In today's digital world customers are no more brand loyal with plethora of choices at their disposal. Customers today want seamless, cross channel and contextual communication that offers them great experiences. To remain relevant and face competition companies are under immense pressure to ensure superior customer experience. Hence, businesses today need to adopt to new digital platforms and improve their digital accessibility if they are to remain competitive. Modern technological advancement and consequent rise of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Big data analytics and augmented reality are helping companies to provide experiences to customer that delights them and keeps them loyal. In this article, we will take a look at some of these technologies that are helping business to improve customer experience.

1. Chatbots

Businesses today are equipping themselves with chatbots to provide a seamless experience to their customers. An AI powered chatbot delights customer interaction and creates memorable experience to build long lasting relationship. It creates instant gratification as it offers solutions when it is needed unlike slow response taking up hours or even days.

Customers need not wait for long call queue and can get the right help at the right time leading to a superior customer experience. A user-friendly, informative and hassle-free chatbot session leads to improvised customer engagement and efficient customer experience.

2. Big data analytics

Data is the new asset. It is new because, without recent success in information technology, the use of data to drive growth was not possible earlier. The advent of new tools has enabled enterprises to capture huge of amounts of data for further storage and analysis in order to deliver a better experience to customers.

With big data analytics businesses can gather useful insights into customer preferences and behaviors to provide relevant offerings to their customers. With personalized services, businesses are building up long term customers and reaping in higher revenue. The technology is helping businesses to understand the pain points in the customer journey, their needs and expectations to finally design solutions according to customer preferences.

3. Artificial intelligence

"By 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human" - Gartner

AI has opened a window of opportunity for companies to position themselves as brands with customer focus and centricity. It helps them to go ahead and create unique experiences for each client, based on their past behavior and data. With millions of interactions through AI, brands can now have a deeper understanding of their customers, their preference, likes and dislikes. Whether it's new offerings, product recommendations, or home page tailored to their interests, with AI, businesses can now discover what customers want and hence increase brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

AI has truly impacted customer service by automating responses in no time with hassle-free experience. Customers on the go today want contextual communication and that too in real time. Deploying AI serves the very right purpose by combining ease of use with speed. Integration of AI with your services offer amplified and efficient CX for your customers.

Amazon's Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s search engines are all transforming the way customers interact and get attracted towards a brand. Google Maps street view provide step by step directions overlaid onto the real world giving a real-time on-site experience. The human sounding virtual assistant, Alexa, can answer almost all queries and commands of the user including weather forecasts, order takeout and handling other basic tasks as commanded by the voice of user.

4. Augmented reality

There can be nothing more satisfying for your customers to experience your products first hand and from the convenience of their home setting. Businesses no more need to pull customers to their store for them to try the product. With augmented reality customers can try out the products with the help of their smartphone camera by projecting the product into the home surroundings to get a feel of how the product would look like in their homes.

Augmented reality gives an added advantage to both on-site and online experience as customers can try the product in a three-dimensional mode. Customers buying a product from a store may not be sure of how it shall look in their home setting and similarly an online product display may not showcase how will the product look when they actually use it. Augmented reality solves both the problems giving customers a superior experience. With an AR application, customers can very easily choose products after they have truly visualized it. Hence it also reduces the rate of returns as customers make purchase decisions after a virtual trial of the product.

5. Internet of Things (IoT)

With the development of machine learning, embedded systems, real time analytics and commodity sensors, Internet of Things has come to be a reality as physical devices now can be turned into a remotely controlled trackable object. Connected objects have transformed the way people use a product and has enables companies to provide a superior customer experience with huge data collected through these devices.

As devices are getting remotely connected, it has truly become possible to resolve customer grievances without them even noticing the problem in the first place. Devices can themselves send issues to the support team or similar requests can be raised by the customer not really needing to contact the customer support and wait for long call queues. The advent of IoT is revolutionizing the way customers experienced a brand with products getting smart enough to offer solutions that can be initiated remotely, or which are automated.

It has thus become critical for companies to adopt these technologies if they need to be relevant in today’s digital world and amidst ever demanding customers. These technologies are transforming the way businesses offer truly satisfying customer experience and helps them increase brand loyalty and engagement. Customer centricity has become the new focus and businesses today must forge on the path of digital transformation if they want to thrive, excel and lead.