How to Get a 360-Degree View of Customers with AI and Data?

The customer experience landscape has changed drastically. You cannot satisfy your customers with just traditional marketing elements. People don’t simply need personalization; they need it. 

Large volumes of data are created and scattered across all these channels. How do you analyze every data? 

You need to have a single view of your customers; this view must have all data about them from all interactions across all channels they use. Let’s call it a 360-degree view of the customer.

So, how would you know what your customer needs? If you have data management systems, what channel would you concentrate on, and how would you gather the data? 

Customers engage with your brand at least 7 times before they become familiar with your services and then take action. 

Identifying which channel they visited is important for you to develop an ideal customer journey.

While marketing technologies like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help process these data, you further need to analyze these to gain actionable insights.

What if you can do all of these with perfection using one solution? – Artificial intelligence (AI).

Artificial Intelligence is one step ahead of predictive analytics!

Objective: To Achieve a 360-degree View of Your Customers

Solution: Artificial Intelligence

With Artificial Intelligence, you can do more than just predictive analytics. With AI, you can gather, segregate, analyze, and unify data from various sources, helping you build a unified customer profile.

When combined with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, AI can help you:

1. Understand your customer preferences
2. Know their needs in advance
3. Deliver relevant experiences

With more than 80% of customers preferring experience as important as a company’s products or services, it’s high time businesses personalize their offering with the help of AI.

Continue to explore this blog to how AI can improve the customer experience.

Start with a Clear Vision:

For an AI implementation to be successful, your enterprise must have a clear Customer Experience vision. Your application developers should be well-aligned with your CX initiative involving AI.

From being a virtual assistant, content generation, etc. to predictive analytics, AI can be applied in every part of your CX journey. Ensuring you have all requirements in place and addressing the gaps can be where you can start.

More than 60% of leaders heading customer experience believe Artificial Intelligence could be the key to revolutionizing the entire customer journey.

Connecting the Channels for an Omnichannel Experience:

Now, this is the difficult part. But it doesn’t have to be that scary because AI is here to support you in all aspects.

From first contact to regular customer service, AI can help in mapping and examining the whole customer journey. 

Let’s break down how you can navigate this 360-degree transition with AI: 

Customer interactions vary depending on the channel and requirement. Some elements contributing to the 360-degree view include but are not limited to:

1. Social media interactions
2. Purchase history and transactions
3. Customer support and service interactions
4. Feedback and reviews
5. Website behavior and mobile app usage

All these data come from sources like social media, CRM systems, etc. Artificial Intelligence can combine all these scattered data, giving you a single view of your customer.

You can automate every tiny piece of data from your customers with proper AI solutions.

It Takes Three: Data, AI, and Personalization for Maximum Impact

By spotting the patterns and trends, AI can help you identify microsecond moments that you usually miss.

Processing information in posts, comments, and reviews, AI can help you learn what customers think about your product or service—Whether they love it or hate it or are indecisive. 

AI can find real-time problems in sentiment using CRM data for buying patterns to find real-time challenges in sentiment.

AI-Driven Insights for a Better Customer Journey

Almost half of consumers will abandon your brand if they have one bad experience—With AI, it doesn’t have to be that way!

Recently, the customer hasn’t engaged or made any purchase.

The company was able to find the past purchases of customers soon after combining AI into its social channels and data.

This in turn improved the customer experience, retained the customer, and optimized their existing content strategies.

AI-oriented Natural Language Processing can inspect customer feedback and reviews thoroughly.

Real-time AI Chatbots can handle more than 70% of your customer questions without your teams’ help.

They identify common queries and unattended issues and help refine your communication approach.

Through text and speech analysis, they can convert all conversations and FAQs.

How AI Helps Improve Personalized Marketing Efforts?

A McKinsey report says enterprises adding personalization to their customer acquisition strategy have achieved a 5-10% hike in revenue and saved costs between 10-20%.

All the more reason you should put personalization as an important part of your marketing efforts.

Customer segmentation: By understanding factors like age, demographics, psychographics, etc, you can segment your customers and provide tailored campaigns for each segment.

If you can’t sell a product that is unsuitable to people aged between 50-70, then you can remove this segment of people when you target.

Personalized offers: AI builds unified customer profiles with which you can do a lot more. All your customers’ data from various sources are made available in this profile.

With ML and data aggregation, you can suggest products, discounts, or offers based on your customers’ preferences.

Proactive Solutions: Artificial intelligence has the capability to anticipate customer requirements by analyzing patterns found in past interactions as well as current data.

For instance, if a customer needs an upgrade or wants to restock anything they bought the first time, AI’s predictive analytics capability can help offer proactive prompts.

Most customers expect companies to offer proactive support and with AI, you can check that box!

Content optimization & consistent brand experience: Customers are more likely to develop a  stronger affinity for your brand when  you provide a consistent and seamless experience across all channels.

A Sneak-Peek into a 360-Degree Customer Understanding

In real time: Amazon uses AI to analyze customer data to personalize product recommendations. This approach contributed to more conversions and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Enhanced customer support and communication strategies: If your customers are struggling with a particular aspect of your services or product (might include checkout, etc.), AI can detect those tiny mishaps.

What Would Possibly Stand Between AI and You

The first issue might start with how your data is stored. With many systems and channels available (CRMs, marketing tools, customer databases, etc.), connecting all these data might be one big hurdle to overcome.

However, investing in marketing technology platforms like CDP, ETL, etc, can help address these issues.

The compliance complications are another aspect to pay attention to. A privacy-by-design framework and regular audits can help you reduce the associated risks.

While AI can do everything from data, it can end up suggesting skewed recommendations. This might be due to a bias in algorithms.

AI for a Complete View of Customer: The To-Do List

Ensure you make a checklist of the below processes while you integrate AI into your operations:

1. Employ platforms like CDPs to integrate disparate data sources— The best practice would be to use an enterprise-grade CDP to support large-scale data integration.
2. Instead of opting for a one-size-fits-all tool, select an AI solution that specifically addresses your issue—Match your communication strategies with AI.
3. Customers need to evolve, and so should your AI models—Place a feedback loop with which AI models can get regular updates (data, insights, etc.)
4. Ensure your communication is transparent to create trust among customers—Keep your customers in the loop about data privacy regulations.

What’s the Payoff

From automation to providing actionable insights, AI helps enhance customer experience with personalized marketing efforts.

Top brands like Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, etc have already implemented AI for customer experience and are seeing huge results in revenue generation.

While implementing AI requires specific attention, the destination is not too far away. Whether you want to implement it in CRM, CDP, or other platforms, AI holds much more potential than just predictive analytics.

It is for the above reasons and beyond, that you must prepare yourself to embrace AI.