The most crucial goal of any marketing strategy is to hit customers’ minds 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 global e-commerce company, a decade ago, pioneered personalized shopping recommendations to the customers and pushing it out at the right time to influence their decisions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a vital role in identifying specific decision-making moments, which enable targeted marketing. Amazon is not the only company leveraging AI as an integral part of its marketing strategy, there are others, such as Starbucks, Nike, BMW, IBM, Alibaba, and more, who have utilized this rapidly evolving technology to increase their brand’s visibility and enrich Customer Experience (CX).
More often than not, gaining powerful insights using AI requires utilizing the available organizational data than acquiring new data. CX can be enhanced in several ways, some of the prominent ways with examples are discussed below.
- Improve product or service
- Provide exceptional customer support
- Personalize customer experience
Improve product or service
German Luxury car major BMW is an excellent example of how customer experience can be improved by innovating a 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 authorized persons like friends and family. AI is used to learn the driver’s behavioral 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 customers’ transactions but also from the insights drawn from other customers’ behaviors. 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 the most to him/her. Typically, customer data containing demographics, transactional, interactional, behavioral is captured across various systems, creating siloed information packets. Being 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 movies or TV shows. What is more surprising is that more than 80% of the TV shows that you watch on Netflix are discovered through its recommendations system.
In this 21st century, with tremendous competition, business success 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 AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing are making strides in not only building an exceptional product but also providing an outstanding customer experience.
