Top Ways to Use AI to Personalize the Customer Experience
In the past, businesses relied on generic messages and broad campaigns based on trends and hunches to market their offers and reach their targeted audience. Such strategies aren’t only outdated now – they don’t work. Consumers today expect personalized experiences specifically tailored to their behaviours, preferences, and needs. And how can you offer them all this? The answer lies in AI-powered personalisation. Read here to learn how AI can personalise customer experience.
Today’s business world is more competitive than ever. It is fast-paced and businesses fight to capture the attention, retain their customer base, and foster loyalty. But, if you attempt to track every customer’s behaviour and personalize your customer approach to each, this becomes an impossible mission.
Personalization is one of the best uses of artificial intelligence. Now that 91% of consumers prefer brands that recognize their behaviours and make helpful recommendations, this is vital for your business’ success.
With that in mind, this post will teach you all about AI-powered personalization and how to use it for your business.
Understanding AI-powered personalization
The world is becoming increasingly digital. The result? Businesses struggle to connect with their customers, especially the ones who only do this digitally, such as companies in the e-commerce sector. When you don’t meet customers face-to-face, it’s much harder to offer them a personalized service.
Artificial intelligence or AI has been the most exciting development in this area. Combined with machine learning, the two can derive highly personalized customer experiences. AI-powered personalization includes everything from the collection and analysis of data to tracking customer behaviors, to taking actions such as automation of customer support and converting audio to text.
Top ways to use AI to personalize your customer approach
When you are trying to personalize the customer approach, AI can be useful in many ways. Below we’ll present you with some great ideas to use AI to offer better service and with it, grow your business.
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Send automated welcome emails
Email was and remains one of the most powerful tools to use to reach out to – and engage consumers. The majority of marketers rely on email marketing to deliver messages to their audience. They send messages to remind customers that they like their brand, offer them enticing promotions, keep them informed of the novelties in their brand, and more.
One amazing use of AI for personalization is to create and automate your welcome messages for new customers. Automated welcome emails require no effort on your behalf. As soon as you create the message, you can use artificial intelligence to send the email to every new customer who signs in on your website, makes a purchase, signs up for your newsletter, and more.
You can also use AI algorithms to continue delivering targeted email content such as recommendations, special deals, and more.
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Collect and analyze data
AI algorithms are masterful at collecting and analyzing data. Even though AI cannot replace humans, this is something that a human could never do at the same speed or with the same capability. Artificial intelligence can gather more data in a day than a human could in weeks, not to mention go through all of the data and analyze it while it is still fresh and ready to use.
Artificial intelligence can analyze your customers’ browsing history, their purchase patterns, the interactions between your brand and each customer on email or social media, as well as their demographics. They can later combine this information and create comprehensive customer profiles.
Personalization starts with figuring out who your customers are and what they want. AI-powered data collection and analysis can easily get you to this point.
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Convert audio to video with AI subtitling
Google algorithms scour the Web looking for data that tells them what brands offer to customers. They will read your website content and offer it to the right audience as long as you optimize it for SEO. And while videos and audio are amazing strategies for growth, these work much better when accompanied by written content.
Not to mention, many people can’t listen to the audio when they access your content. This includes people with disabilities, people in crowded places, or those who simply prefer to read instead of turn the sound on.
Artificial intelligence can help you with this too. Without using any effort to manually transcribe every piece of audio content you have, you can simply use an AI subtitling service to transcribe your content within minutes instead of days. Then, you can simply edit the ready content as you please and publish it to accompany different forms of content.
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Offer personalized recommendations
Another brilliant application of AI in personalization is the use of systems for recommendation. Tools like AI-powered search and algorithms can analyze the user behavior and their historical data – and then use that data to provide personalized recommendations.
Did you know that shoppers are 5 times as likely to click on a product recommendation?
The recommendations can take many forms, too. They can come in the form of product suggestions, personalized playlists, special offers, content recommendations, and more.
Take, for instance, YouTube. Have you noticed how the brand recommends videos that are similar to what you have watched and searched for? This is driven by the platform’s algorithm for recommendations.
Another example of this is Netflix. The streaming platform uses machine learning and AI to recommend movies and TV shows to its subscribers based on their watching history, and the things they liked or searched for.
Sephora takes this in a different direction. They use machine learning algorithms to analyze the consumer’s facial features (if the customer allows this, of course), and recommend them makeup products that best suit them.
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Dynamic creation and delivery of content
AI’s superpower is to help businesses deliver dynamic content that will adapt based on the user’s behavior or preferences. Instead of creating different content for different buyer personas, why not use technology to adjust everything from the website layout to the pricing to the promotional messages – all based on what your customer expects?
An example of this is Amazon. Their homepage is a prime example of how dynamic content delivery works. Amazon uses AI to display personalized deals and recommendations, so every user gets a tailored experience based on their behaviors and data.
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Personalize customer service with AI-powered chatbots
If you use it right, AI can change the customer support experience. Many businesses nowadays leverage this technology to offer instant service to every customer. By using AI-powered chatbots, you can eliminate the waiting time altogether.
Before these bots, customers used to wait in queue to get a response from a real agent. If the brand didn’t work around the clock, they had to wait for the working hours to get an answer to their question.
The truth is, that artificial bots don’t replace human agents in many cases. Even so, these can handle the most commonly asked questions and resolve common problems. They can also connect the customer who needs more help with an actual agent to offer optimized customer support.
By using AI-powered chatbots, you’d be limiting the number of customers your agents have to deal with, therefore optimizing their service and offering everyone a speedy, positive experience.
Advantages of AI-powered personalization
AI-powered personalization comes with many advantages if used properly. Here are some of the biggest advantages of using it to personalize your customer approach:
- Better customer experience. When you tailor the customer experience to the user’s preferences and needs, this can, in return, boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. It gives the customer a sense of being understood, valued, and appreciated.
- Boost in revenue. AI can help you recommend products that your customers are more likely to enjoy, so this can boost the likelihood of purchase and your revenue.
- Increased engagement. Personalized experiences are attention-grabbing and engaging. When you appeal to people’s unique interests, they are far more likely to interact and take action.
- Reduced customer churn. Customers who have to scour your website to find what they need might not stick around to keep looking. By providing a personalized AI experience, you can reduce customer churn rates.
How personalized is your customer approach?
AI-powered personalization comes with advantages, but also some challenges, so it’s important to tackle it with caution. This article taught you some ways to leverage AI to offer a more personalized experience to your users, but these are just a few of many examples you can follow. How personalized is your customer approach and are you using other methods to achieve this?
Author bio:
Nadica Metuleva is a senior content writer with experience of over eight years in the freelance market. Her specialty is blog posts, listicles, and articles in the business, SaaS, gambling, and lifestyle niches. Over the years, Nadica has deepened her understanding of SEO strategies and developed a passion for storytelling. She holds a Master’s Degree in English Literature and Teaching and speaks four languages. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Gravatar account: nadica.metuleva@gmail.com
