How AI is Transforming Social Customer Engagement Strategies
With the inception of Artificial Intelligence in business, many types of industries are experiencing a great digital transformation. And business functions like operations, marketing, and customer care are all reaping the benefits. In fact, one of the fastest growing areas where AI is being deployed is in human engagement, specifically around online customer experience.
For example, through tracking and data gathering, AI can help uncover the motivations and actions of a customer. By providing this information to the customer care team, it can provide a better level of service. AI is then able to reduce the cost of customer care by automatically answering questions or even proactively working with customers to prevent issues.
This is just one example of how AI is elevating the customer experience, but there are applications across several teams in customer engagement, including marketing and sales. While every industry is different, we’ve gathered a few ways for businesses to leverage AI to build lasting customer engagement.
Social Engagement and AI: How AI influences buying decisions
Social media sites may be some of the largest advocates of artificial intelligence in supporting customer care efforts. Social customer engagement strategies can increase trust on a social page or on online shopping websites. AI is being used to automatically respond to comments on social pages, or chat with customers in real time as they shop online. By responding quickly, or personalizing marketing content, the brand is building a relationship with the consumer. This increase in customer trust can lead to decreased customer service costs, increased engagement rates, and more sales.
A study conducted by McKinsey this year stated that “robots will be able to fully resolve 30% to 50% of all [customer service] requests, which can double productivity while reducing costs in half.” These statistics point to the fact that AI will be intuitive enough to have a meaningful conversation with a user, understanding his or her needs and providing an individual with plausible solutions. Leveraging AI can improve the customer experience while reducing the cost of customer service.
AI in CX environments
89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience (CX), so it isn’t a surprise that AI is being integrated into the CX process to better understand a customer’s needs and how to best serve them.
While chatbots and virtual assistants have existed for several years, those technologies supported by AI are quite new. And it is easy to notice the stark difference between an AI-assisted chatbot and a non-AI based chatbot.
The key difference is that AI is designed to acknowledge the context in which the customer speaks. So, it is easy to tailor a response that can relate to their concerns. The same is not possible with non-AI assisted chatbots, as it feels like the customers are just getting a preprogrammed set of answers rather than a meaningful conversation.
How Are Businesses Using AI to Develop Business Strategies?
When you interact with AI, it is storing your preferences and likes to tailor a better experience when you use it the next time. In theory, the more you use AI, the more it becomes accustomed to your tastes and preferences in such a way that it can automate things for you without any input.
Businesses can use this data to know what the customer likes and dislikes. They can get data on both wide demographics, as well as do micro-segmentation. They can also help acquire insight on trends and market movement
AI is indeed a powerful tool in stargazing the road map for a company’s marketing. Think about the possibilities that your business can explore when you know in advance how the majority of people are going to react to a specific kind of marketing strategy. It helps to tailor your marketing strategies to get the best results without much waste of time and money.
More Targeted Marketing
Marketing traditionally can be done in two ways — by targeting each individual, and by targeting a larger audience in a wide demographic. Most businesses find success in combining both to create a well-rounded plan.
With AI, both types of data sets can be leveraged to create a near-perfect marketing strategy. Since customers nowadays use a variety of digital mediums on a daily basis, it is hard for businesses to get their ads noticed by people due to all the digital noise.
However, we humans have a way of blocking out the noise if a product or service they see on their screen is something they have been looking for, and AI is capable of helping companies create such personalized ad campaigns. AI can help you get your product/service to people who are most likely to buy it, rather than a hit-or-miss campaign.
Leveraging Social Media for Customer Engagement
With the global population at 7.7B, nearly half of it possesses a social media account. Even 1% of 3B amounts to 30M. It is evident that social media is a potential gold mine if you know how to market your business on it.
Facebook, Instagram, and other popular social media sites have AI working within their UI to bring you posts that you are most likely going to click. They do this by learning a user’s social media engagement patterns. By doing so, social media companies have an idea about how well each person will react to certain ads.
You can use this data by hosting ads on Facebook where AI will show it to users who are most likely to purchase that item. AI is heavily user dependent and this is what helps businesses tailor their marketing strategies more effectively than ever before.
AI can play a significant role in developing customer engagement strategies that are effective and deployed in a seamless manner. This powerful technology is just beginning to show value in the customer engagement space and the possibilities to come in the next few years are quite exciting.
