How to use AI in favor of the HD Customer Experience

According to all the studies that are being published about what the marketing trends may be for the next 2021, the customer experience or CX is the one that always appears in the first positions. If we add the push of artificial intelligence to this, the equation becomes extremely powerful. In this post I want to tell you about the future of CX, as well as how AI can be used to create a competitive advantage in your company. Let’s go for it?

I remember seeing the first HDTV in an electronics store in the early 2000s. The quality of the images took television to a new level and made it feel like a truly immersive experience. With this type of TV, I knew it would revolutionize home entertainment. I can also remember a similar time in the early part of the last decade when 4K TVs started to hit the market, and now we’re seeing the emergence of 8K devices.

CRM has reached a comparable turning point. Currently, most companies have a fragmented, outdated and distorted image of their customers, which is affecting the level of service they can achieve, directly affecting their ability to grow.

Poor data quality hits organizations where it hurts most, costing businesses an average of $15 million , according to Gartner research .

To deliver a next-generation customer experience, companies must replace their current blurry vision with a sharply focused image that is rich in breadth and depth. This is called High Definition Customer Experience , or ‘ HD-CX ‘, and by delivering on it, businesses can achieve new levels of performance and predictability, and increase customer lifetime value.

In this regard, data is particularly important, and knowing how to manage and ‘read’ it is of vital importance for companies that want to play in this field.

There are investigations that indicate that 91% of the data in CRM systems is incomplete , and this without taking into account the number of these that are erroneous or incorrectly entered, as we already saw in the post on ‘What is Dirty Data’ .

Now that we have put ourselves in the situation, we are going to see where the future of CX or Customer Experience could go.

The future of CX

Consulting firm Forrester says that over the next 5 to 10 years, CX will be “crucial for brands to survive, to avoid disintermediation, irrelevance, softness, and/or cluelessness about customer sentiment .” However, those brands that choose to wait 5-10 years before offering an HD-CX experience will find themselves outdated and behind the times, likely exiting the market.

To outperform the competition and drive growth, companies need to get a high-definition view of their market, business, and customers as soon as possible, as I discussed earlier.

The design of the most perfect Buyer personas, as well as being able to identify the segments with propensity or intention to purchase, or achieve lifetime customer loyalty, is what can be achieved by obtaining this high definition.

HD-CX is all about leveraging accurate, up-to-date information from multiple sources and across the organization to achieve new levels of business performance and predictability. This can be perfectly applied to companies of all sizes and in all industries.

But for that to happen, companies need to be able to count on a ‘time-aware’ CRM .

The time will come when the concept of a 360-degree client can be redefined by adding key components that are missing today, such as time . The power of including this would be to have a complete historical record of changes in the customer journey , and augment this data through a rich repository of relevant information to guarantee complete knowledge of the situation and the direction of a client.

Recording every moment of a change in the customer journey is essential to predict future results. These predictions enable companies to make better business decisions, manage risk, respond to problems, and seize opportunities.

And this is where machine learning and artificial intelligence come in, let’s see it.

How to use artificial intelligence to create a competitive advantage

Making sense of all this data can be an ongoing problem for businesses, with the average business having an average of 162.9TB of data , according to various sources. To draw conclusions from this amount of data, turn it into a competitive advantage and make predictions that can help companies increase revenue, artificial intelligence is the key.

Understanding the current state and how it got there is essential, but what if you had the ability to look into the future and know what your business could be? I have already highlighted the importance of having a complete historical record of every moment of change in the customer journey, to ensure a complete understanding of the situation and direction of your customers and your business, but AI considers the other direction of time: the future .

AI has the ability to deliver exceptional predictions, even with limited or incomplete CRM data , by leveraging large amounts of external data to consider factors your data doesn’t cover and reveal information you might not have known existed. These unmatched predictions allow companies to make confident decisions and focus on the highest-priority activities in marketing, sales, customer service, and more.

One caveat though, prediction accuracy is essential . Not all AI – powered predictions are created equal. This means a proven platform with deep learning models, combined with the best quality external data and CRM data. A combination that most companies cannot offer their customers.

Businesses that can build a high-definition picture of their customers over time, using artificial intelligence to deliver exceptional customer experiences and business predictions, will benefit from enhanced customer engagement . Those who continue with an old, outdated, standard-definition view of their customers will quickly find that the gap between them and their competitors can no longer be closed, growing wider and wider.

The combination of user experience and emotional intelligence, together with machine learning, is what will achieve the goals of a satisfactory customer experience with optimal performance.

Another important factor in achieving a unique customer experience is through micro-personalization . This can only be achieved, once again, thanks to technology. A technology that long ago was only available to certain companies like Amazon . However, today we have technology such as IBM Watson, Oracle or Google , and other companies such as Inquisitive Technology , which adapt this technology to the level of customer experience.

Using AI for the benefit of CX is already possible , but before starting it is necessary to take into account some points such as:

• It is necessary to rely on collaborating companies, experts in customer experience, but which have a solid base in analysis and measurement. In an environment as competitive as the one we are in, companies cannot take care of everything alone. This type of specialization is complex and this collaborator will help you correctly combine the use of robotic automation and the most humane and personalized touch.
• Have a strategy in terms of data collection. This means that the company must establish how and in what way it is going to collect and treat the data of the experience that its clients have. For this, the automated transcription of the conversations with them, tagging and labeling of it is necessary to make it treatable and useful in order to be able to measure it and extract relevant insights to shape the objective experience.
• Start with pilots and conduct experiments. The modern companies that are growing the most worldwide are characterized by one thing: experimentation. Test concepts, test, carry out small interactions and measure everything in order to find the ad-hoc strategy for the needs of your company and your customers.

Technology and through it AI helps enormously in defining an adequate customer experience, however, technology alone cannot achieve the desired success. For this, the human variable is necessary, through which and through the art of conversation, it is possible to reach the hearts of other people, who are the clients, and achieve trust, which is ultimately the only thing that ends up uniting consumers with brands.