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Giving customers what they love: Personalizing experiences through AI

 | 3 min read
Giving customers what they love: Personalizing experiences through AI

Nowadays, we live in an attention economy. Everyday and every minute, people get a steady stream of notifications, message, and ads—all competing for attention. This barrage of information has raised the ever-important question: how do you break through the noise and get customers’ interest?

It’s time to get into the mind of customers.

With the information explosion also comes an increasing volume of data. Capitalize on this growth and leverage AI to reimagine the customer experience as it is. Show them products that they’ll love, provide content that resonates with them, and build a customer journey that generally makes them feel valued and heard. Personalize their experience and capture their attention.

Personalization in its most basic form

Like most things, personalization efforts started with the simplest tactics. Let’s consider communication channels. When sending transactional or promotional emails, organizations have the option to switch out dynamic elements for customer details.

Instead of saying “Dear customer”, you can say “Dear Alex” or “Dear Rachel”. This is personalization yes, but it’s very basic. Still, it already goes a long way in terms of customer experience. The customer would access their email inbox and feel valued as they see their name on the screen.

Except for this personalized bit though, the whole message would be the same. You might say that you tweaked some of the content for returning buyers and prospects, but from a larger perspective, you’re still sending out the same email.

So, while this attempt at tailoring content is commendable, at the end of the day, it’s still a batch-and-blast campaign. And let’s face it—with data volume growing and technology maturing, there are far better ways to personalize your customers’ experience today. This is where artificial intelligence comes in.

Adding AI to the mix

Aside from making customers feel heard, artificial intelligence can make every day experiences more coherent, dynamic, and seamless. Below are three ways AI can tailor experiences and create delight for customers:

1. Optimized email content

Going back to the example above, there are ways to elevate email campaigns and ensure an even more tailored experience. After all, 246.5 billion emails are sent or received worldwide per day. In order to stand out, you must make sure you send emails that truly resonate with your audience.

Through AI, customer data is leveraged to send personalized emails: using the right words through natural language processing, predicting their preferences through sophisticated algorithms, and determining the optimal send time and frequency through machine learning.

2. Improved shopping experiences

Decision fatigue can happen when one has too many options to choose from, and this is something that happens all too often when shopping for anything from shoes to a software platform. To battle this, you can make the purchasing experience effortless by offering hyper-personalized suggestions based on customer expectations and behavior.

As customers show interest in a particular topic or product, AI systems can use this information and anticipate what they could be interested in next. This way, customers get intelligent recommendations that are relevant to their needs.

A market basket analysis conducted on Analance can help retail organizations identify the optimal products to upsell or cross-sell with customers.
A market basket analysis conducted on Analance can help retail organizations identify the optimal products to upsell or cross-sell with customers.

This isn’t only applicable to digital stores. Brick-and-mortar establishments can leverage real-time monitoring in-store to optimize what products to display in the storefront or what ads to show to visitors.

3. Enhanced customer service

To take hyper-personalization a step further, don’t forget to consider the truly one-on-one experience for customers: conversations. You’ve likely noticed chatbots dominating online platforms these days. You visit a website and a chat box pops up, asking you what you’re looking for; or you message a social media account and get a reply in seconds, starting a free-flowing dialogue without talking an actual person.

These AI-powered systems enable on-demand and instant communication across touchpoints, but more importantly, they allow organizations to provide exactly what the customer needs. By drawing on customer data and behavior, chatbots can give personalized answers, information, and recommendations.

Elevate your customers’ experience

Artificial intelligence may be a form of technology, but it’s a key piece to making your customers’ experience more personalized and more human. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI automation will manage 85% of companies’ customer relationships.

By using AI to improve customer experience, organizations like yours will have more opportunities to build meaningful and relevant connections across touchpoints—a journey that customers are sure to love.

About the author

Fiona Villamor

Fiona Villamor

Fiona Villamor is the lead writer for Sryas, a global technology company that delivers powerful insights and business transformations at scale. In the past 10 years, she has written about big data, advanced analytics, and other transformative technologies and is constantly on the lookout for great stories to tell about the space.

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