According to the CMO survey 2019, AI has seen significant adoption among marketers working in $500M to $1B companies. Conversational AI for customer service is the most dominant amongst all the AI technologies. Adopting Ai technology is not just limited to big businesses as more than half of small businesses clocking in sales of $25 million or less are also integrating Artificial Intelligence into their system for customer analytics.
Let’s explore the meaningful ways to leverage Artificial Intelligence to improve the customer experience
AI helps in understanding the customer
Understanding the customer is one of the primary requirements for user engagement in any business. Using Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies tools, modern-day businesses can gain a much better understanding of their customers. Earlier, the data gathering mechanisms were there, but raw data is hardly of any use to the entrepreneur.
What businesses wanted was a mechanism that could derive actionable insights from the data. This gap is fulfilled by intelligent AI algorithms today, which continuously learn and improve based upon the existing data and accurately predict the customer behavior pattern.
By knowing their customers more in-depth, brands today are catering relevant products and services to their customers, increasing sales opportunities, and improving the customer journey.
AI is helping brands in solving how to engage user's conundrum effectively
Sven Feurer, the senior director of engineering and operations at SAP Customer Experience, said, "To deliver truly excellent experiences, all customer-focused business units—like sales, customer service and marketing—must work together and efficiently leverage AI tools for common goals. By doing this, AI has the potential to help brands connect with customers on a more personal level, thus increasing loyalty and securing trust not just for now, but post-pandemic as well."
Popular CRM platforms like Salesforce Einstein, Zoho, and C2CRM are already helping the sales teams in understanding their customers in a better manner by integrating AI technology tools that provide
- Predictive analytics
- Conversational assistants
- Real-time decision-making ability
By analyzing individual customers' interests and insights, Artificial Intelligence can help entrepreneurs in recommending the next best set of actions for that particular customer, thus helping a brand to increase business by engaging users
By analyzing individual customers' interests and insights, the AI can aid in recommending the next best set of actions for that particular customer, thus helping a brand to increase business by engaging users.
Businesses use sophisticated AI technology systems to analyze thousands of signals from their internal systems and also from third-party systems. A few examples of these signals are
- The most visited sections of the website
- How much time did users spend on the website?
- Did the prospects attend the free webinar, or were they comfortable with the free eBook?
- How frequently did the customers call customer support, and were they satisfied with the response?
By analyzing thousands of different data points, AI can sense when the customer is actively seeking a solution. The AI can even suggest the sales deal's probability of getting closed and identify the best prospects who should be targeted first.
By leveraging AI technology, the sales team can laser-focus their attention on deals with the highest probability of getting close, increasing their efficiency exponentially.
Thread is a UK-based fashion startup that uses the power of AI to act as a personal stylist for 650,000+ customers. The customer takes style quizzes and provides AI with their personal preferences. Every week the AI sends clothing recommendations to its customers and, based on their feedback, refines itself to provide better recommendations in the future.
Real-Time Decision and Predictive Behavior Analysis
Today's customers expect a fast resolution to their problems, fast delivery of products and services, and fast payments. Real-time decision-making is business systems' ability to make decisions based upon the most recent available data with almost zero latency.
Precognitive is a company that provides online fraud prevention systems to its clients. The Decision-AI is a system developed by the company that has a response time of below 200 milliseconds. The AI system is primarily designed to use a combination of AI and machine learning to assess every situation in real-time.
Many businesses are using AI technology tools to provide alternative user interface components to customers using ad blockers. AI systems help businesses in identifying patterns in the customer's buying decisions.
By analyzing the customers' buying patterns, the businesses can cater more personalized content to their customers. Using its ability to process large data sets quickly, AI empowers businesses with predictive analytics, enabling them to produce real-time and actionable insights.
The user engagement matrix allows people at different levels within an organization to see the importance of a user engagement program.
Artificial Intelligence can help in determining the effectiveness of each component in the user engagement matrix. For instance, AI can help determine what exactly lures the customer to the website for the second and third time.
By modeling and projecting user behavior, the AI systems help the brand emotionally connect with its customers.
AI Chatbots Come of Age
MIT surveyed the top 100 business leaders. The respondents said that the top application where AI is proving helpful is the customer service application via chatbots. Using AI technology, businesses are now deploying intelligent Multi-Bot AI chatbot to their advantage.
A prime example of AI in action is the chatbot of Hipmunk. This full-service travel platform provides everything from flight bookings to hotel bookings to tour operator bookings to its customers.
Hipmunk created "hello chatbots," a platform that the users can easily integrate with their Facebook, Slack, or Skype accounts.
The Facebook messenger bot of Hipmunk is an intelligent chatbot that determines user location and sends travel deals accordingly. It removes the headache of researching various websites to find the best deal and directly delivers the information on the user's messenger app.
The most important thing is that with Hipmunk, the users won't feel that they are talking with a bot. The bot has been designed to mimic human conversational practices, giving the user an experience of chatting with a human being. Hipmunk uses casual language, gifs, and emojis while chatting, making it more fun and engaging the users with the chatbot.
According to the CEO of Hipmunk, an average user has to do 20 searches while planning a trip. The Hipmunk chatbot condenses the process into a straightforward conversation and removes the hassle of searching through various travel websites and apps.
According to Chris Radanovic, who is an AI expert at LivePerson," Intelligent virtual concierges and bots instantly greet them, answer their questions and carry out transactions, and if needed connect them to agents with all of the contextual data they've collected throughout the conversation."
AI for Hyper-Personalization
Usually, for customers trying to solve their problems with traditional systems, the experience is frustrating. This is because the customers have to repeat the information that they have already shared. For example, re-confirming their phone number or re-explaining the issue to multiple customer service agents. An intelligent AI system can prove to be the savior in such situations by providing a smoother UX.
GRCAI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence) conducted a study to learn about smartphone users' reading patterns. Using eye gaze technology, the researchers tried to identify whether the famed F pattern was still relevant or not.
The researchers identified that most users still study the text in an F-shape, as is evident from the above heat map image.
The marketers are using this information to present their content in a more relevant manner.
Amazon, the big-ticket online retailer, showed how to use the power of AI in hyper-personalization. Amazon is famous for using a rigorous recommendation system that is based on AI. The system provides recommendations based on various data points like –
- Products the customer has previously searched on Amazon.
- Products that the customers have added to their shopping carts
- Products similar to the ones that the customer is looking for
Amazon's recommendation engine proves to be a great UI tool as it reduces the cognitive load on users who have visited the website to shop quickly.
Amazon has started selling its recommendation system to smaller companies to leverage the power of AI in their endeavor to provide personalized experiences to their customers. The system is aptly named Amazon personalize, and it lets the developers build applications that can provide specific product recommendations to the customers. Using Amazon personalization, even small businesses can provide a better engagement experience to their customers.
With machine learning algorithms, companies can move away from rules-based recommendation systems to more intelligent systems. By looking at data points, such as which products a customer added to their cart or previous purchases, brands are better able to suggest related or relevant product recommendations in real-time.
Amazon recently made its ML-based recommendation system available for purchase to help businesses of all sizes create a real-time personalized user experience. Named Amazon Personalize, this service makes it easy for developers to build applications capable of delivering a wide array of personalization experiences like customized direct marketing and personalized real time notifications.
Summing up
Artificial Intelligence is proving to be a game-changing technology for businesses looking for new and innovative ways to engage with their customers. As the top executives of companies realize the potential of AI in engaging customers, the AI technology is set to play a disruptive role in shaping the future of customer engagement.