Customer Retention and AI: Focus on WHAT you want to achieve, let AI carry out the HOW – a paradigm shift in customer engagement | Part 2

How Does It Really Work?

In part 1 of this article we’ve discussed the advantages of incorporating advanced AI-based journey orchestration tools in your marketing activity in order to easily and efficiently manage complex customer journeys and personally interact with each individual customer for enhanced customer retention and other business KPIs.

As most of us are not data engineers, but would still like to have a good understanding of how the backstage of this AI-based journey orchestration looks like – here’s a glimpse into Roojoom’s AI-based Personal Journey Orchestration platform:

It all starts and ends with your business goals

AI has one job only – achieve your business goals. So that’s the first step in understanding how this whole system operates.

Unlike most marketing automation tools where only one KPI is to be chosen per campaign, the Roojoom platform is designed to pursue multiple predetermined measurable KPIs. For example: a formula including KPIs as customer loyalty, customer spend and customer satisfaction.

This brings us to the other two components AI will need in order to accomplish optimization of KPIs:

1. Customer data – While not using personally identifiable (PII) data, the platform can reach a high degree of personalization by gathering journey data indicators, which outline the progress of individual customer journeys.  Therefore, before any interaction with a new customer is made, the platform can still plan the customer journey and create predictions based on basic information it initially receives (this may include the current plan the customer is on, payment conditions and method, age, location and more). Once interaction is established, more information is collected and customer behavior is added as a key data component for AI to optimize future interactions and journey predictions.
2. Business objectives – these are the set of messages and calls-to-action that could impact your KPIs, to be chosen and defined by your marketing team (e.g service features, special offers, promotions, information, account options and so forth). Your marketing team can and in fact is encouraged to choose as many objectives as possible for the predefined KPIs. This allows the AI algorithms to select the most accurate objectives to send to a customer at a given time. A long list of objectives would  complicate any human managed customer journey but would actually elevate AI-based journey orchestration.

Once all of the above has been defined, and the journey duration has been set – the AI steps in and from this point on the journey orchestration begins. The Roojoom platform will assign personal journey AI engines to each individual customer and create journey-long AI predictions where every single interaction is determined based on the full journey plan that has been created for the customer. 

AI engines first select only relevant objectives, given the personal journey data. If for example there’s an indication that the customer has logged into the app- the “download the app” objective is no longer relevant. Beyond relevance, the personal AI engines calculate the predicted impact of every business objective on the KPIs per customer. The impact of a single objective at a specific time could be positive for one customer and at the same time neutral or even negative for another(!). The learning engines are continuously pursuing the best result possible and are capable of recognizing the KPI that has the most potential of being achieved per customer as well as the objectives that will positively impact this KPI. 

Cross-channel continuity

Another important characteristic of the Roojoom personal AI engine is continuity across engagement channels. Customer interactions can be conducted on web, app, call center interaction (voice/chat) and more. The Roojoom platform offers a unique channel- a personal mini-site that is generated in real time and sent to the customer (link) via email or text message.

Your AI mate

When it comes to complex journeys with multiple business goals and tens of objectives – AI is the first tool to consider. It does not eliminate the human factor or cancel the need in a brilliant marketing team as some may think, but plays as an important contributor to the process that handles what humans simply can’t and takes the complexity off their table.

Sometimes we would like to think that we, as humans, have the intuition as to what’s impactful and what’s not when engaging with our customers. The nice thing about AI is that the machine can pick up on those intuitions we have but also find other non-trivial correlations that will eventually improve the customer experience and help your brand reach higher results within only a few weeks while saving your marketing team valuable time.