Today, consumers demand a memorable customer experience when interacting with your web presence. Whether it’s navigating your website or clicking an email, long gone are the days when difficult navigation or late emails would be seen as acceptable.
Consumers are no longer so forgiving because they want immediate information, and they want it served fast and ready to go.
Luckily, B2B marketers don’t have to spread themselves thin to keep their brands top-of-mind. Artificial Intelligence can improve the customer experience tenfold while simultaneously freeing up valuable resources.
It’s said that 91 % of major brands deploy some type of AI to enhance the customer experience (CX) and boost customer satisfaction. Here is how AI can contribute to a brand experience that amazes your audience as we proceed into the future.
Predictive Insights
The buyer’s journey has become increasingly complex. One of the biggest frustrations for marketers today is running countless reports and inserting that data into spreadsheets AI helps marketers overcome these pains by allowing for real-time and predictive insights. With machine learning at the helm, marketers can track conversion touchpoints with precision accuracy.
What’s more, AI can predict where customers are most likely to visit, the behavior they’ll most likely engage in, and whether they’ll become buyers or not. It also can help marketers determine what it will take to drive a buyer to make a purchase.
AI is able to deliver information proactively in the context of what leads are interested in, how they act, and what they most want, allowing marketers to offer out-of-the-box relevancy to every interaction.
By using AI, marketers can bolster their marketing campaigns based on what’s working, what’s not, and what their marketing software predicts will work. This predictive analytics is a far cry from traditional digital measurement, where marketers were only able to tweak campaigns based on past behavior.
AI, in a way, allows us to predict what prospects are most likely to do, making the technology invaluable for B2B marketing.
Fantastic Product Recommendations
Machine-based learning gives AI psychic-like capabilities, by learning a consumer’s interests and buying habits over time. We already see this at work, with Amazon offering product suggestions based on others’ buying habits, and Netflix movie suggestions.
We can expect this technology to get even more advanced as time goes on. Artificial intelligence based marketing solutions use aggregate email, mobile, web, and offline behavior to predict products, offers, and content that your audience craves.
Now, the consumer may not even know they want a particular product until it’s offered, but the product will be so accurately matched that making a purchase becomes a no-brainer.
Relationship Building
AI makes bonding with your audience easier than ever. Instead of merely doling out messages celebrating customer birthdays and anniversaries; something any programmable CRM can do, AI can answer frequently asked questions and offer other information with Emotional Intelligence (EI).
AI will learn how interested leads are and will nurture the leads according to their engagement score and will never stop analyzing your audience’s habits.
This will lead to a finely tuned machine that trickles in leads like clockwork and keeps customers coming back for more thanks to personalization, effective lead nurturing, and customer pattern analysis that saves time and money while supercharging any marketing campaign. In fact,
The More Data, the Better
Keep in mind that AI requires quality data, just like any software program would. The cleaner your data, the more relationships AI can build, predictions can be made, and product suggestions delivered at opportune business moments. The Aberdeen Group determined that companies achieving the best results with AI predictive analytics tend to use data from multiple sources and thousands of data signals and attributes. AI can then take a 360-degree, multi-dimensional analysis of all that data to generate deep and actionable insights that accelerate sales and marketing while providing the most value to prospects and customers alike.
Conclusion
Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared in 2016 his vision of a “shift from mobile-first to an AI-first world over many years,” and his prediction is steadily coming to pass. Around the same time, Pedro Domingos, author of “The Master Algorithm” told the New York Times that, “Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age.”
However, AI will take some getting used to, on both the part of the marketer and the consumer. For one, the marketer will need to learn to release control…but not completely. You are no longer in charge, your data is. However, while it’s said that by 2020 85% of business interactionswill be handled without a human agent, marketers won’t be able to take an entirely back-seat position. Marketers will need to work hand-in-hand with AI so that the right balance of human and machine can be found that leads to improved customer communication and satisfaction.
Consumers will need to learn to accept that AI will soon learn more about them than they expect, but that’s the only way to build a customer profile that delivers a user experience unlike any the world has ever seen.