AI, Blockchain and IoT: How is the Trio Improving the Customer Experience
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain - these technologies are disrupting the business world. They are helping startups and Fortune 500 companies to optimize their traditional processes, mitigate the prevailing challenges, beat the competition, and explore new opportunities in the present competitive business world.
But, can we say the same for the customer experience domain? Does the power of three (AI, Blockchain, and IoT) apply in the field of customer experience too?
Let’s find out in this blog. However, before we jump to the context of this blog, let’s take a recap of their basics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the technology that highlights the creation and operation of intelligent machines that think, work, and react like humans. The technology, with its lucrative features like data ingestion, facial recognition, and mimicking of human cognitive, is becoming an indispensable element of every business world. Evidence of which is that the global AI market is anticipated to be of worth USD 190.6 billion by the year 2025.
Often termed as a chain of blocks, Blockchain technology is basically a distributed ledger that accumulates all the transactions in consecutive nodes in a secure yet transparent manner. The technology, with traits and concepts like tokenization, consensus algorithms, and smart contracts, has decentralized the business world and added ample of benefits. A result of which is that the Blockchain market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 69.4% between 2019-2025.
Internet of Things (IoT), in layman terms, refers to an ecosystem of similar computing devices, sensors, smartphones, and digital machines that comes with the potential to transmit data to each other in real-time without any human intervention.
As per the market predictions, it has been found that businesses investment will count up to 50% of the overall IoT spend this year.
With this covered, let’s see how these technologies are transforming the customer experience across the industries and business vertical.
AI and IoT provide businesses with an opportunity to access and analyze real-time data of every user activity and market trends. This makes it easier for them to understand what are the needs, expectations, and marketing strategies they need to focus upon for driving higher ROI.
On one side, AI has automated a major fraction of inhouse processes in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants. While, on the other side, Blockchain has eliminated third-party intermediaries from the process. This way, the dual technologies are streamlining and speeding up the purchase and other traditional processes.
The convergence of Blockchain and AI also helps with securing user records and other sensitive information. While blockchain ensures that no information can be altered or deleted without approval from the involved nodes, AI integrates the power of NLP (Natural Processing Language) and Image recognition into the process to give a warning whenever a suspicious activity is noticed, as well as, turn a large system into numerous micro-economic environments to add flexibility into the process.
AI-powered tools and machines, on convergence with blockchain trends and IoT, eases the process of storing, arranging and analyzing a heap of user data. This improves the real-time customer analytics, which further fosters building successful marketing strategies and adding value to the business.
AI-based chatbots and machines interact with customers day and night, listen to their requests, analyze their sentiments, and provide marketers with the right piece of information to study and predict their next move. And this way, come up with a lucrative marketing offer they could not resist and take a decision in their favour.
One of the prime benefits of introducing AI and IoT in the Customer experience process is that they can inform businesses about equipment failure in real-time. Here, AI-powered machines and software can analyze the functioning of equipment in real-time and inform if an irregular pattern is observed. Whereas, the Internet of Things (IoT) can transmit this information across the mesh of connections; making it possible for every node to be aware of the equipment failure and come up with a backup plan immediately.
This way, the dual technologies can not only prevent customers from operating faulty equipment and get frustrated with poor performance, while enabling employees to optimize their work accordingly.
In the present competitive market scenario, one factor that can keep customers hooked to a particular business is trust. But, due to the growing unethical activities and data breaches, users are finding it tough to trust new and existing brands.
Blockchain and IoT (also called Blockchain of Things), in this scenario, can add the value of transparency and trustability into the ecosystem. They can ensure that the right information is delivered across the different connected nodes, as well as the user is informed about everything happening with the ecosystem.
Blockchain and IoT also facilitate highly-secured and faster payments. The technology eradicated third-party intermediaries, introduced cryptocurrencies that lower down the cost to transfer money globally, and added pace to the process.
Last but not least, AI-driven platforms enable brands to capture and analyze the emotions of users based on their facial expressions or voice, and engage them in a way that delivers an instant positive effect on them.
Now as you know what difference can Blockchain, IoT, and AI can bring into the customer experience strategy altogether, it is likely that you must be wondering how to integrate them into your traditional process.
Well, all these technologies are still evolving and have come loaded with a myriad of benefits and challenges. In such a scenario, it might be tricky to implement them into your customer experience strategy on your own. So, it is advisable to hire a tech specialist that is well-familiar with these trending technologies and has an in-depth knowledge of business needs.