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. 

Your customer engages on social media, websites, mobile apps, emails, and in-store visits. 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 aware of your services or 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.

Keep reading this blog to understand what role AI plays in enhancing 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!

For example, an enterprise has a long-term customer who has purchased products or services and is active in offline and online channels.
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.

Then, they were able to offer customized suggestions and offers, which allowed their customer to make a complete transaction.

They then were able to deliver personalized recommendations and offers, which prompted the customer to become active and make a successful transaction.

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

Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered by AI can help you analyze customer reviews and feedback better.

By processing textual information from emails, social media, or any other channels, AI enables you to understand needs and sentiments.

With NLP, you can spot common issues in product reviews and ask your product teams to come up with new and personalized recommendations.

Real-time AI Chatbots are another important element that contributes to improving customer satisfaction. These bad boys 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.

With speech and text analysis, they can translate all conversations and find any patterns of worry or even FAQs. With these inputs, you can improve your services and train your team for better response.

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. That’s how segmentation works.

In real-time: Leveraging AI, Netflix segmented its users based on their preferences and shows content that aligns with their interests. This ultimately reduced their churn rates and improved retention.

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.

This includes their interactions, feedback, past purchases, and a lot more. With ML and data aggregation, you can suggest products, discounts, or offers based on your customers’ preferences.

Proactive Solutions: AI can predict customer needs by identifying patterns in historical interactions and real-time 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 love your brand more if you offer a seamless experience across all channels.

Once AI delegates a set of content to a particular customer, it sticks to that style throughout the journey with your brand.

Even if they engage through different channels, AI consolidates all data and ensures they receive the same level of service and messaging.

A Sneak-Peek into a 360-Degree Customer Understanding

Accurate product development and offerings: Say you launched a new product and want to know whether your targeted customers like it.

AI can help track how a new product is performing and discussed across all platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). With this insight, you can work on any product innovations to align with your customer expectations.

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.

With this, you can update your product facilitating a much better user experience.

Churn prediction: AI is always on the lookout for warning signs. These can include a sudden drop in engagement, repeated issues, negative communications, and the like.

If you have insights into all these data, you can proactively initiate a proactive approach. You can offer discounts, offers, or an upgrade to re-engage and reactivate these at-risk customers.

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. With a vast database, you should ensure compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

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.

If you involve different teams for more perspectives and employ fairness-aware algorithms, you can establish equal treatment and reduce 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 ensure all customer touchpoints are connected to your CDP.
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.

Harnessing AI for creating unified customer profiles can bring in more benefits including smarter decision-making, consistent customer experience, and a greater competitive edge.

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