Artificial intelligence (AI) is on a rise now. It has been a trending buzzword in every industry. It is rightly so as it is playing a significant role in transforming industries across the globe. In fact, the global AI industry is predicted to reach $190.61 billion market value in 2025. This only means, that rapid adoption of AI is underway.
AI has a remarkable impact on the customer service industry. It comes in many forms to ensure customer support and relationship management. It also enables predictive and prescriptive analytics to market and customer service, by leveraging the huge amount of data all around us. Offering a consistent and predictive experience keeps your customers happy and satisfied. And we all know that happy customers will come back for more.
Customer loyalty is a big win in today’s economy. With so many players in the field, it is tough to acquire customers. Anyways, it is also cheaper to retain your customers and artificial intelligence through its many incarnations can help you achieve this.
Content:
What do we mean by Artificial Intelligence?
How to Improve Customer Loyalty with AI?
AI is happening right now
When we think about Artificial Intelligence, we automatically think about robots performing human-like tasks. Well, it is almost accurate the usual perception. AI is the ability to enable a machine to perform tasks that will require human intelligence and judgment. The machines are taught to emulate humans and perform tasks that humans might find tedious and time-consuming, all the while improving our quality of life. Some popular examples of Artificial Intelligence are:
If you notice, AI is not limited to just robots. Yes, the last example of Netflix was exactly what AI is doing with data. It is able to study data and revealing patterns which assist you better. The same technology when used in contact centers, can help any business to understand their customers more intimately. Let’s see how!
Customer loyalty is all about rewarding your customers so that they keep sticking with you. AI can offer exclusive insights and predictions which will help you in relationship building and nurturing. This is done via analyzing a huge pool of data provided by your customers, every time they interact with you.
As customers ourselves, we know how every purchase is not always driven by reason. In fact, most of our purchases are based on emotions. Understanding this driving factor can assist marketing teams to excel in their venture. To do it across the organizational scale, deploying AI is wiser and neat. From chatbots to predictive tools, most AI-driven customer-facing solutions can track the feelings of the customers through voice analytics or text analytics. The solutions will track keywords in the conversations that will give away, the primary feeling the customer might be experiencing when interacting with your brand. In AI parlance it is sentiment analysis. Based on this information, you can target your campaigns better, and create a supportive environment for your customers. This also ensures that you are never unprepared for your customer be it inventory-wise or support-wise. AI can detect the pattern of a visitor who can become a customer, most likely. Analyzing the clickstream data of the web visitor, AI can real-time predict the potential of your website visitor and suggest some offers to quickly convert them. Isn’t it wonderful to make the compelling offer only to visitors who has the likelihood to convert, rather plastering it on the website x% discount over the retail price!
How do you prevent customer churn, when you don’t even know who they are? Identifying customers who are showing the least interest or have stopped purchasing often is very important. Via this information, you can proactively reach out to them and enquire about their reluctance. All-in-all, you will be able to connect with the customer with more personalized finesse and sophistication, which is better than coming off commercially motivated.
For example, when I stopped ordering food on Zomato during the covid-19 pandemic, I received a mail addressed by their CEO. It asked if I were well and healthy, as I have not ordered from them in a long-time. They were concerned that I might be affected by the pandemic and offered me a coupon as well. This was a well-executed campaign by Zomato, which was possible as they could identify the customers who stopped purchasing at a very concerning time. This campaign not only retained many customers but also created a positive impact and scored a social media shoutout.
Applying it to your contact center will enable real-time monitoring of all the interactions and AI will flag the calls or chats where the supervisor will need to barge in and assist the customer who would otherwise add to the churn list.
Active communication is another vital aspect of achieving customer loyalty. Customers despise being unheard of. They usually feel that they lost their money on an unrewarding service and would eventually move on to a different brand. However, deploying a chatbot or a voice bot can easily relieve you from all these troubles.
AI-driven bots can easily handle multiple queries at once, in any language required. Bots are usually as good as they are trained. So, train your bots with relevant data and semantics, and let them do the rest. The bot will address and acknowledge your customers, making sure that they are never unheard. These bots can be integrated with any messaging platform such as Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, and Telegram. It can also be integrated with email ticketing systems, to respond to emails. Chatbots can assist your customers on any task. However, if any query is too difficult for it to handle, a live agent can jump into the rescue. In the end, the customer will be assisted almost instantly, 24x7, without any geographical restrictions. Such diligent service is appreciated and prevents customers from going anywhere else.
As AI can be leveraged to perfect your service, it can also be used for perfecting your product. Artificial Intelligence as always will reveal what your customers prefer and what is trending. Through this information, you can support your development team in devising a contending product. Honestly, it is the little adjustments that matter when it comes to products and solutions. This is why it is very important to use AI research tools to unveil what is in demand. Your product should offer an immersive experience and usage ease.
For example, there are multiple music apps in the market. From YouTube Premium to Gaana, many apps have been around for a while. However, as of 2021, Spotify became the most popular music streaming app. This is because they identified what is trending and what their customers wanted. They realized how users want better recommendations and not the same playlist every day. They created a remarkable recommendation system where the AI tool will analyze historic listening data to curate the ideal playlist for their users. Spotify used machine learning, NLP, and convolutional neural networks to tap into user preference, to perfect their service. As a result, Spotify has 320 million monthly users across the world.
This goes to show how successful and intimidating the power of AI can be. It can be utilized to personalize everything and offer your customers exactly what they want. AI will allow you to create intelligent products and personalized experiences. Did you know that Amazon’s recommendation engine – Related to items you’ve viewed – increased its sales revenue by 29%?
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay and grow. Early adoption of AI in your customer support strategy will only bring positive results. It is close to impossible to think of customer service without AI support in the coming years. I mean, every website now has chatbot support right? That is just the tip of what’s going to happen. AI can assist your team with customer loyalty, product perfection, customer service, and data interpretation.
In the customer support industry, loyalty is hard to maintain. Why should a customer consistently choose you? Because you can predict and offer to them exactly what they want. To do so, it is the right choice to invest in AI-driven solutions in your business.
Author Bio: Sweta is a passionate technical writer with experience in digital marketing. Outside work, she is a devoted Esports advocate.
