Why Successful Companies Treat Each Customer As An Individual — AI For Personalised Customer Experience
Every customer is different. And you wouldn’t expect your sales team to say the same thing to every customer.
So why is your chatbot doing exactly that?
Long gone are the days of ‘chatterbots’. If you’re not familiar with that term, it’s what chatbots were originally called, or more crudely: crappy chatbots of days gone that were easy to break and left the customer feeling more annoyed.
Free your memory of ‘chatterbots’ and welcome to the world of what we at JRNY like to call emotionally intelligent conversation — that is, artificially intelligent conversation that, using the JRNY platform, can profile leads in real time and deliver personalised responses to each and every customer.
It’s now possible to harness the efficiency of machines without losing the personal touch of human interaction. Sounds pretty dreamy right?
In this blog we explain the importance of treating each customer as an individual and how this can be done with the right artificially intelligent conversation tools.
Make your customers feel loved and they will love you
Customers don’t like being treated like cattle — waiting in line for ages as if they don’t have anything better to do, receiving bulk emails that aren’t relevant to them, filling out forms, waiting for email replies for days, speaking to multiple different sales people on the phone, starting the conversation from scratch each time.
Even with newer technology like common chatbots, people often feel they’re getting the same treatment as every other person speaking to the chatbot.
With competition and disruption only increasing across most industries, many companies are finding that competing on product and price alone just isn’t enough to acquire more customers and reduce churn. Customers are just one bad interaction away from going elsewhere — companies simply can’t afford to deliver poor customer experiences.
Thus, the era of customer-obsession is here. Make your customers feel loved and they will love you.
Increasing Cost to Serve is no longer an excuse
Employing enough customer services and sales staff just to meet call and email demand is costly. The cost required to effectively spend the time to treat each customer as a valued individual is even larger.
But there’s another way — and we’re not proposing to replace staff with machines — no way. With artificial intelligence and machine learning you can employ a conversation engine to compliment customer service and sales teams. The engine can deal with the bulk of enquiries throughout the entire customer journey — from prospective customers, leads and existing customers. The engine works 24/7, 365 days a year, delivers instant responses and can serve virtually any amount of customers at the same time.
The engine has the capability of handing over complex cases to a human with detailed tickets so that staff are more empowered and have more time to deal with the smaller number of cases they have.
Therefore, you don’t need to employ extra staff to deliver better customer experiences. Rather, by investing a smaller amount in the latest conversational technology you can acquire and retain even more customers for a fraction of the cost.
Where personalisation comes in
The right conversation engine can inject personalisation back into the customer relationship in multiple ways:
- The JRNY conversation engine can profile leads into categories using psychographics. It also uses information shared through the user’s social profile itself. This all happens as soon as a user starts the conversation. The engine then delivers personalised responses instantly — saving time and the ‘customer cattle mentality’.
- The engine picks up the conversation where it left off remembering the personal preferences and profiling from previously, which is virtually impossible for humans to do in a call centre when they’re dealing with so many people. Again, saving the customer time and making them feel valued.
- The third way that a conversation engine assists personalisation might come as a surprise to you. By employing a JRNY AI conversation engine, staff are freed up from the constant influx of queries and can better deal with the complex cases. Staff can give more time to these customers and deliver better solutions — making the customer feel valued and coming away thinking: “Golly gosh, that was a great customer experience”.
Don’t just sell to customers like individuals, market that way too
It’s not just in the realm of customer service and sales that you need to treat customers like individuals, but also in your marketing.
Customers don’t want to receive spammy marketing. To really grab customers’ attention in a world saturated with social media and paid advertising, companies need to market to consumers in a way in which customers can identify with — the message needs to be highly relevant to the individual.
Information that can help you really know your customers:
- Demographics: this includes information like age, address, income, habits, preferences, their ‘why’.
- Behaviour: at what stage of the buyer’s journey is the individual with your company — have they been looking at your website constantly, chatting with your bot on many occasions, or are they a current customer investigating an upgrade.
You don’t need to rely on feedback forms or guess work to collect this information anymore. Conversation engines can collect information about your customers from their shared profile and the conversation itself. Accurate audience segments can then be created. A detailed analytics dashboard then heightens the ability to customise customise customise and optimise optimise optimise.
From here, marketers can send broadcasts to specific groups through social media with messages more customised than ever before, and then of course, analyse the results.
So hopefully we’ve left you with two messages:
- Love thy customer and they shall love you.
- You can have your cake and eat it too — you can enjoy the efficiency of machines and rapport of a human with JRNY.
