Why is customer engagement important? The term often feels
like a buzzword today but essentially it's all about improving the interactions
between businesses and their clientele. Good customer engagement is what gets
leads through the door in the first place. But when well done, it's what keeps
them loyal to your brand, and encourages cross and upselling. In the past,
customer engagement has always been a tedious and largely human-driven affair.
Today, artificial intelligence is affording simple, effective, and convenient
ways for brands to improve engagement, sometimes even on autopilot. Without
further ado, here's how AI is impacting customer engagement for the better.
1. Intelligent chatbots to increase engagement
Chatbots have grown in popularity. Most businesses on the
face of the internet rely on some form of conversational algorithms, including
our digital marketing agency and many others, as a visitor's first point of contact
with the brand. And this becomes even more important at a time when 23% of
leads come in after hours.
Here's what else AI-driven chatbots bring to the table:
- Instant response- 17 hours is the average lead response
time for websites today. Chatbots can hack that tremendously and reduce leads
that businesses lose due to delayed turnaround
- Consistency- Intelligent chatbots are often powered by a
single source of truth or database that ensures uniformity in answers thus
further elevating the customer experience
- Personalization- AI-driven chatbots can also gather lead
data to therefore improve personalization in terms of offers and messaging
2. RPA content intelligence is diverting more time to quality engagement
Today, robotic process automation (RPA) is in full swing
across niches. While the term is often associated with big machines performing
iterative tasks in factories, much simpler alternatives are making life much
easier for brands.
For example, intelligent OCR scanners are helping improve
customer service in many ways. First, they eliminate tedious data entry chores,
automating the process and thus freeing up time for customer service reps or
sales agents to spend with leads.
Moreover, AI-driven OCR technology helps break down data
silos brought about by physical and legacy data storage or filing systems. It
leverages natural language processing and machine learning to classify content
by similarity while eliminating duplication. In a nutshell, this ensures a
customer's data is completely available across the organization and subsidiary,
which further improves personalization and marketing strategies.
3. AI enables an insider's view of customer behaviour patterns
These days, brands face a lot of competition. Data-centric AI
is enabling businesses to pick up on customer behaviour patterns and gain a leg
up on any alternatives. A trend that has become known today in many circles is
customer behaviour analysis.
Traditional avenues of analysing customer behaviour remain largely
unideal due to time and resource constraints, without forgetting to factor in
the possibility of human error. While AI isn't outrightly taking the place of
data analysts, it's helping them do their jobs much faster and more
effectively.
Via deep CRM analytics, it's becoming possible for brands to
gain valuable insights regarding customers':
- Spending habits
- Wishes and
preferences
- Buying patterns in terms of time or season
- Expectations and much more
All this ensures that customers are presented with products,
and offers at large really, that are most relevant to them.
4. NLP can be leveraged for sentiment analysis to improve engagement
NLP or natural language processing is a branch of AI that's
concerned with programs being able to understand written and spoken language
and decipher direct meanings as well as implications from the tone. This
technology powers sentiment analysis which brands can use to identify positive
and negative sentiments. It can be
leveraged to trawl social media data and identify customers' pain points that a
company may otherwise miss, especially if they have a large following that's
hard to keep up with.
NLP and intelligent conversational technology is also being
widely used today to provide agent support as far as a business's call centers
are concerned. This enables brands to handle way more customer support tickets
than they would otherwise. Additionally, advanced NLP with emotion recognition
enables businesses to deal with high-priority customer cases quickly.
5. AI allows brands to test-drive engagement strategies
Brands are always tinkering and tweaking to try and advance
customer engagement. Most times, certain strategies can blow up in one's face,
and even if it is retracted, the damage to brand reputation may not be undone.
In the same way, A/B testing allows a digital marketing
agency to test out alternatives before a website goes live, and so too does AI
technology enable trial runs for businesses in terms of customer engagement
strategies.
For instance, AI, which is filling the shoes of customers in
hypothetical situations, is enabling brands to train their human customer
service reps over dozens of possible scenarios. This ensures that human agents
are better prepared, sharpening customer service skillsets such as:
- Positive language
- Adaptability
- Persuasive speaking
- Empathy
- Patient
- Taking responsibility, among others.
6. Smart content to customize content needs for customers
Smart content is also in full gear today. It's a tactic we also
harness for our digital marketing agency and to great reward. In essence, smart
content is all about customizing content needs for users through the power of
machine learning.
Let's consider email content, for instance. Delivering
customized email content to the entirety of an email list can be an impossible
feat. AI enables personalization in this case by picking up on patterns and
topics of interest to determine blog posts to send to audiences based on:
- Posts customers have previously interacted with
- Website interaction at large
- Time spent on a web page
- Shifting popularity of posts, and other factors
Ultimately, this increases content relevance, improves email
open rates and CTRs, and generally bodes well for catalysing customer
engagement.
AI is making a huge difference today for brands everywhere
Is AI the future of customer service? We receive a lot of questions to this effect as a digital marketing agency with a passion for data-centric customer engagement. And the answer we like to tell our customers is No. AI is not the future of customer service. It is the present. It is here. It is now. The age of AI is alive and kicking, and close to 75% of brands today have implemented AI in various customer engagement processes. This has improved client satisfaction rates by upwards of 10% on average, according to Forbes. So for any business that remains sceptical about AI, the writing is on the wall.
