Customer Retention and AI: Focus on WHAT you want to achieve, let AI carry out the HOW – a paradigm shift in customer engagement | Part 1

If you’re a service provider dealing with thousands of customers every day, you are probably constantly trying to crack the code to how to engage customers effectively and improve their loyalty to your brand, as well as lift other business KPIs.

In an ideal world you would most likely want to get to know each and every customer, learn about their needs and expectations and try to cater for those needs accordingly – making every interaction they have with your brand successful and driving their customer journey towards better experiences and outcomes. 

Reality is that orchestrating personal customer journeys with effective engagement is too complex to manage with manual design of campaigns – no matter how big your marketing team is. The permutations and options of engagements are too many to cover and journey data flows are dynamic and ongoing. That’s where AI technology steps in and the faster you adopt it, the more likely you are to achieve your business goals. 

Personal Journey Orchestration

How can you execute and manage personal journey orchestration of thousands, sometimes millions of customers all having many different journey routes to choose from? 

How do you optimize the limited attention customers have for reading and interacting with your messages? 

In most brands that do not use advanced journey orchestration tools, the marketing team will be creating campaigns based on KPI’s and business objectives AND managing the logic behind the campaigns e.g when to send out the campaign and the following one, which customer segment is it being sent to, how many objectives to include in a single interaction and more. Needless to say that the potential for effectively driving personal journeys is limited when a campaign is being sent out to a whole segment.

AI-based Personal Journey Orchestration

Back to our ‘ideal world’ customer engagement. Knowing who your customers are and what they need is key. Moreover, knowing when and why there has been a user behavior change will definitely help you optimize and personalize even more your messaging and offering to each customer in future engagements.

The ultimate would be, and in fact is, for you to first define the business goals you want to achieve (e.g customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer spend and more). Then, list all the potential objectives – calls to action and messages that could impact those business goals  (service features, special offers, promotions, information, account and so forth – as many as you have) – and that’s it. You’ve defined what you want to achieve and a sophisticated AI-based machine takes the complexity away by executing 100% personalized customer journeys, engaging customers with relevant and most impactful journey objectives over time and across channels, automatically under your control of outcomes. Mission accomplished. 

Adopting an AI-based journey orchestration tool will enable your customer engagement activity to reach its full potential and your brand to personally engage with EACH customer, by:

1. Creating predictions of the impact of specific business objectives on a customer. 
2. Constantly learning algorithms of customer behavior – tailoring the most impactful and relevant messaging sent to each customer.
3. Engaging with customers across service channels, the most effective for them.
4. Providing a full journey experience from start to finish – optimizing resolution rates and predetermined KPIs.

And what about segmented campaigns?

 Well, they are very good for the purpose campaign-based systems were originally designed for –  converting prospects into customers. And when the objectives are few and duration is short, coping with designing the campaign, or managing the customer engagement logic, makes sense.  

In your more complex and challenging customer journeys (such as onboarding, service change, digital adoption increase, service utilization etc..), where you have many potential messages to bring across to your customers and many calls-to-action you want them to respond to, you and your company would greatly benefit from letting AI orchestrate journeys on your behalf.  Some would say, there is no other way.

Stay tuned for Part 2: HOW does it really work?