Artificial intelligence is being used by marketers in new ways and strengthening customer engagement is one of them. Engagement is the key to furthering customer relationships in the digital landscape, and customers want a say in how they interact with your brand; learn about your product; and how they reach out for customer service. You need technology to help provide the convenient, personalized, and well-informed experiences for which your customers are asking. The answer may very well be leveraging AI in customer engagement efforts.
Data drives artificial intelligence. As the amount of customer data grows, machine learning and AI become even more useful in uncovering insights that can help improve customer engagement. AI can recognize patterns in customer behavior that indicate when a customer needs a product upgrade, is about to make a purchase, or cease their relationship with a brand. This gives customer service reps a chance to intervene and influence a customer’s next purchase decision.
Leveraging AI to Improve Customer Engagement
Using the predictive nature of AI to prevent a customer from churning and to identify those who are likely to accept an upsell can make the customer experience far more tailored to meet that customer’s needs. There are several advantages which AI delivers that can improve a customer’s experience with your brand.
Better Data-Driven Insights
Data is useless unless you can make sense of it. And AI is helping marketers use data to better understand their customers, anticipate their needs, and increase customer loyalty. Imagine that you could give a computer a human’s set of cognitive skills. Basically, what you’d get is AI. AI gives machines the ability to engage people in a way that doesn’t feel machine-like, forced, or robotic because AI can learn, reason, adapt, and draw conclusions from information, just as a human being would.
By collecting data from a variety of sources, like mobile apps or websites, marketers can spot new customer segments and craft more relevant messages. And by understanding what’s on a customer’s mind, brands can speak to that customer in a more authentic way that enhances their journey, deepening their relationship.
More Efficient Self-Service
Customers in the digital landscape love freedom. They enjoy being able to help themselves whenever possible. AI is making it easier for customers to solve problems and gather the information they’re looking for without needing the help of a customer service representative. However, self-service can become troublesome when customers encounter long-winded forums, online help centers, or irrelevant Google search results. That’s where AI can help.
AI is transforming how customers find answers to questions through machine learning and natural-language processing (NLP) to locate the most appropriate information for a customer’s query. Virtual assistants, which have the option of being voice-operated, can locate products, answer questions, and engage the customer in conversation. Chatbots are also being used to respond to questions and offer customer service. These innovations offer an alternative for customers who don’t like interacting with human customer service agents.
Greater Personalization
Customers prefer messages and information that have been tailored to their specific needs. It adds a personal, human touch to the customer experience and helps ensure the correct customer pain points are anticipated and addressed.
AI can analyze large amounts of customer data to find trends and patterns of behavior. Or, it can look at a customer’s history of interactions, such as their support tickets, to predict how a current engagement may end, which gives your customer service team a chance to improve future customer satisfaction scores. AI can perform predictive analysis and make better recommendations, such as using search history and time or location data to suggest helpful products. By drawing insights from a customer’s past behavior you can personalize their experience, which saves them time and effort.
Enhance Customer Engagements Using Shopkick
AI powers many of the products and subscription services people use every day, from Netflix to Google. Now that marketers are tapping into AI’s ability to enrich customer engagement, brands and retailers must leverage technology to remain competitive. Shopkick is one of these powerful tools.
Shopkick makes use of consumer data to deliver timely messages to users as they shop. Using location-based data, Shopkick alerts users of deals or products while they’re in a purchase mindset, which encourages product interaction and improves sales likelihood. This technology works via a consumer app and in-store beacons that provide location information and deliver deals based on those details.
If you’re looking to reshape your brand’s customer engagement strategy, partner with Shopkick.
Through the app, customers are encouraged to visit stores and make purchases more frequently. It uses a points system fueled by “kicks”, or rewards points, to motivate consumer behavior, raise brand awareness, introduce new products and increase sales. Shopkick gamifies the shopping experience by turning it into a mobile scavenger hunt that is fun, memorable, and rewarding. And those are exactly the sort of strategies that can deepen your brand’s customer engagement and ultimately drive sales.
If you’re looking to reshape your brand’s customer engagement strategy, partner with Shopkick. Earning rewards makes customers feel good about their purchases which, in turn, makes them feel good about your brand.
Shopkick offers our partners an enriching environment for reshaping customer engagements. To learn how our partners have used Shopkick to solidify the customer relationship, read our success stories.
Image courtesy of Nopphon_1987
