Leveraging AI for better customer retention

One motto all businesses live by is “the customer is king”. Why?

Because retaining customers is six times cheaper than acquiring new ones.

With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, many technologies that were once thought of as “ahead of its time” or “impractical” is now gaining traction and one of those technologies is Artificial Intelligence or AI.

We approach every customer by looking at them in terms of their demographics, behavior, psychographics, and their intent. The advanced analytics enabled, thanks to AI, can sharpen the way you look at these aspects. This available data can draw you a picture of who our customer is and help us design more focused marketing strategies. Simply put, it is set to transform the way we approach customer service and ensure that our customers keep coming back to us. Let us look at some ways to leverage AI for better customer retention and how it can help you enhance the level of customer service you offer:

Cognitive Virtual Assistants (VA):

One way in which you ensure timely and efficient pre-sales and post-sales services is through call centers. You connect with customers and demonstrate that you are there for them and help them. Recent research shows that nearly 73 percent of US consumers say that they are happiest when a brand demonstrates that they value their time. For a business that has a call center in their arsenal, this means ensuring lesser waiting time whenever a customer pings in with queries. Currently, customer service agents spend nearly 4.5 minutes in a 6 minutes service call looking up and sifting through information. This delay is even more pronounced in case of challenging queries. If a customer has to listen to hold music for that long, it is very likely that they will opt to go to a competitor that can possibly offer faster service.

This is where AI can make a difference in the form of Virtual Assistants (VA). With the help of machine learning, we can enable cognitive VAs that can handle a lot of the queries that customers have like answering FAQs and do so very fast. These VAs would be able to handle multiple customers at a time and offer consistently high quality of service. If the queries are too complex and the VA cannot resolve it, the issue gets escalated to human agents. This way human agents are free to engage in more high-level problem solving and connect with the customer to gain a better understanding of how they perceive the product and make notes of how the company can improve their services.

In-Store Support:

For any regular brick-and-mortar store, active salespeople is a factor to ensure success. Be it B2B or B2C, salespeople are essential in creating relationships with customers. They connect with customers, understand their needs and assure that the business they represent can fulfill those needs. While this has been successful, advancements in AI has opened up new possibilities towards enhancing customer experience and taking it to the next level.

Let’s say a customer walks into a retail store and opens up the store app. The in-store AI can then track the customer using its geolocation and geofencing capabilities. Based on where the customer is in the store, how long they were in a certain section, their purchase history, and browsing history, they can be sent personalized recommendations to encourage a purchase before they leave. Emotyx, for example, can convert your regular CCTV camera into real-time video analytics and surveillance system. Built using computer vision and AI, Emotyx can track customers and read emotions to generate insights that can be used to decide how best to persuade customers to buy products and to design more focused marketing campaigns. It can also assist on-site salespeople by giving them information about what products the customer might be interested in based on which shelf they were at and the emotions they experienced when they were browsing the shelves.

Online Shopping Support:

Periscope by McKinsey conducted a survey in 2018 to understand consumers and their attitude towards buying products online. They surveyed more than 2500 consumers around the world including a thousand in the US. They found that nearly 70 percent of the respondents buy online and that comprised of people between the ages of 18 and 29. That said, as people learn about the possibilities of online shopping, other demographics are likely to adopt this medium too.

An AI-enabled system can do wonders for your business in this scenario. Whenever a customer is on your website and browsing through your offerings, that signifies a purchase intent. Based on how they interact with your website, your AI-enabled system can determine what recommendations to make to encourage the customer to make a purchase. Maybe the product should be bigger or smaller or a different color or a different brand; the keywords the customers use when using your website can give you enough information to determine what offer can entice them to buy from you.

AI for better customer retention – Bottomline

Every day you are open for business is another day you think about how you can keep your customers interested in your products. While the quality of the products is a factor, customers value to their shopping experience even more. All the different gimmicks you have tried may have worked wonders in the past, but if you want to retain your next-gen customers, you need to employ some cutting edge, next-gen techniques.