Role of Artificial Intelligence in Enriching Customer Experience
The most crucial goal of marketing is to reach customers during their decision-making moments. This is the reason why most of the consumer product companies do not just focus on marketing to the masses, instead focus on targeted marketing. Amazon, one of the leading e-commerce company, a decade ago, pioneered personalized shopping recommendations to the customers and timing it at the right time to influence the decision making.
Artificial Intelligence plays a vital role in identifying specific decision-making moments, which enable targeted marketing. Amazon is not the only company leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an integral part of their marketing strategy, there are others, such as Starbucks, Nike, BMW, IBM, Alibaba, and more, utilize this rapidly evolving technology to increase their brand’s visibility and enrich Customer Experience (CX).
More often than not, gaining powerful insights using Artificial Intelligence requires utilizing already available organizational data than acquiring new data. Customer experience can be enhanced in several ways, some of the prominent ways with examples are included below
- Improve product or the service
- Provide exceptional customer support
- Personalize customer experience
Improve product or service
BMW, one of the famous German car manufacturers, is an excellent example of how customer experience is improved by innovating the product. The company created an application “BMW Connected Plus”, which provides a more seamless customer experience both inside and outside the vehicle. Capabilities range from giving door to door directions, checking the fuel level, and providing live trip status to the selected friends and family. Artificial Intelligence is used to learn the driver’s behavioural patterns to automatically suggest destinations, preferred petrol stations, and contacts, leading to superior customer experience.
Provide exceptional customer support
Chatbots have revolutionized help desk operations by eliminating the long wait time to get help. The bot is always learning not only from the current customer’s transactions but also from gaining insights from the other customer’s behaviours. IBM’s chatbot – “Watson Anywhere” is built by keeping human and machine interaction in mind to provide a seamless transition among various functions like conducting a conversation, performing a sophisticated search, and escalating to the human agent. A study released by UK-based Juniper Research forecasts these chatbots will contribute to cost savings of over $8B annually by 2022.
Personalize customer experience
Optimal customer satisfaction can be achieved only when the consumer is treated with what matters more to the specific individual. Typically, customer data containing demographics, transactional, interactional, behavioural is captured across various systems, creating siloed information packets. Be able to connect all of the information to provide a holistic understanding of the customer is the key to a personalized response. Netflix not only makes content suggestions based on personal preferences but also presents a tailored cover art for the recommended movie or TV show. What is more surprising is that more than 80% of the TV shows that you watch on Netflix are discovered through their recommendations system.
In this 21st century, with the tremendous competition, business success is no longer depends on the exceptional product, but more on outstanding customer service by understanding the customer as a segment of one. Earning repeated customers does require understanding the customer holistically (360 view of the customer) and tailoring the service specifically for him. Fortunately, advancements in the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing are making strides in not only building an exceptional product but also providing an outstanding customer experience.
By:
Sreevani Konda, Data & Analytics Leader