When it comes to succeeding in business, it’s not only about just what you’re selling but how you’re selling it. Customer engagement is the one differentiator that businesses can use to get ahead of the competition when there’s little to set them apart, hence the constant need to seek out new opportunities for improvement.
AI technology has quite frankly become a buzzword in recent times really, but practically offers priceless opportunities to modify customer engagement for the better. If you’re here to learn how, let’s break it down.
How AI can Modify Customer Engagement
1. Bolstering after hour lead response time
Did you know that 23% of businesses receive new leads when they’ve already closed up shop for the day? An even more alarming statistic that points to the drastic state of affairs is that 5 in 10 consumers admit that they’ll go with the brand that responds first.
This is an area where artificial intelligence can help businesses with limited operational hours to cast their net wider, and maintain a digital storefront that’s always open regardless of day or time of the week. Via website chatbots, businesses can:
- Nurture leads down their sales funnels any time
- Answer pressing FAQs in real time
2. Personalization to build human connections
It may be odd when you talk about imploring machine learning algorithms to improve a business’s human touch. However, AI can indeed help businesses to make customers feel like they’re the only one.
Without personalized digital experiences, chances are you’ll lose out on 75% of new leads, who prioritize such experiences. AI can save the day, here enabling brands to discover customer patterns, such as how often they check their phones during the day.
An important metric that can help finetune push notifications, for example, if you’re keen on improving mobile app user engagement. Beyond that, machine learning technology help marketers determine the best email subject lines, copy, and sending times as well.
3. Improved engagement through automation
Automation is especially an appealing point for brands with business concepts revolving around a mobile application, with this niche often experiencing 70% user walkouts within 1 week.
When you take certain iterative tasks out of the hands of customers with AI bots, then your app becomes faster to use and way more convenient, which can work wonders for engagement. And we’ll demonstrate this with a few examples of everyday apps and how they implore AI for automation to get more usage time:
- Uber uses automated reasoning to link up consumers with rides. This convenience & accuracy is one of the reasons why uber dominates the global taxi industry with a 12.75% market share.
- Google Maps remains one of the most widely used navigation aids as it leverages big data and implements machine learning to pick out the shortest paths with excellent accuracy and reliability.
And the list goes on…
4. Easing leads through hectic checkouts
7 in 10 shoppers today jump ship right after they place items in their cart & get ready for check out. A few of the causes for this include:
- Buyers getting distracted and forgetting their purchase
- Check out processes that are either too complicated or too lengthy
Artificial intelligence, and menu-based bots, in particular, can help see these leads through by holding their hands and guiding them over the finish line. With simple pre-selected choices, algorithms can ease leads through the most important part of your purchase funnel and even prompt bonus purchases by suggesting complementary.
5. Shouldering work burdens
Burnout affects 52% of all employees, with the condition much worse for contact service personnel with that figure standing at a jaw-dropping 74% in the latter case. When customer reps are burning the candle at both ends as they drown in overwhelming work, chances are they won’t deliver the best care service always.
While we’re not advocating for artificial intelligence as a substitute for human reps, the latter would certainly fare much better with aid from artificial intelligence. AI tools like smart OCR readers, for example, can take over onboarding paperwork and other administrative tasks. This frees up customer service staff to focus more on building meaningful connections with leads.
6. Analyzing feedback with NLP
Artificial intelligence is made up of a number of facets, and one particular aspect that’s making great strides is natural language processing or NLP. In simple terms, this means algorithms being able to understand how we talk or write, taking into account things like:
- Tone
- Intonation
- Sarcasm, etc
Overall, sentiment analysis systems powered by NPL can help businesses understand customer feedback better than ever, also due to the capability to pick out common terms or phrases that customers are frequently using to describe them.
Summary
Artificial intelligence can conjure certain complexities, which is why many businesses shy off or procrastinate its implementation. However, when it comes to embracing AI, the best way to approach this is to take small, simple, baby steps.
First, think about repetitive aspects of your customer engagement processes you could save hugely (time and money wise), if intelligent automation were to take over. Once you get the results you desire, move on to the next opportunity.
Take on one opportunity at a time, and always measure results thereafter. Don’t try to make every process intelligent all at once.
