The Time is Now: Why Your Brand Needs AI to Enhance CX

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Today’s retail market is increasingly digitized and saturated with competitors, making customer experience (CX) a critical part of the customer journey. In fact, a recent study shows that 75% of shoppers prefer to buy from brands that personalize their purchasing experiences. Over the last 10 years, brands have invested heavily in CX with the goal of cultivating a positive, holistic customer experience to gain and retain customers.

So, how can your brand deliver (and scale) a brick-and-mortar style of digital customer experience? The answer lies in leaning into Generative AI — a category of machine learning that utilizes existing learning algorithms to create new and original content, including text, code, images and video. Paired with a trained knowledge base, this groundbreaking technology can help you generate personalized messaging as if you were speaking to customers individually and, in turn, motivate them to act.

As your brand looks to boost its CX efforts in 2023 and beyond, Generative AI paired with machine learning can help improve your overall customer experiences, boost revenue and reach business goals faster.

Cultivating meaningful, lasting customer experiences with AI

Customers don’t want to buy from just anyone. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of today’s shoppers prefer to buy from a brand that personalizes their customer engagement. In 2023, it is imperative
to invest in AI tools that enable your brand to deliver personalization at scale, no matter the size of your company. Customers expect the same level of personalization from a Fortune 500 company as they would from a brick-and-mortar store.

But how can brands tap into that level of personalization without a massive marketing team? Through hyper personalization. Hyper-personalization uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create content for each individual customer. Your brand can deliver personalized content based on a customer’s interests, make recommendations based on past purchases, and more. This level of personalization has the potential to boost brand loyalty, grow customer engagement, cultivate meaningful experiences and provide insights on how to improve overall customer experiences.

Generative AI technology, combined with a specialized marketing knowledge base, optimizes language for each consumer. Credit: Persado.

Meaningful customer experiences need to last far beyond a customer’s first purchase: continuing to nurture customer relationships throughout their entire journey is critical for establishing and strengthening brand loyalty. To build loyalty and trust customers, you need to understand that messaging should reinforce action. If your brand positions itself by offering free returns, any customer that goes to return an item should not be charged for that return. The messaging should reinforce the promised customer experience, and the language you use matters.

Credit: Persado.

Customer experiences vs. marketing campaigns

Today, 65% of consumers report that a positive brand experience is more influential than great marketing. Your brand needs more than a great subject line and clever messaging to break through the noise. The enterprise marketing climate is already oversaturated, with the average customer exposed to over 4,000 brand messages a day. And while marketing campaigns are an integral part of the customer journey, you cannot rely solely on them to create a positive customer experience.

Instead, you should focus on enhancing the entire customer journey by using specific language and emotional sentiments that resonate with your customers and motivate them to act.

Credit: Persado.

Tapping into Generative AI will enable your brand to develop highly targeted, personalized content at scale while providing relevant data and insights on which methods of communication are most effective for targeted groups. In traditional marketing, marketers use A/B testing to find the message that resonates best with their target audience. With AI, however, you can run six or seven different variants to find the right message. By weaving in customer data and past campaign insights, AI machines can hone in on hyper-personalized messaging that takes the guesswork out of your work and eliminates wasted effort.

Turbo boosting experiences (and revenue) in the era of first-party data

In 2023, more and more brands are moving away from reliance on third-party data to support their marketing efforts, and toward first-party data instead. First-party data is customer data collected through a brand’s owned channels and methods. According to a recent study, more than 60% of brands plan to increase their emphasis and spending on first-party data. Brands are constantly interacting with customers, and could be gathering those invaluable insights to cultivate an even better customer experience in the future. The most successful companies rely on first-party data and AI to translate customer behaviors into key insights and data points that enable brands to make informed decisions and enhance their overall customer experience.

As companies like Google and Apple tighten their data and privacy policies, the era of first-party data has arrived. If your brand is already using first-party data, it’s time to implement augmented first-party data — such as purchasing history, contact preference, and customer interests — and pair it with AI/ML to achieve cross channel hyper-personalization at scale. If successful, your brand could experience an increase in revenue of up to 40%, according to this 2021 study.

Unlocking ROI with AI

Leaning into hyper-personalization and insights from AI will not only help your company meet its business goals faster, but it also has the potential to deliver an ROI of anywhere up to 80% according to Deloitte. An investment with a great return, a strong customer experience enhanced with AI is a non-negotiable for your brand if you’re looking to scale and truly reach your customers where they are.

Lisa Spira
Lisa is a linguist who has focused her career on leading the design of language-based digital products. Her professional passions live at the point where language, technology, and humans intersect. As VP, Content Intelligence at Persado, Lisa leads the team responsible for the language innovation and insights within the platform. In her free time, Lisa loves to bake and is an avid puzzle solver.

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