3 Huge Ways Companies Are Delighting Customers With Artificial-Intelligence-Driven Services

We know that the range of AI-loaded smart products is constantly expanding. But what’s less obvious is how AI is also transforming the world of services – enabling service-based businesses to improve their offering, and even develop entirely new services and revenue streams that are underpinned by AI.

Just as in product-based businesses, AI has become a driving factor for success in the service sector. Here are three ways businesses are delivering a better service through AI.

AI provides incredible opportunities to get to know your customers – what they like and don’t like, what they actually do (as opposed to what they say they do), how they engage with your service, what factors would encourage them to engage more deeply, and do on.

This is important because the more you understand your customers, the more you can customize your service to suit their needs. Driven by the likes of Netflix, this notion of customization and personalization is a major business trend. If your customers don’t already expect a more intelligent, personalized service offering, they soon will do. If you aren’t able to offer such a service, rest assured your competitors will. (And, increasingly, that competition may come from the tech sector itself. Consider the rise of personal finance apps that are seriously challenging traditional banking service providers.)

We tend to think of retail as a product-based industry, but in fact, it perfectly illustrates this move towards more personalized services. Amazon was an early pioneer of data-driven, personalized shopping recommendations, but now a wave of new services has sprung up to offer a similarly tailored approach for consumers. Stitch Fix, which delivers hand-picked clothing to your door, is a great example. With Stitch Fix, you detail your size, style preferences, and lifestyle in a questionnaire. Then, using AI, the system pre-selects clothes that will fit and suit you, and a (human) personal stylist chooses the best options from that pre-selected list. And voila, the perfect clothes for you arrive at your door every month. If you don’t like or need an item, you simply return it, and the system uses that information to provide better recommendations in the future.

I believe the most successful companies of the future will be those that are able to develop a meaningful, value-adding service relationship with their customers. And by value-adding, I mean genuinely making customers’ lives easier, better, healthier, and so on.