The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) is hard to ignore, with businesses worldwide harnessing it to revolutionize customer experience (CX).
Unsurprisingly, forecasts estimate AI’s market value will soar into the trillions by 2030. However, there’s another technology gaining equal momentum that can significantly complement AI: augmented reality (AR).
The growth projections for AR are impressive, with estimates suggesting a surge from $598 billion to $1.1 trillion by 2030 – staggering numbers driven by customer demand for unique experiences. So, what happens to CX when companies tap into both of these experiential technologies?
By integrating AI-powered tools like chatbots and predictive analytics with AR, companies can take customer service to new heights, creating experiences that defy expectations in a demanding market.
This blended adoption of AI and AR is still in the early stages, so brands that act now to innovate will get a headstart in the race to provide the memorable interactivity, engagement, and personalization that customers are crying out for.
Here’s a closer look at the numerous direct and indirect benefits, practical applications, obstacles, and strategies for deploying a CX-boosting combination of AI and AR.
How Exactly Can AI + AR Enhance CX?
If brands get it right, an innovative mix of AI and AR technologies can open up pathways to better understand and serve customers.
One of the most widely known use cases is immersive product experiences, which are particularly impactful in the retail sector. AR enables us to experience products in our immediate environment before purchasing. IKEA, for example, helps customers visualize how a piece of furniture fits in their living room. Sephora’s app, on the other hand, allows people to see how a new shade of makeup looks on their skin. Immersive experiences like these are already significantly boosting sales and reducing the likelihood of returns.
With AI’s real-time ability to analyze customer data and deliver personalized recommendations, advice, and assistance, these AR apps can evolve into more immersive, customized product visualizations and experiences, making each customer feel uniquely valued and understood. As AI continuously learns from customer interactions with AR applications, it can start to adapt the experience on the fly to better suit individual preferences and behaviors.
Accessibility and convenience is another boon for customers. For example, AR can provide visual navigation within physical stores, but when complemented by AI chatbots, these apps can offer real-time support and assistance, answering questions and resolving issues instantaneously.
Imagine giving customers access to a virtual sales rep who appears in the store when viewing it through a smartphone. Powered by large language models, this digital personal assistant would be ready to answer any questions customers have as they browse products and then help place an order on the spot. These experiences bridge the gap between web-based and in-store shopping, and they are possible to create today.
Plus, by automating routine inquiries with AI, brands can allocate their human teams—or “customer champions” as we fondly call our teams at Inspiro—to more complex and high-value interactions. By adding AR to the mix, brands can even help employees visualize certain products or create AI-powered customer personas for teams to practice with.
Then there’s the “wow” factor. The unique interactive experiences enabled by AI and AR can significantly enhance brand perception by building strong emotional connections, both among customers and employees, enhancing loyalty and trust across the board.
Organizations can dramatically speed up product development and testing processes. By utilizing AR for virtual prototyping, companies can visualize new products in real-world environments. AI can further enhance this by providing predictive analytics on potential market reactions and performance.
These crucial differentiators can make or break CX in a reality where attracting and retaining customers (and employees) is highly competitive. But the advantages of innovating in this space extend even further.
Surprising Benefits of AI + AR Innovations
While direct advantages like improved CX and operational efficiency are pretty well-known, there are some incredible secondary benefits of blending these two technologies. For instance, on the customer champion side of things, AI tools can help create personalized learning programs based on individual employee performance, while AR can make training more interactive and engaging. Let’s go back to that virtual sales representative concept. Why not create something similar for your contact centers by developing digital mentors or coaches for CX agents in training? The result would be a significant reduction in training costs and time while also improving employees’ skills and engagement levels, which indirectly leads to better CX. Organizations can also dramatically speed up product development and testing processes with AI and AR. By utilizing AR for virtual prototyping, companies can visualize new products in real-world environments before committing to the resource-intensive process of developing physical prototypes. AI can further enhance this by providing predictive analytics on potential market reactions and performance, allowing for iterative design improvements based on data-driven insights. Again, your customers would be the beneficiaries of this technological combo. AI and AR can also make products and services more accessible to individuals in hard-to-reach places or those with disabilities, helping to break down barriers and overcome geographical and physical limitations. For example, brands could develop an AR app to enable customer champions to interpret sign language when video-chatting with people who are hard of hearing. At the same time, AI can help translate communications in real-time for users in any part of the world, ensuring that no customer is left behind.
The social benefits extend to sustainability and environmental impact, too. AR-powered virtual product trials and digital showrooms can reduce the need for physical samples and products, leading to lower production and shipping emissions. Similarly, AI can analyze and optimize your logistics and supply chains to significantly reduce waste and energy consumption, helping you reach your sustainability goals.
The list of benefits is endless—and only limited by a company’s imagination—but organizations should also be aware of the various obstacles that can slow the adoption and innovation of AI + AR solutions.
Preparing for Challenges to Maximize AI + AR Impact
Adopting and combining AI and AR technologies comes with various technical, operational, ethical, and strategic challenges.
First off, integrating with existing customer service and IT systems can be complex and resource-intensive, throwing up compatibility issues that might require significant modifications or upgrades. Many AI and AR applications are also heavy on computational resources and infrastructure, so brands must work hard to ensure robust performance and scalability in these areas – not always easy, especially for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources.
If the ultimate goal is to personalize CX, your new AI systems will require access to vast amounts of data, so safeguarding this data from cyber threats and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA is crucial. Plus, AI systems are currently biased toward the ideas and content present in their training data, sometimes leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes. You’ll need experts to ensure your data is up to scratch before training any AI models.
Meanwhile, AR applications are raising some ethical concerns, particularly around data privacy and user well-being, especially when they involve the capture and analysis of real-world environments. Ensuring these technologies do not infringe on privacy rights is crucial.
Designing applications that are intuitive and user-friendly is difficult in the traditional sense, but it is even more challenging when exploring emerging AR technologies. Poorly designed interfaces may deter users, undermining the potential benefits that customers are looking for, so opting for quality over low-cost solutions will help your brand stand out.
The development, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of high-quality, functional apps also require significant investment and specialized skills that are currently in high demand. For many businesses, justifying the cost of hiring and retaining tech talent, plus the overall costs of development, against the expected ROI, especially in the short term, can be a hard sell at the C-level. Hence, it helps to understand the potential returns that memorable CX can actually generate.
Digital CX veterans like Inspiro can help you define clear objectives and use cases and identify your CX goals, such as increasing engagement, improving conversion rates, or reducing return rates – wherever the combination of AI and AR can have the most significant impact.
Another huge challenge is finding the right balance between AI-automated services and the human touch that customers want, especially for complex inquiries. When brands rely too much on AI bots and digital AR tools to do the jobs that humans excel at, it can often lead to customer frustration.
So, how can brands mitigate these risks?
Pilot projects are a great place to start, followed by strategic planning, investment in training and infrastructure, and a commitment to ethical standards and customer-centric design.
We also highly recommend partnerships with business process outsourcing (BPO) providers since many established firms already have the capabilities to help you limit the challenges of technological innovation in CX.
To wrap things up, let’s take a quick look at the specific benefits of partnering up.
Successful Blend: How Digital CX Partnerships Can Help
As we’ve revealed with the laundry list of benefits, combining rapidly evolving AI solutions with front-end AR applications is clearly worth the effort. Still, it helps to recruit some experienced digital CX providers to streamline the process.
Digital CX veterans like Inspiro can help you define clear objectives and use cases and identify your CX goals, such as increasing engagement, improving conversion rates, or reducing return rates – wherever the combination of AI and AR can have the most significant impact.
Today’s BPO partners can help you test, learn, and iterate with AI and AR tech. For instance, they can give you a headstart by launching pilot projects to trail specific use cases, which allows for learning and adjustments before a full-scale rollout. Along the way, they can also help implement mechanisms to gather customer feedback and then analyze it to continuously improve the experience.
Experienced digital CX providers can ensure that blended AI and AR systems have secure access to a unified customer data platform, allowing for dynamic personalization of AR content based on AI-driven insights. Privacy and security
are also paramount as digital CX partners help businesses tackle the regulatory hurdles along the way, ensuring compliance with data protection laws and implementing robust security measures to protect customer information.
On the human support side, BPO partners have squadrons of customer champions who are educated, experienced, and motivated to create a consistent, enjoyable customer journey across all channels. If your customers have a problem with an AI-generated response or your AR app inexplicably stops working, you’ll need these experts readily available to keep people happy.
By teaming up with digital CX experts, brands can quickly start exploring the exciting world of AI and AR, creating a unique, enhanced customer experience that leverages the strengths of both technologies.
Quick Takeaways
Supercharge Your CX: When blending AI with AR, your customer experience will get a massive boost. The combination of these technologies lets your customers interact with your brand through new digital experiences and get advice that feels like it’s made just for them. It’s all about creating memorable moments that keep people coming back for more.
• Unlock Hidden Perks: Along with the direct impact on CX, AI and AR technologies can help level up your customer champions with personalized training, streamline how you create new products, improve your sustainability practices, and more, which all create an indirect positive influence on overall customer experience.
• Prepare for Challenges: Merging AI with AR has a ton of benefits, but it also comes with its share of obstacles. Brands have to ensure that all systems and channels work together seamlessly. Then there’s the essential protection of customer data, training AI models, developing high-quality AR apps, and finding the sweet spot between automation and the human touch – it can get pretty complex. And yes, excellent quality does come with a higher price tag.
• Team Up for Success: Partnering up with digital CX and BPO providers can make the journey much smoother. They can help you figure out where to start, how to innovate, how to keep costs on track, how to stay aligned with the latest regulations, and even provide teams of customer champions to augment the great benefits of these tools. If you’re looking to fast-track into the world of AI and AR-powered CX, don’t do it alone!
