Customer engagement is the backbone of a successful business, and those who don’t focus on it will have a hard time seeing success in the long term. Customers don’t want anything else except to get what they want when they want it.
That being said, AI is completely changing the way we interact with our customers and is starting to become an integral part of businesses' everyday routines. The truth is that human beings only have so much time, but can never be available 24/7.
Therefore, in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about how AI is maximizing customer engagement.
Helps in providing advanced customer insights
AI transforms the decision-making process by providing real-time information. This allows customers to make a purchase right away since they are being shown real-time data. Using chatbots, automated support, and personalized product recommendations allows users to take advantage of the AI customer experience.
AI’s real-time insights allow brands to deliver a personalized experience that resonates with the customer’s needs and wants. It also helps you make modifications to your strategies, and stay updated with ongoing trends in the market.
That being said, let’s dive deeper into learning more about how AI provides you with advanced customer insights:
- AI collects data through multiple sources that can either be through social media, customer interactions, purchasing history, and web analytics.
- It can identify preferences, shopping habits, and interests based on data analysis.
- Last but not least, it can find all pain points in the customer journey to improve user experience and retention.
Advanced customer insights help learn more about what your customers want, and this is an important part of successfully engaging with customers at the maximum level.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
AI customer service automation is becoming increasingly popular and helps companies gather customer feedback based on the experiences they had when interacting with their online business.
Unlike humans who are only available during work hours, chatbots and virtual assistants are available 24/7. Chatbots have experienced a 92% increase in usage since 2019. This means that their usage is increasing and this is good news for you since they are always at the customer's service.
Additionally, let’s not forget that a chatbot can handle a large volume of queries without needing any intervention from humans. It’s evolving continuously and one day, will start to interact with customers even better than humans do.
Voice assistants
You’ve most likely heard of voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant which are all powered by AI voices. Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities make it possible for voice commands to be understood. This means that when a customer goes on your website and makes an order, they can easily find the products they are looking for through voice commands.
Just like chatbots, voice assistants are available 24/7 and can provide real-time answers to FAQs, product inquiries, and other customer-related issues. Many times, voice assistants are integrated together with chatbots to provide more accurate responses.
Nevertheless, they also have a positive influence on customer loyalty, meaning they help build long-term customer relationships. Let’s not forget that 69% of customers claimed that they appreciate personalization and that voice assistants are excellent at personalizing services for them.
Hyper-personalization
AI uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer’s current and past purchasing behaviors, preferences, and interests. With the advanced insights that it provides, AI can use this information to provide personalized product recommendations.
For example, if a customer is buying T-shirts, the AI system will continuously recommend similar T-shirts to the customer. This is a great cross-selling technique and has a positive influence on your sales conversions. Research shows that personalization increases business revenue by 10-15%.
Moreover, you’ve heard of personalization, but have you ever heard of hyper-personalization? This approach dives deep into customer data, analyzing user behaviors, preferences, and impacts real-time decisions.
Conversational AI is improving and this means that AI is interacting with customers similarly to how a human being would. This can be done by using relevant data like order history, behaviors, and preferences for addressing customer needs and identifying potential issues that customers are facing when shopping at your store.
Many newer conversational AI technologies can reply based on the customer’s intent and emotional tone, which can either be negative or very positive, providing a quick visual cue to prepare the agent for an interaction.
Reduced operational costs
Integrating AI into customer experience can significantly reduce operational costs by automating repetitive tasks, and eliminating the need to hire additional staff members, provide extra training, and use additional tools.
AI outperforms in task automation, content recommendation, and predictive analysis for addressing customer needs. Investing in AI during economic shifts helps teams manage customer inquiries and implement fast delivery.
Advanced text analytics
AI algorithms can analyze large amounts of customer data and find patterns and insights that humans might miss. They are applied in different industries including finance, e-commerce, legal, healthcare, and customer service.
Key components of advanced text analytics include:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP allows AI to understand and generate human language.
- Sentiment analysis: AI detects and analyzes customer emotions in social media and feedback.
- Entity recognition: Identifying and categorizing places, organizations, names, and other specific terms in the text.
- Text classification: Groups texts into predefined categories for better organization and analysis.
- Topic modeling: AI finds hidden themes, topics, and patterns with large amounts of text data.
Advanced text analytics help in quickly analyzing large amounts of text data, which is never possible to complete by humans. It can detect subtle patterns and trends that might be overlooked by human analysis. Also, it uses historical customer data for predicting trends and customer behavior.
AI customer segmentation
AI analyzes customer data by creating detailed segments based on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics. This allows businesses to deliver a personalized experience and improve outcomes.
Statistics show that 10% to 15% more revenue is generated by businesses that have higher offerings to customer segments than by those that don’t. AI customer segmentation can be implemented in the following ways to maximize customer engagement:
- Understand business needs: You need to identify what your business needs and use the appropriate AI tools and data for implementing customer segmentation. Identify the challenges in customer behavior.
- Collect relevant data: The AI model's accuracy depends on the quality of the data collected. You need to always be equipped with the right data points before using AI. When you collect data, use different sources for getting up-to-date information. Extract data from customer relationship management systems (CRM) and databases.
- Choose the proper machine learning models: Once you have relevant data sets, your next step is to find the right ML models. ML models are tailored for different roles in the customer segmentation process. Traditional algorithms are more suitable for specific tasks, while deep learning models are capable of addressing complex issues.
- Integrate with existing systems: Once you have your AI model that is trained on large data sets to perform different roles, you can start the implementation process. It’s always important to make sure that the AI technology you are using is compatible with CRM and marketing platforms.
- Monitor your performance: It’s always important to monitor AI performance and always address issues that you may overcome. Update AI models to stay updated with customer behaviors, market trends, and business goals.
AI customer segmentation is only as successful as the data you gather, so if you are gathering the right data, this means that you’ll be on the right track.
A better omnichannel experience
Since there are different methods of interacting with brands nowadays, customers expect a multi-channel experience. For example, let’s look at Starbucks, they have a mobile application that integrates with their loyalty program, giving customers the option to order ahead, pay in-store by using their mobile, and earn rewards.
This is an AI-driven approach and promotes personalization and consistency across customer touchpoints regardless if it’s in-app, or in-store.
AI is completely changing how we interact with customers
AI is entirely transforming the way businesses interact with customers, creating a new era of customer engagement and personalization. By leveraging AI, companies can now dive into advanced analytics, understand customer behavior on a deeper level, and predict what customers will want and need in the future.
This not only helps create a much more personalized marketing approach, real-time support, and a flawless customer experience that makes customers feel valued and understood. As AI continues to evolve over time, it will build a much stronger and long-lasting relationship with customers, improving customer loyalty, satisfaction and implementing long-term business success.