Your customers are looking for AI-driven advice

Today’s technological world is full of exciting innovations, especially on the customer service front. Consumers are living in the age of advice which is served to them in the form of recommendations, tailored product offers, and intelligent guidance based on collected data.

This AI driven advice has caused customers to become more interested in receiving useful and relevant information. The use of Artificial Intelligence for giving advice means that it’s becoming more accurate, and is matched to the individual’s specific needs and preferences.

How you can give your customers a complete experience with AI

Using AI for the customer journey can help digital marketers to satisfy the increasing expectations of customers. Even small-to-mid scale businesses are now able to deal with customers and provide outstanding customer service on par with larger companies. The advice below will help you to achieve this goal too.

Timing is important

Message timing and context are important for marketers and are common themes in the algorithms and interactions of AI. Push messaging, for example, allows businesses to send personalized messages at just the right time which can lead to improved engagement rates.

An example of a perfectly timed push message could be the AI sending a review request after a customer has visited a store or it could be offering a suggestion of a store they might like in the area, based on their shopping history data. It allows businesses to send contextual, personalized messages that matter to the customer.

Introduce chatbots for customer experience

Chatbots are services used to interact with customers via a chat interface. They can be used on almost any platform, including social media and your own websites. Using chatbots frees up the time of your marketing team, and no longer sends the same frustrating fake sounding messages to customers.

Modern chatbots are data-driven in order to provide customers with the best experience possible, and some of the best are powered with contextual data. An exciting development is the introduction of speech-to-text translation using NLP (natural language processing) to offer a natural dialogue. Shoppers simply state their needs and the chatbot will present a variety of items to match them.

Use it for consumer insights

Because AI is not bound by memory constraints or volume, it can be taught an infinite number of different types of structured and unstructured data sets. These structured data sets can be first, second or third party data in a highly organized relational database. Unstructured data is the data from the open web.

When using data from social media platforms or from IoT devices, cultural preferences and consumer behavior can be discovered and used by marketers. You’ll be able to segment target audiences and discover behavior patterns, perceptions, attitudes and more for marketing, communication, and CRM strategies.

What it takes to give the correct advice

Giving tailored advice to customers entails the use of first-party data. This data is tied directly to an individual because it is the individual who is providing it. To be effective, this first-party data will need the following information.

Identity, attributes, and preferences: This data answers the “who” question to shape the persona of a customer. It includes information such as age, gender, location, communication preferences and frequency of communication. It’s usually collected from your website or contact forms.

Behavior, conversations, and transactions: Interaction data is important because it can help to build context. This data includes a person’s transactional history as well as their digital footprint. You’ll also learn what people do, where they go, what they engage with,
what they buy, and more.

Usage, feedback, and social engagement: This data provides a much richer context, as well as clearer intent predictions. It’ll allow your company to target a variety of people with a personalized message based on specific relationship data.

How do customers react to AI advice?

Giving the right advice to your customers means that they’ll reward you with loyalty. When a company takes a more proactive role in the guiding the customer experience, customers are more likely to return to these companies over others.

Almost 63% of consumers indicated that they would think more positively of a brand if it gave them content that was relevant, interesting and valuable. Others said that they would be more comfortable with retailers which pay attention to their shopping interests and behavior data to deliver relevant offers.

Tailored experiences tend to draw more consumers, which means that AI-driven advice is the perfect option for this. If you are interested in including AI driven advice in your customer services, have a look at our article on how artificial intelligence applications increase profits.