Published: May 14, 2025

Smart CX: 5 steps to bigger impact with AI

AI is a powerful ally for improving your customer experience (CX) and streamlining your operations across the entire customer journey.

Using a structured, iterative, and risk-managed approach, AI technology can help your team understand your organisation’s core business problems, predict customer needs, personalise interactions individually and at scale, and automate routine tasks. This frees up your people to add more value, handling more complex, nuanced, and empathetic customer engagements.
 

One of the most common misconceptions about AI is that it will eliminate the need for human interactions. But in reality, an effective AI strategy will see the technology augment human skills, not replace them, acknowledging the synergy between AI efficiency and human empathy for complex issues.

For example, Google Cloud's Agent Assist empowers customer service staff to resolve issues faster and more accurately by providing real-time coaching and guidance.

Another common myth you may have come across is that implementing impactful AI for CX is prohibitively complex and costly. While ‘bring your own models’ can be complex, platforms like Google Cloud offer powerful, often configurable AI solutions. They are cost-effective and allow you to demonstrate feasibility and realise benefits quickly, while managing risks.

The reality is with a structured approach and the right platform, AI can transform your customer experience and operations quickly and effectively.

Here are five ways you can make a game-changing impact with AI.

• Enable more sophisticated personalisation

When you understand customer behaviour, you can make better, more relevant recommendations, improving their experience and boosting conversion rates and revenue.

AI does this at scale. It analyses user behaviour and context to understand customer intent and makes highly personalised content, product or promotion recommendations based on your desired outcome – whether that’s driving conversions or engagement, boosting average order value or improving loyalty.

• Anticipate customer needs

By analysing vast amounts of data (from purchase history to browsing habits) AI can identify patterns and predict your customers’ next move. Understanding future behaviours allows you to proactively tailor your offers, optimise inventory, innovate ahead of your competitors and reduce customer service issues and complaints.

• Streamline customer support

As your customer service ally, AI can simplify your operations and make them more efficient. It can automate responses through chatbots, support staff with real-time information and guidance, direct inquiries to the right people, and enable conversational search for better self-service.

Businesses who use AI in their customer service see a reduction in overall costs, average handling time and improvements in first call resolutions.

• Elevate human interactions

AI can also help you understand the ‘why’ behind customer interactions, giving your people the insights they need to have more impactful and empathetic conversations. The technology can also analyse conversations and identify coaching opportunities for staff, helping continually improve customer experience and boost employee satisfaction.

• Optimise pricing and offers

With its vast analytics capabilities, AI can help you move to a more sophisticated and data-driven pricing strategy. From demand forecasting and customer segmentation to dynamic pricing optimisation and personal offer generation, harnessing AI can help you maximise revenue, improve inventory return on investment and improve profit margins.
 

Start small for big impact

Making a meaningful impact on your CX with AI doesn’t have to be a complex or costly exercise.

Start with a clearly defined, high-value customer problem or opportunity and focus on how AI can support your people to address it. Then follow a structured, iterative delivery approach that establishes clear success criteria from the start and quickly validates value before scaling.

At NCS, we can help you harness the power of AI to transform your CX in just six weeks.

When you work with a Google Could AI partner like NCS, you can:

• Realise a faster path to Proof of Value (MVP) using cutting-edge AI
• Deploy to production quicker
• Achieve demonstrable ROI
• Scale reliably
• Reduce operational overhead while aligning with efficiency goals
• Be confident with strong support for a risk-managed AI adoption.