Dive Brief:
- Three in 5 customers are wary of AI, and only half believe AI's benefits outweigh its risks, according to a KPMG survey of 10,000 customers released last week.
- Nearly three-quarters of customers believe that companies implementing AI must make it trustworthy.
- “The biggest gap is going to be trust,” Jeff Mango, managing director and CX lead of KPMG, told CX Dive. “Getting the balancing act [right] is going to be really important going into 2024.”
Dive Insight:
For all the value that AI can bring to the customer experience, its implementation can easily backfire without trust.
Customers are skeptical of the fairness, security and safety of AI systems, KPMG found.
“Customers really don't trust it,” Mango said. “They think it's biased, and historically, it has been biased.”
“I don't think that AI is ready for prime time to be communicated with as a customer,” Mango said. “It mostly will be valued right now helping and enabling employees, supply chain, product ordering, [and] product.”
Most businesses aren’t putting the technology in front of customers, but those that rushed to implement it have found it can harm customer experience quality, which KPMG found fell 5% last year.
“In fact, people are seeing a dip in their experience because they might get the wrong answer,” Mango said. “I had it the other day where I got the same wrong answer from a system that I was calling into trying to use it, and I got the same wrong answer three times and had to abort mission.”
Businesses have touted the ROI of AI implementation, but Mango urges business leaders to take a closer look and make sure they aren’t costing themselves elsewhere.
Mango provided an example of a customer calling and speaking to a machine instead of a human. The company may see that as a cost savings of nearly $12, he said. But if they don’t look at the full customer journey, they may not see that the customer then called again and talked to a human being to get their issue resolved.
In addition to that costing the business the same amount of money, the customer may not have the same trust they had in the company prior to the interaction.
“Some companies have some areas where they built a lot of trust, whether it's hotels or airlines and whatnot,” he said. “And then when you put out technology that starts to break that trust, they have a difficult time adopting more technology later.”
The importance of getting the implementation right off the bat cannot be understated, Mango said. “Getting it right transfers trust to the next process and the next technology and the next connection you make with the customer."
