It wouldn’t be wrong to say that customers are the heart of any business. Organizations spend millions of dollars to understand their customers, their needs and their behaviour. Also, customers are directly linked to a business’s sales and revenue. This is the reason why businesses put so much effort into maintaining and developing outstanding customer relationships.
Nowadays AI (Artificial Intelligence) has become one of the leading trends in the technology sphere. It has now gained a reputation among sales professionals and marketers. It has now become an essential tool for brands who crave to provide a top-notch and hyper-personalized customer experience.
A report by RobertHalf, Future of Work reveals that around 19% of the IT leaders are expected to use AI within the next five years, 33% say that they would be integrating AI into their business within the next three years and 39% of leaders are presently using some sort of AI or ML (Machine Learning) in their business.
This blog will discuss customer success from the perspective of an AI development company; why is it crucial, what it is and how can the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) ensure better customer success. So, let’s dig deep.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success in layman terms is the efforts put by a company to keep its customers happy. It is the anticipating of questions or challenges and proactively giving answers and resolving issues. Customer success helps businesses increase customer retention and loyalty, and in turn, increase revenue.
“Smart companies have realized that customer loyalty is the most powerful sales and marketing tool that they have” – Bill Price, Driva Solutions
Who needs a customer success strategy?
Any business that has customers needs to focus and invest in customer success. Recently, it is becoming more and more expensive for businesses to acquire new customers. The best practice is to make the existing customers happy. Word of mouth is still the most trusted mode of marketing and happy customers become your brand’s advocates.
In this fast-paced world, where businesses rise and fall regularly, most growing and successful companies have already invested in customer success. A study shows that a growing company is 21% more prone to prioritize customer success than its stagnant competitors.
Why focus on Customer Success?
Selling a product is not the end of the role for a marketer of today. They need to educate the customers and make sure that the customers are availing all the benefits promised by the business. In other words, this is customer success.
Businesses must emphasise customer success as it bears a positive impact on your business. Satisfied and happy customers are repeat customers, doing repeat purchases and bringing new customers via word of mouth and referrals. 20% – 50% of purchases are triggered by word of mouth.
Customer success brings benefits such as brand loyalty, brand promotion, customer acquisition, customer retention, churn reduction and profitability.
Can AI Play A Vital Role In Customer Success?
By now I hope we have established the importance of customer success to a business. This is the very reason why organizations strive to encompass new technologies to stay competitive and improve the customer experience of their brand. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most aggressively used technologies in the field of customer success.
Here are some ways AI can be used for Customer Success.
Effectively Target Customer Experience
To understand and serve the customers properly, businesses carefully analyze all the data they have gathered to recognise trends. There are various tools available for marketers that can capture vital data such as customer acquisition to time of purchase and dropoffs. This data is used to derive insights into a customer’s buying behaviours, patterns, and inclinations. This helps them devise highly convertible marketing campaigns. Around 59% of the experts say that AI will help businesses distinguish prospective customers.
With the availability of ML (Machine Learning) and AI algorithms, the business has realized that their marketing campaigns should not singularly be based on hunches, but should be derived out of customer data analysis. Sectors such as automobile, financial and healthcare were the early adopters of ML and AL algorithms and have seen considerable efficiency in the decision-making process.
AI-enabled CRM
To find success with your customers, organizations have to store a lot of data about their customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools integrated with AI can help businesses achieve a greater level of customer success. The thing with CRMs is that the more data you feed them the smarter they get. CRMs integrated with AI learn from the data, they start to recognize and make sense of every fragment of information available to them. This is very helpful in streamlining processes and running segmented marketing campaigns. AI can organize customer data and thus ensure effective handling of customers and prospects.
Chatbots
Chatbots have transformed the sphere of customer support and have improved customer experience. Chatbots have made customer support automated, interactive, fast and easy. For example, its importance was felt especially in the banking sector during the pandemic when customer care representatives were unavailable. Chatbots allowed banking organizations to cater for their clients 24/7 by providing them with valuable information whenever they needed assistance. A study predicts that by 2025 AI will power 95% of all customer interactions including telephonic and online conversations. Using chatbots organizations can approach some of the most prominent concerns users have when searching for a positive customer experience. A report by Juniper predicts that chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion annually by the year 2022.
Smarter Knowledge-base Management
An insightful and adaptive smarter knowledge base is important for a company’s success. AI tools can improve the efforts of your customer success team in the following ways:
Automation
To cope up with ever-increasing customer expectations and simultaneously deal with large amounts of data, automation can easily simplify the process for marketers.
With the collaborating smart algorithms, Big data and workflows, AI can help businesses meet the demands required to run effective customer success and effective customer engagement.
AI can analyse huge chunks of data and make a record of every action taken by a customer, allowing businesses to discover new purchasing patterns and behaviours. AI can be used to find customer preferences and behaviours. This information can be used to automate various processes such as sending onboarding or welcome mailers, sending personalized emails etc.
Conclusion
In this era of AI, custom software development services have become inevitable, delivering abilities to organizations to open endless doors to endless possibilities and applications. Only the future will enable us to witness the full capability of AI and the benefits it reaps.
Customer Success is now enhanced and can be managed easily with AI. Marketers can now leverage the power of AI to personalize their communications and efficiently engage with their customers. Organizations have now understood that AI can help them deliver a top-notch customer experience and an impactful customer journey.
If you are someone like that and need assistance with software development, do book a Free, no-obligation consultation with us, today.