This is a guest post by Therese Palmere, content writer and consultant for Aumcore.
Nearly half the world’s population is online, with more than 3.7 billion users accessing the internet through mobile devices. Not only is the digital world growing, but it’s also ever-changing and so too are the marketing trends businesses use to capture users’ attention. So, how does a brand stand out in an oversaturated market?
Through personalization.
Personalized and targeted marketing campaigns have never been more important than they are today. This is because, through personalization, brands are able to target users at specific stages of the sales funnel and prompt them to convert using more relevant content. For enterprise businesses that are running enormous global operations, this kind of attention to detail may seem daunting, but with the help of AI, it can be achieved! In this post, we’ll be going over how you can use the power of artificial intelligence for your enterprise business. This post will serve as your enterprise guide to use AI for customer success.
Understanding Customer Success
Customer success is a business methodology that anticipates and addresses user concerns and issues before they come up. As written by the marketing experts at Hubspot:
“Customer success is the process of anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions and answers to those issues prior to them arising. Customer success helps you boost customer happiness and retention, increasing your revenue and customer loyalty.”
By adopting this business methodology, you’re ensuring the success of your business through the success of your customers. You will not only increase customer satisfaction, but you will also increase customer loyalty when you adopt a customer-centric business model. Users want to know their needs are your first priority and, for the sake of your business, they should be. In fact, after a single instance of poor customer service, 33% of Americans would agree that they would consider switching companies. Additionally, 20% of those people will complain publicly via social media, further damaging your company’s reputation. In contrast, after having a positive experience with a company, 77% of users say they would recommend that company to a friend.
According to research done by PWC, 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service as the most important elements of positive customer experience. Focus on these elements to create customer-centric procedures where your customers feel attended to and appreciated. Once you’ve created a system that properly focuses on customer success, your users will quite literally pay the favor forward. Loyal customers are 5X as likely to repurchase, 5X as likely to forgive, 4X as likely to refer, and 7X as likely to try a new offering.
As businesses prepare for 2020, it’s important to think about exactly who your target audience moving forward will be. While the internet star-studded Millennials are still very much a subset of users your business should focus on, more so are Generation Z users who will make up 40% of all US consumers by next year. This generation makes up 32% of the world’s population, making it the largest cohort globally. Nearly 50% of Generation Z users are also connected to the internet for more than 10 hours a day. (That’s a lot of potential face time!) Consider how your brand can market to the next generation of consumers with AI for customer success (and a bonus with IoT based customer experience).
AI Technology for Enterprise Businesses
How do customer success and AI go together? Why do businesses need AI? The answer is that businesses can use AI technology to streamline processes and nurture leads at scale. There are a million different ways AI improves customer success for any business. Below, we’ll go over a couple of specific examples to add to your enterprise guide to use AI for customer success:
CRMs and Machine Learning for Customer Segmentation
AI and customer relationship management (CRM) tools are practically synonymous. When you use AI technology, you are most likely using a CRM to help collect and analyze data. One of the most amazing things about CRMs is the more data you feed into them, the smarter they get. With the help of machine learning, CRMs learn to recognize bits and pieces of information more readily than ever before. This means more streamlined processes and more accurate insights of your consumer base. When your CRM tool can recognize user information faster, it means your team can utilize that knowledge for segmented marketing campaigns.
AI for Team Workflow
CRMs also generate reports from the collected data that help your team navigate complex data sets and come up with solutions to new user inquiries. These AI capabilities can also pinpoint pain points in your data and bring attention to different issues and discrepancies. Since these processes are all being done through AI, it not only saves time but also allows your team to focus on more important things like helping your customers.
Chatbots for Customer Service
As stated above, some of the biggest contributing factors to customer success as stated by users are speed, convenience, and knowledgeable help. Chatbots allow businesses to cater to their users 24/7 and help direct them to information users need whenever they need assistance. Chatbots can provide unique answers to user queries, giving them a personalized experience. Utilizing chatbots for your brand helps you address some of the biggest concerns users have when looking for positive customer experience.
AI can help marketers and advertisers make sense of large data sets and make predictions of customer success. These tools can inform them of important customer trends seen in the numbers. AI can also differentiate between different users based on customer behavior, meaning that brands can segment their marketing campaigns. The solutions above are just a couple of examples of how your team can leverage the power of AI.
Key Takeaways
Marketing solutions to address issues at scale have become even more efficient thanks to artificial intelligence. AI empowers marketers to take data and turn it into actionable insights that teams can use to drive revenue and run successful campaigns. Hopefully, this blog post has shown you why an AI-powered customer-centric approach is important to adopt in today’s digital age. Finally, to sum up, your enterprise guide to using AI for customer success, here are the key takeaways one more time:
- Adopting a customer success business model means investing in your business
- Users will literally pay the favor forward by being loyal customers when your brand invests in customer success
- CRMs use machine learning to help create campaigns for market segmentation
- AI improves team workflow by handling all the administrative work
- Chatbots serve as 24/7 customer service agents directing users to relevant information based on their queries
- There are AI-powered tools on the market for everyone
We hope this provides actionable insights on how you can put AI to work for your business to achieve superior customer success models.