Examining AI and the Customer Experience

To provide today’s shopper with a strong end-to-end customer experience, artificial intelligence is non-negotiable. In this blog, we’ll examine AI and the customer experience to shed light on why these two things go hand-in-hand.

What makes a great customer experience?

At its core, a great customer experience will..

• Delight shoppers
• Mitigate barriers to entry and purchase
• Be entirely seamless from start to finish
• Help cultivate a long-lasting relationship
• Make the shopper feel like an individual and not just another number

When you’re running a small business, accomplishing these things is easy.

But when you’re an enterprise, maintaining this kind of customer experience is far more challenging. That difficulty is why so many enterprise marketers are guilty of (be it consciously or unconsciously) taking what amounts to a one-size-fits all approach to their campaigns.

Communication, AI and the customer experience today

Today’s customer experience is dictated by what the customer wants, not just in the way of products and services, but communication and engagement too. 

• Apps
• Email
• Paid Ads
• Lightboxes
• On-site chat
• Push notifications

These are just some of the forms of communication and engagement that AI can support.

Building more intelligent customer experiences

By blending AI and the customer experience, enterprise marketers gain the ability to create personal, customized experiences at scale for every part of the customer journey. Here are some of the areas where artificial intelligence software can enhance the customer experience.

Chat bots are an essential part of any well-rounded enterprise marketing strategy because they aid in the creation of a ‘sticky’ customer experience. AI-powered chat bots can not only hold eloquent conversations to meet customer needs faster and more efficiently, but they can even understand how your customers use specific products and services.

Image: Digital Genius

When a customer signs up for a newsletter, service, or ecommerce platform, the traditional enterprise marketers like to lean on email drip campaigns. These emails will include anything from a “warm welcome”, to special promotional offers, to general company content.  But is this the right approach? Well, it really depends. Marketers need to stop and think how they can get the most engagement, with the least invasive communication, over the right channels. 

By incorporating AI and the customer experience into one, enterprise marketers can get the clear answers they need to make the best decisions possible. Instead of relying on basic metrics like open rates or clicks to understand what’s working and what isn’t, marketers can learn from every aspect of a consumer’s engagement across all channels and devices. In other words, they can get down and dirty visibility into what consumers like and what they don’t like as it relates to a brand’s marketing efforts.

Customer Feedback and Support

Machine learning takes predictive analytics to a whole other level. Imagine support that can learn about every individual customer and respond intelligently, predict and avert potential complaints and reprioritize customer requests intelligently to optimize response time, all the while learning how to do this better. That’s what artificial intelligence and machine learning can bring to your relationship marketing plan. No matter which stage of the customer journey, you can never go wrong with delighting customers by solving their problems in record time.