Opinion

How artificial intelligence can improve customer engagement

Several organizations and its new products and technologies or new business models have now turned their focus towards customer expectations and have made it their target. Hence, meeting those changing expectations and experiences is a challenge in this whole scenario. Organizations are rethinking their decisions on how to get engaged with customers and stay connected and enhanced. Companies being available for the customer 24/7 and building a relationship is the goal of these organizations.

According to a report by Salesforce, “54% of customers say companies need to transform to bring a change to how they engage with them.” Every customer is unique, every organization will use different ways to amuse them. This leads to the current motto of companies on their major principles and touch points, reaching out to the customer in all stages and across the whole journey. This will help the organization to shape its tactics on how to involve their customers. In the long run, this will help organizations to enhance their one on one customer relations and be loyal to each other. 

Advancement of AI in improving the experience 

AI has been the biggest influence on customer experience by making it faster, hassle-free, and automated. For example, chatbots are AI-based virtual conversation tools that are being used in many customer engagement circumstances. These are made for human interactions to provide personalized and immediate responses. This will eliminate mistakes and setbacks for customer queries. It also reduces the training period for sales representatives.

There are several stages that enhance AI with customer experiences through AI-enabled analytics, predictive personalization, voice visual and text engagements, rapid change in decision making. AI-enabled analytics provides organizations with insights by nurturing intelligence into marketing automation, CRM, and other several tools. They improve customer engagement and influence employees by helping them in making decisions. 

AI leading the market

According to the Salesforce report, “75% of customers say that they expect companies to use those new technologies to create better experiences for them”. These numbers clearly show the link between technologies and changing customer expectations.

Google is using AI for Gmail accounts to predict the responses on the mails as Smart Replies. It has added more machine learning tools and productivity to its email services. Gmail added a new creative way to write email subject lines for users and schedule an email to send at a later time. In the same way, as Google is using AI-powered Smart Replies, LinkedIn also started using automated systems to recognize the responses on the messaging platform. These helped the LinkedIn team to create professional conversations with more efficiency and information.

Hospitality, travel, and transportation industry is using AI to comfort their customers. Machine learning is part of AirBNB’s new approach to predicting whether a customer will book within a week or not. This helps them in their marketing campaign resulting in improved revenue.

AlphaSense, a fintech startup, is using ML to analyze millions of data from 35,000 financial institutions. An AI-powered financial search tool was created so the investment firms now have more information at their end. AlpahSense, now has the ability to scan millions of data points to generate detailed reports based on related financial data which saves plenty of time. This search engine provides improved results that help organizations to make superior strategic decisions to one-up the competitors.

In one more example, Pager, a healthcare company uses artificial intelligence to help patients with small issues like illnesses, pains and body aches. The company is taking advantage of machine learning to gauge the clinical issues and assess the gaps in the patient's treatment. Through these AI tools, patients can seek help for booking appointments and making payments. This app allows the patients to chat with the nurses, and doctors via messages 24/7 and video chats. The company gives an opportunity for both patients and the doctors to be on the same platform remotely to make quicker and clever decisions.

Improving customer experience has always been the end goal of many organizations, Covid19 has accelerated the digital transformation for better survival. This has led to new status quo for the companies such as: 

  • AI is now an integral part of companies looking forward to building loyalty with their customers.
  • AI brings together a multitude of data and experiences and through machine learning can improve with each bytes of data fed.
  • AI enables the 24/7 availability marketing for companies and “to the point” responses to the customer queries.

The future possibility of artificial intelligence is overwhelming. Companies have enhanced AI-driven customer engagement analytics that requires them to deliver highly qualified customer experience.