Using AI to Drive Customer Engagement

Consumer behaviour is rapidly evolving, with new insights and trends popping up seemingly every day. From the ways consumers choose to shop, to how they interact with certain brands, to the frequency at which they make purchases, sales trends are all vastly different than they were just a few decades ago.
Today’s consumers are pledging loyalty to the brands that they engage most frequently with, creating pressure for businesses to provide exceptional customer experience. If a brand fails to deliver on the customers’ demands or lacks personalisation, they could lose valuable business to rivals who are willing to make investments in customer engagement initiatives. With new technology constantly emerging, businesses of every size now have the possibility of investing in these initiatives.

80% of consumers say they are willing to spend more on products and services from brands that provide a better customer experience. With artificial intelligence (AI) helping to power the technologies that drive better customer experience opportunities, the possibilities are seemingly endless for what they can do.
Although AI can seem complicated and overwhelming for any business owner, the prospective customer engagement capabilities make the research and investment a choice that can’t be overlooked. Capable of anticipating customer needs, providing exceptional customer service, and creating targeted marketing campaigns, AI is an investment that’s well worth its value.

When implemented into a business, AI can be a powerful tool to drive customer engagement and increase sales.

Anticipate Your Customer’s Needs

Knowing what your customers want before they can tell you is a powerful skill that precisely would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. However, with the use of predictive analytics drawn from historical trend data, this skill becomes a reality for any business to take advantage of.

To understand consumer behaviour, it’s important to understand the factors that could influence their purchasing decisions. Looking at the factors that have historically affected the business’s performance can help decision-makers more accurately understand why these events (such as a drop in sales or customer retention) happened.

Using a cloud-based revenue management solution can help your business more easily to track and analyse customer data. It can also be a useful method for obtaining consumer behaviour trends over time.

Data has proved to be a valuable business tool for decades, but when it is combined with the capabilities of AI, the increase of that value is unprecedented. AI-enabled machines can collect, analyse, and translate data into an easily understandable summary for rational analysis within a matter of seconds. When you have large sets of consumer data such as purchasing behaviours, customer demographics, or competitor intel, this can save your team valuable production hours. With this information at hand, decision-makers within your organization can transform this knowledge into actions that help increase customer engagement.

Provide Better Customer Service

One of the best ways to increase engagement with your clientele is to provide exceptional customer service. Furthermore, when a customer shares this positive experience through social media or word-of-mouth, engagement could grow that much more as a result.

As businesses scale, it can be challenging to manage the number of service requests and queries customer service representatives receive. It can be especially challenging to do so in the time frame customers want to be answered in. With advanced chatbots that are powered by artificial intelligence, companies can process and respond to these requests seamlessly, and without sacrificing quality.
Chatbots are faster, more reliable, and more accurate than traditional customer service representatives tend to be. AI chatbots also have capabilities of providing hyper-personalised recommendations and experiences for customers, a function that can often take humans a long time to process.

With the use of chatbots, information derived from the interaction with the consumer is made accessible for customer service representatives to view before continuing the conversation. These machines are also able to sift through requests to assign priority levels and identify the sentiment of each message to help create a structure to the process of responding. This reduces the amount of time spent answering simple requests that bots are fully capable of handling, while still maintaining the importance of a human connection.

Create Targeted Marketing Campaigns

An essential aspect of any modern customer engagement strategy is a well-executed marketing campaign. To execute these campaigns, an identified target audience needs to be identified.
Targeting the right demographic groups in a way that will appeal to them is the best way to increase engagement. Before you can target your audience, however, you need to segment the prospective market to identify each demographic or psychographic group you wish to target. These groups can be determined based on specific sales goals.

The best way to segment your market is to use a personalisation tool enabled with machine-learning technology. This tool knows precisely what your customers want before they even land on your page and can directly target ads and other recommended product pages towards them. As customers visit your page, the tool analyses their unique purchasing behaviours to create personalised experiences and targeted campaigns.

As technology advances and AI continues to dominate the market, it’s crucial to become an early adopter. Remaining stagnant or falling behind the competition can be caused by something as simple as failing to invest in the right technology. As much of this technology is now readily accessible for businesses of any size, it’s easier now than ever before.

Though it may seem like a large task to face, there are many resources available to simplify the process of implementing AI-driven technology. Companies that choose to invest early-on will stand a strong chance of high customer engagement rates and overall improved business operations.