07 Mar
Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine
Way back in 1998, Jeff Bezos once remarked, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.”
More than two decades later, one can say for sure that truer words haven’t been spoken. In today’s digital era, personalized experiences form the heart and soul of meaningful customer engagement. Customers prefer brands that can predict their needs and understand what they want to buy.
As a new age customer, you must have experienced the rapid transformations that have been happening around you. Well, this blog will talk just about that. So, let’s deep dive into the following aspects —
- Changing customer expectations in the post-pandemic world
- Introducing AI in your customer experience strategy
- The perils of not personalizing customer engagement
- Use cases of AI chatbots in personalizing the customer journey
- Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine
- POND’S successful journey to personalizing CX
- How can we help
Introduction
91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and relevant recommendations. Additionally, 74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content. Generic, non-personalized messaging can upset customers and lead to churn.
Customer needs have gotten more dynamic and harder to fathom by the day. Yet, customers worldwide continue to demand personalized and seamless engagement. In a survey of 350 executives conducted by consulting firm Gartner, about two-thirds (63%) of digital marketing leaders said they continue to struggle with personalization. The survey also found that even as 84% of respondents believe AI and machine learning enhance the ability to deliver real-time, personalized experiences, only 17% of the executives are using it.
For one, an unprecedented amount of customer conversations are taking place online — tweets, memes, likes, dislikes – and customers expect brands to listen to all these conversations. Secondly, they expect brands to leverage all this information, modify their CX strategy accordingly, and deliver proactive, meaningful, and personalized customer engagement.
The Perils of not Personalizing!
Personalization has become the “holy grail” of marketing. Businesses are striving to garner the benefits of personalized customer experiences (CX), including improved retention and increased ROI.
Organizations that fail to adopt personalization as a vital CX strategy face issues on various fronts, some of which are listed below —
- Negative customer experiences and increased churn
- Low customer retention
- Lost business value
- Lack of customer insights
- Inaccurate customer data
- Loss of competitive advantage
Research by Gartner says brands risk losing 38 percent of customers because of poor marketing personalization efforts.
Artificial Intelligence in the CX World
To empower customers with tailored brand experiences, CX leaders are making vast investments in artificial intelligence-powered virtual agents, like chatbots, voice bots, and conversational IVR.
AI-powered chatbots, in particular, play a significant role in forming connected brand experiences across the entire customer journey. By analyzing customer conversations to gain real-time insights into their preferences, sentiment, and intent, bots can help brands create unparalleled personalization at every stage of the sales funnel, delighting customers and delivering significant ROI from AI.
Let’s deep delve further into how chatbots are helping brands personalize the customer experience and generate 5X ROI.
How are AI chatbots driving personalized CX?
AI-driven chatbots leverage advanced analytics, machine learning, natural language understanding, and cloud technology to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of customer data, discover patterns in customer interactions, and predict customer needs to deliver proactive and personalized engagement.
In the post-pandemic world, customer experience practitioners are making vast investments in AI to meet their customers at all possible digital touchpoints (omnichannel engagement) and satisfy their desire for instant, flexible, and more personalized interactions.
Moreover, such bots drive higher value customer interactions by proactively recommending intelligent actions to help contact center agents resolve customer issues quickly.
So, how do AI chatbots help brands tailor customer journeys, build lasting loyalty, and produce exceptional ROI?
Use-cases of AI chatbots in personalizing the customer journey
1. Reach:
- Reach out to new customers by pushing alerts about products, collecting insights on customer preferences, and sending personalized tips and advice.
- Study customer preferences, create cohort profiles, and better match them to recommend accurate products.
2. Acquire:
- Acquire customers by curating personalized marketing campaigns, assisting in online shopping, guiding customers on product use, and sending tailored product suggestions.
- If the customer’s preferred product is unavailable, AI chatbots can apologize for the inconvenience, suggest alternative products, and provide a “buy now” option to enable a smooth transition.
- Suggest frequently bought together products to invoke new thoughts and help customers make better buying decisions.
3. Retain:
- Create buyer personas (customer profiles) to understand their priorities and area of focus and send personalized reminders to “buy again.”
- Study valuable customer data to predict customer needs, proactively upsell, and develop products based on customer needs.
4. Support:
- Progressively profile customers based on their interests and click-rates and proactively recommend articles and FAQs based on their primary concerns.
- Answer product-related queries, track orders, help with product use, and offer technical support.
- Leverage sentiment analysis capabilities to comprehend customer emotion and respond to customer needs accordingly.
5. Loyalty:
- Ask for product ratings and feedback to recommend better products in the future.
- Build tailored loyalty programs (freebies, discounts, reward coupons, etc.) to develop lasting customer relationships.
Enjoy 5X returns on chatbots with a personalized engine
Research has shown marketers who exceeded their revenue goals were using personalization techniques 83% of the time. Moreover, businesses that employ data-driven personalization deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend.
Deloitte’s study “Connecting with meaning: Hyper-personalizing the customer experience using data, analytics, and AI” reveals well-executed hyper-personalization can deliver 8X the return on investment on marketing spend and lift sales by 10% or more.
Additionally, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50% and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10% to 30%.
A recent survey of 200 marketing leaders by Forbes Insights and Arm Treasure Data reveals that where personalization is being applied in a robust way, enterprises see positive results. Two in five executives surveyed, 40%, report that their customer personalization efforts have had a direct impact on maximizing sales, basket size, and profits in direct-to-consumer channels, such as e-commerce, while another 37% point to increased sales and customer lifetime value through product or content recommendations. More than one-third of respondents have seen increases in their transaction frequency due to personalization strategies.
Let’s take a quick example of SAL, POND’s personalized skincare expert.
Women often find themselves googling for skincare products and hacks for fighting uninvited spots and pimples before an important event. Yet, most are still searching for the “right” skin care product for their skin type. POND’S recognized this gap in the market and developed its chatbot SAL to meet this consumer need.
SAL is the “go-to” place for all women spending hours on the internet searching for skincare products.
Rohit Bhasin, Global Brand Vice President, POND’s Unilever, has stated, “POND’s has always been known for providing consumers with expert skincare and making beauty more accessible. We recognize how confusing and overwhelming it can be for anyone to pick the right skincare products when there are so many choices.”
Customers can access POND’s SAL through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee. SAL leverages powerful technologies like AI and augmented reality (AR) to act as a personalized skincare assistant for users.
With SAL, POND’s has newfound ability to interact three-dimensionally with all its customers and provide immersive shopping experiences to them.
When in need of skincare, all you have to do is open SAL’s chat interface and upload a selfie. Based on your headshot, SAL will identify significant skincare concerns in four critical areas: pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone, and suggest the best product for your needs.
Additionally, SAL will keep sending additional beauty tips to keep you engaged while it analyzes your skin.
SAL’s success can be established because 98% of users have cited positive ratings with the bot. Moreover, 95% of users have enjoyed the personalized shopping experience on SAL.
How can Acuvate help?
According to Gartner, “By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-service channels, up from 23% in 2019.”
At Acuvate, we help clients build AI chatbots to assist them in hyper-personalizing customer journeys and generating maximum ROI from investment in AI using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.
- A low-code, graphical interface that allows companies to build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots quickly
- Bot administrators can create/update bot responses using the drag and drop feature and rich media elements like Buttons, Carousel, Images, Videos, etc.
- Supports seamless integration with existing CRM software
- Our bots can engage in both simple and highly complex conversations.
- BotCore leverages Microsoft’s most renowned AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.
- Our bots are deployable on popular enterprise messaging channels (Slack, Teams, etc.) and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.
To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a one-on-one consultation with our experts.
Cinu, our Business Analyst at Acuvate, has a keen interest in Chatbots, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), & Conversation design. He has been instrumental in bringing several chatbots to life that elevated employee and customer experiences for various enterprises across the globe. Staying on top of emerging trends, Cinu creates a remarkable influence in deriving maximum return on investment for the chatbot implementations.
Cinu Clement