Making Your Company AI-Ready with Simon Kriss

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This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions and more:   

1. How can AI simplify the process of delivering a seamless customer experience? 
2. How can AI enhance customer service while balancing technology and human interaction? 
3. What is the impact of AI on customer service jobs? 
4. How can customer support roles evolve with AI? 
5. How can companies ensure their data is ready and accessible for AI to enhance customer experience? 

Top Takeaways

• AI is revolutionizing the customer experience by automating processes to make them faster, cheaper, and more efficient. By integrating AI into customer support, companies can meet their customers’ needs while simultaneously reducing operational costs. 

• The key is to use AI without losing the human touch. Customers still appreciate human interactions, but they also want convenience. AI can support this by handling routine tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more complex and meaningful interactions. 

• When starting with AI, building a tolerance for failure is important. Think of AI as an employee working on your business and realize that if you don’t train them properly (making sure AI can access your knowledge base, practicing writing clear and correct prompts, etc.), they will not deliver what you want. 

• As AI continues to evolve, it will change how customers interact with brands. In the future, individuals might rely more on AI to make decisions for them, like choosing which brands to do business with. Companies need to ensure their data is accessible and optimized for AI to keep up with customer expectations.  

• Will AI cause people to lose their jobs? Every new technology causes job loss. But, it is less about job elimination and more about job transformation. Many roles currently held by human employees that deal with simple, repetitive tasks can now be automated with AI. These changes can open new roles and opportunities, such as employees shifting to monitoring AI systems or developing AI-driven solutions.  

• AI can offer deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors. By analyzing past interactions, it can predict what kind of service or products a customer might need next. This can enhance customer experience by helping companies anticipate customer needs.  

• Plus, Shep and Simon explore how AI continues to shape customers’ daily lives and how companies can leverage it to their advantage. Tune in! 

Quotes:

“When it comes to customer service and experience, leaders need to think about how they can explore AI. What new things can they do? What new services can they offer? If you had a magic wand, what would you want to do for your customers that you can’t do today? And, how can AI enable that?” 

“Your customers can now know more about your company than you do by using AI to scrape your website and documentation. If customers can self-serve like that using AI, when they come to you, they are expecting you to be just as smart.”  

“Those that lean into AI earlier are the ones that are really going to win because they are going to be the AI leaders.” 

“Get in, get your hands dirty, start playing with AI if you haven’t before, and build a tolerance for failure. This is a very new tech, and don’t expect that the first time you write a prompt or try to do something, it will work out exactly how you thought it would.”

About:

Simon Kriss is the Chief AI Officer at simonkriss.ai. He is a keynote speaker, author of The AI Empowered Customer Experience, podcast host, and one of CX Network’s top 50 customer experience influencers to follow in 2024.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio.