Every expert marketer knows the importance of delivering outstanding customer experiences, and this activity remains atop their business model regardless of the industry they are in.
A wide range of customer engagement software in the market is proof that retaining a customer is of paramount importance for the marketers and goes hand in hand with acquiring new clients.
Companies of all sizes adapt and embrace customer engagement software to take care of their regular customer engagement.
And since solution providers want to be the market leader, developers have gone beyond traditional coding and introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the mix.
Chatbots are the first step towards transforming customer service, and these AI-powered tools are helping many businesses implement a 24/7 customer service model to improve customer engagement.
The Increasing Role of AI
AI is no longer constrained to addressing questions and has found its way into customer loyalty programs and brand building activities.
Ever since the AI-powered chatbots went mainstream, multiple companies have optimized their customer engagement activities with automated tools and have consistently improved their customer’s experience with the brand.
It is expected that by the year 2020, nearly 85% of customers will interact with the brand using automated tools.
Now, the question that remains is whether or not automated tools and AI-based customer engagement software are improving the customer experience? In the following lines, we will take a closer look at how artificial intelligence has changed how customer engagement worked, whether for the good or bad.
Myth: AI will take away your jobs
Fact: AI is there to assist you and add value to your marketing efforts
Let us address the elephant in the room now and find out how AI-based automated customer engagement software helps marketers improve customer satisfaction.
By definition, automation aims to mitigate the level of human intervention in customer service. However, the most critical negotiation and conversations still happen in-person, and it proves that AI is just a means to assist you and not take your job away.
These automated solutions can help marketing teams in multiple ways, and some of them include the following:
1. More Self Service:
A lot of customers like to get answers to their questions themselves. That why automated customer service models work flawlessly. One great example of the same is FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section, which can be regularly updated by AI programming on its own.
As a result, whenever a customer highlights specific issues, the chatbots can present a list of FAQs from where they can immediately get answers to other customers’ common problems.
This makes marketers’ life a lot easier, and they can focus on other high priority tasks.
2. Chatbots to Scale Businesses:
Customer acquisition costs are always a challenge, and the more business you bring to the company, you will need to spend more time on customer service.
Chatbots can be a game-changer here and keep the costs down, especially customer service teams. Once you deploy a chatbot, it can leverage its programming and learn from recurring customer responses to develop a list of solutions.
3. Texting is the Way:
We cannot deny the fact that many people prefer texting over talking to someone on the phone. You can use this habit to benefit and deliver solutions to your customers in text conversations using chatbots.
Using their natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, they can provide lightning-fast responses to the customers and elevate customer satisfaction exponentially.
4. Customized Offerings:
Service is not the only thing that AI is good at. These programs analyze customer data and provide a unique experience to the customers by giving them customized offerings based on their preferences.
Brands like Amazon and Netflix are perfect examples of how AI can position the right products to the users based on their past decisions.
5. Customer Feedback:
One of the biggest challenges is getting quality customer feedback, and we can agree that clear feedback can be the cornerstone needed to kickstart several improvements.
Feedback can be derived in multiple ways. These include sentiments, text analysis, customer service analysis, and reviews.
AI-based customer engagement software can do all of the above in a breeze once it has access to critical data like Customer Effort Score (CES) or Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The data based on sentiment analysis is combined with keywords like price, quality, delivery, availability, and more in the text reviews to determine what the customer is experiencing.
It then offers solutions that have worked in the past and continues to learn from the ongoing interactions while guiding the customer.
6. Predictive Analytics:
Predicting is a tough job. But when you have an intelligence working on it with factual data, it will significantly improve the process.
Active AI and machine learning (ML) programs identify which solution yields a high impact with minimal efforts and delivers the customers’ answers using the least invasive approach.
As a result, customer churn is reduced substantially over time. AI’s NLP identifies intent signals from the customers and presents them with relevant information instead of a broad segment-based approach.
7. Personalization with AI:
A marketer’s job is about building relationships with customers by offering them personalized opportunities to interact with the brand.
Using an automated tool allows you to instantly launch new activities to establish a much-needed connection between the brand and the customer.
You might have a hunch about which direction you should put your efforts into, but AI eliminates guesswork and helps you make an informed decision with data-based recommendations.
8. Engage and Nurture Leads via Email:
Frankly, AI is not capable enough to replace veteran marketing personnel, but they can take care of some tedious tasks.
Some AI programs can access data, nurture the leads by following up via email, and in some rare cases, even cross-sell.
Once an AI integrates with your CRM, it can start identifying leads and begin offering them solutions based on their previous interaction with the brand.
9. Assist in Content Production:
If you are attracting leads through inbound marketing, you will agree that the cost of producing high-quality content is pretty high.
But now you can opt for an AI-based solution to generate content. AI uses automated insights to produce natural-sounding and sophisticated content.
It also considers the content available on your website’s landing pages, product descriptions, and existing blog posts to produce relevant and customized content.
10. Onboarding New Customers:
The main job of an AI program is to guide the people in making informed decisions. You can leverage your AI’s capabilities to do a multitude of tasks when it comes to onboarding new customers.
It can measure opportunities based on existing customer profiles, leads, and successful sales closures, and create cases that the new joinees can analyze when they come on board.
They can use this mobile to quickly adapt to the CRM and focus their efforts on strategies that work effectively.
11. Funds Allocation for Increased ROI
AI can help identify what your competitors are spending their money on during their active buying cycles with regards to specific products or services.
This allows you to focus your attention on advertising and engagement efforts towards the most favorable prospects and generate more engaged leads to develop a positive ROI.
12. Anticipate New Opportunities:
The biggest challenge in forecasting is that you often presume a lot of things based on historical trends. You strongly feel that they can work for the future and often fail to account for unknown conditions.
However, you can reduce the uncertainty involved in predicting reports generated using thorough data analysis.
An AI program takes all factors into account, like historical data, real-time trends, business intelligence, and sentiment analysis, to offer an evidence-based path towards new opportunities.
Conclusion
Maybe AI and machine learning have not reached their utmost potential just yet; they offer many benefits to marketers today. From saving costs to forecasting and improving efficiency, they can be the perfect help that marketers need today.
Are you also looking for an AI-based automated customer engagement software to scale up your business?
Let’s talk. Experts at NextBee will help your brand build USPs that can yield measurable results in the near future. Get a free consultation right away to get started.
