate, you won’t get the most out of your AI. So, define your processes and start by automating the most clearly defined ones.
• Scrutinize your workflows: How does your team typically handle customer complaints, queries, and feedback? Analyze these workflows from initial contact through resolution and keep an eye out for places where the process breaks down.
• Assess your team’s capabilities: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your support team. Consider their skill sets and the volume of tickets they handle to identify gaps in experience and where it would be most beneficial to automate their workload.

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Step #2: Single out areas for improvement

After you’ve taken stock of your existing CX infrastructure, you’ll be able to identify pain points and areas for optimization. Ask yourself questions like:

• Are customer wait times a major concern?
• Are my agents fielding repetitive questions?
• Do customer complaints follow similar patterns or arrive at common roadblocks?
• Could my team be doing more impactful work if we were to automate various processes?
• Is the quality of support my customers receive consistent from one representative to the next?
• Do I have adequate staff to handle surges in demand?
• Are we able to provide support to customers across the globe in their native language?

The answers to these questions will help you pin down where AI can make the greatest impact.

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Step #3: Define specific, measurable objectives

Now that you’ve audited your systems and identified processes to automate, it’s time to set up actionable goals. These objectives should be specific and measurable. Examples might be along the lines of:

• Reduce the average customer wait time by 20% in three months: Shorter response times directly correlate to greater customer satisfaction. Knowing that, you might choose to automate responses to common queries via virtual assistant.
• Improve customer satisfaction by 30% over six months: AI can generate accurate, personalized responses, which in turn leads to happier shoppers. You might then compare your post-integration customer satisfaction scores to baseline.
• Increase customer engagement by 10% in two months: With tools at your disposal like automated follow-ups, behavior-based offers, and customer feedback, you might set a goal such as this to quantify growth in customer engagement. 
• Improve peak-time efficiency by 15% in six months: With AI, you can automate routine tasks and optimize your customer service resource allocation with dynamic scheduling. This will free up your agents to handle more complex issues during busy times.
• Automate 50% of tickets in six months: You might set a goal to automate half of your customer service interactions in the first two quarters post-integration. Automating tasks like FAQs, troubleshooting, and ticket categorization can help free up your staff to handle more complex queries.
• Achieve 25% cost savings in 12 months: By effectively allocating human resources and automating routine tickets, you can put a significant dent in your operational costs.

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Step #4: Choose the right vendor for your needs

Once you have measurable goals in place, you’re ready to do a little shopping of your own. Picking the right partner is the single most important step in the process, so be sure to keep several things in mind.

• Industry knowledge: If you want an additional leg up on the competition, opt for a vendor that knows your industry inside and out. Yuma AI is built for e-commerce businesses like yours.
• Success: Our track record of success speaks for itself. Check out the story behind one of our many happy customers, Koin Club. With our technology, the collectibles company automated 40% of its tickets and skyrocketed its response time from 6% to 57%.
• Tech stack: Most AI vendors offer piecemeal services. They might be able to automate your inbox, for instance, but not monitor your socials. Yuma AI, on the other hand, handles the entire CX journey from start to finish. Our technology is unique in that it can fully resolve tickets without human intervention. 
• Training: You’ll want to select an AI partner that provides comprehensive training. Yuma AI offers robust resources that will help get your staff up to speed.
• Support: It’s not just your customers’ experience you should keep in mind — you’ll need reliable support from your AI vendor, too. Yuma AI takes pride in providing quick response times and troubleshooting. We’re always here to help.

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Step #5: Map out the integration process with your vendor

When you partner with us, we’ll help you customize an integration plan fit to your needs. Here are some steps you’ll want to consider:

• Recap your objectives: As we touched on above, specific and measurable objectives are key. If you’re aiming to reduce response times by 25% in the first quarter post-integration, write it down and make sure it’s common knowledge among your team.
• Map out a timeline: Create a detailed timeline for each step of the process from initial planning to full deployment. Establish specific milestones for things like pilot testing, full-scale implementation, and post-integration analysis.
• Allocate the necessary resources: Ensure you have the appropriate personnel in place to test and launch. You may want to divy up specific roles and responsibilities to each team member to promote accountability.
• Involve key stakeholders: Engage your IT team in the technical aspects of integration like data security and system compatibility. Get your customer service representatives onboarded with their new AI tools and ask for their feedback, as they’ll be working closely with it on a day-to-day basis. Finally, don’t forget to utilize your AI vendor for support and training.
• Collect data: No matter your key performance indicators (KPIs) — better response times, greater customer satisfaction, or otherwise — track the data closely.
• Monitor and adjust: You might need to pivot your strategy — for example, you may speed up or slow down your phased implementation depending on resource allocation or unexpected roadblocks. Stay flexible in your approach and adjust as needed.

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A few more friendly tips

At Yuma AI, we’ve learned a lot from our customers and their successes. We’ve also observed their challenges and helped them overcome various obstacles. Here are a few more suggestions to keep in mind:

• Know what you want AI to accomplish: It’s critical to lay out specifically how you want AI to benefit your organization and how it will fit into your operation.
• Be intentional and specific: It’s often best to onboard in phases. Start small, adjust, and then keep building.
• Utilize internal resources: You have a whole team with internal business knowledge. They understand the lingo of your organization and how things get done. Consider dedicating a specific team member or two to onboarding to help ensure a smooth transition.
• Embrace the possibilities: AI’s capabilities are vast — virtual assistants, sentiment analysis, helpdesks, natural language processing, and on we go. Don’t be afraid to harness its power. It really is the key to a better e-commerce CX.

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Revolutionize your e-commerce CX with Yuma AI

Yuma AI empowers e-commerce businesses to achieve True Automation and stand out in a crowded field. Our tried-and-true technology can optimize any and every customer touchpoint, so you can speed up response times, boost customer satisfaction, and gain more loyal customers. 

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Ready to see for yourself the Yuma AI difference?  Contact us to start your free trial.