Blog - customer journey with AI

Take control of the customer journey with AI

Smart businesses personalise every step of the customer journey and anticipate customer needs using ImpacTech’s AI-driven suite of solutions

The journey to becoming a customer is far from linear and highly variable. Purchase decisions result from interactions with numerous touch points and through several channels over days, weeks, months, or even years.

However, the purchase isn’t the end of the customer journey. It is as important to analyse post purchase to achieve long-term success.

Research shows 39% of consumers in banking, auto, insurance, telco, energy and retail consider switching supplier after two negative experiences. 82% of those people then go on social media to share these experiences with more than five people.

There are many reasons businesses fail. However, more and more businesses fall behind the competition because they struggle to deliver the experience customers expect.

Developing a winning customer experience (CX) starts with understanding your customers and their needs. These insights are in their customer journey data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a highly effective method of analysing huge data sets while providing insights. The insights ImpacTech’s AI-driven platforms produce enable a business to optimise and personalise the entire customer journey. Making the right business decisions and delivering a superior CX becomes a daily habit.

In most cases businesses use AI to make an individual task easier or more efficient. However, when applied throughout an organisation AI not only optimises tasks it reveals what will improve business performance. ImpacTech’s AI-driven tools are applicable to all customer-facing operations to make critical decisions much better and faster.

LET THE AI-DRIVEN CUSTOMER JOURNEY BEGIN

The customer journey usually begins with a marketing campaign. The objective is to capture leads by creating awareness, interest and desire in the product which ultimately results in purchase.

Marketing effectiveness contributes significantly to Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Marketers use a mix of outbound marketing (AdWords, social media, email and print campaigns) and inbound marketing to capture leads.

The cost of these campaigns has a significant bearing on profitability. Therefore, finding the most cost-effective campaign is an ongoing challenge.

Our marketing tools generate highly qualified leads via the Google Ads platform by using branded mobile apps. Leads are attracted by the high functionality of the apps and a mixture of online and offline app events optimisations that exploits the Adwords bidding system.

Our solution collects application event data to identify lead patterns and their sales triggers. This is used to create laser-targeted campaigns that feed a client tunnel and generates branded leads with high purchase intent. This results in higher click to lead rates while significantly lowering CPL and CPA.

Monitoring the performance of marketing campaigns by integrating the solution with Impact CRM increases understanding of client behaviour and yields better campaigns. Automated performance tracking flags when campaigns delivers below expectations in real time and identifies the tweaks needed for more efficiency.

MORE DATA, BETTER RESULTS

Digital connectivity has enabled businesses to reach many more people. However, this has also raised customer expectations.

Meeting expectations requires having a platform that responds to every channel that customers use. Impact CRM is an integratable and scalable cloud-based platform that pulls together data in real time from across the business based on customer’s profiles.

It is a given that poor experiences risk revenue loss. However, customers will pay more for good CX which makes it more important than ever to provide better experiences during the customer journey.

Impact CRM uses the machine learning capabilities of Impact AI to provide a better CX along every step of the customer journey by producing real-time insights. For example, predictive analytics anticipates the likely nature of the customer enquiry and connects them with a support agent with the skills and experience to respond to the query.

Impact CRM captures the information when a form gets completed as well as interactions from landing pages, what is said to chatbots and during live chat, phone calls, SMS and emails.

The sentiment analysis module available with Impact CRM and Impact Telecom reports the mood of the customer during an interaction. Identifying what results in positive and negative interactions clearly defines the path that results in sales and higher customer satisfaction levels.

This analysis also helps identify which keywords work best in sales and marketing and how different customer segments react to variations in campaigns.

Valuable insights result from processing the rich source of data available in the variety of channels customers use. Time spent within a channel and which channel is used for what purpose are just two variables that reveal insights about preferences and customer intentions.

With these insights Impact CRM helps your business deliver the best personalised CX during the customer journey at scale.

SALES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Impact AI accurately uncovers customer needs. It also reveals which lead is more likely to buy and who in your sales team is best-suited to make the sale.

ImpacTech’s intelligent chatbot is an excellent tool for uncovering customer’s needs.

The data collected through chatbot conversations offers greater value than website data due to the deeper understanding about user preferences revealed during a chatbot interaction.

Chatbots enhance CX by collecting actionable detail like revealing pain points and the most popular services.

Our intelligent chatbot uses conversational AI to engage prospects automatically. How the chatbot responds is the result of a hybrid approach that is fine-tuned through rule-based AI and machine learning.

Most sales teams spend 80% of their working week chasing deals. Our chatbot cuts through that so your team focuses on leads with high purchase intent and spend more time closing deals. It draws context from previous interactions and engages until they turn into a customer or opt out.

Our automated lead scoring tool helps to select which leads to approach by predicting with high accuracy* which lead is most likely to convert. *(86.7% prediction accuracy on leads most likely to convert based on an average of 300,000 leads processed per month).

Traditional rule-based lead scoring methods are unreliable because of the calculation complexity and variations due to weighting differences with different demographic combinations.

Our AI-driven tool is more accurate because it employs sophisticated non-linear models. The predictions are both interpretable and explainable and use a combination of ensemble learning, machine learning and continuous learning.

Automated lead segmentation determines which member of your team is best suited to convert a lead.

In addition to revealing customers’ needs, the best leads and who should convert them predictive analytics also uncovers cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

INCREASE LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE AND REDUCE CHURN

Walmart founder Sam Walton understood the need to minimise churn. He said: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Human error and failure to meet customer expectations increase churn. Fragmented data from disconnected platforms and organisational data silos are an additional source for this failure and underline the importance of tracking the entire customer journey.

ImpacTech platforms use AI to enable every customer-facing team to respond to influences in the market. By tracking the customer journey, agents are aware of the experience – both positive and

negative – clients have in real time. It monitors customer activity patterns to determine customer risk thresholds and identifies at-risk clients, thus helping reduce churn.

Some of these failings can be minimised by using our intelligent chatbot. Your business can engage with customers 24/7/365 and respond consistently to client demands.

Conversational AI ensures they will always receive a response that is consistent with business goals and with what is known about the customer through Impact CRM.

Impact CRM also arms your agents with insights about sentiment, preferences and buying triggers. This information is critical to increasing lifetime customer value.

It is five times more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to sell to existing customers. Despite this, many businesses struggle to pair their products with an existing customer need. In part, this is because over one third fail to adequately track their customers’ journey.

It’s the difference between someone calling you about an exciting offer (standard CRM) and seeing something in your preferred social media channel that fits your needs based on analysis of your customer journey data.

CONSISTENCY AND PERSONALISATION ARE KEY

There is no guarantee that a one-time purchase results in a long-term customer or that occasional discount offers result in a repeat purchase. In fact, “rewarding” customers with discounts can sometimes confuse and end up backfiring.

The focus needs to be on a beginning-to-end experience, from the creation of those experiences to their delivery, management and their monetization.

Companies that can focus on their most profitable and loyal customers after the sale naturally set up future business opportunities and increase lifetime customer value. Keeping churn to below the rate a business acquires new customers effectively guarantees growth.

If your business only focuses on the last interaction, rather than the entire journey, it will reach conclusions which will do nothing to reduce the number of customers that leave.

Personalisation identifies who are your most profitable customers and ensures your business focuses on keeping them with offers that meet their expectations and reflect their value.

Use Impact CRM to define customer segments by profitability and predictive analytics to determine risk of churn and expected response to an offer to stay. Knowing who is worth keeping and predicting the outcome of retention efforts results in more efficient use of resources.

Getting existing customers to continue buying and adding new customers are goals all businesses share. Personalisation is key to achieving those goals and are now achievable at scale with ImpacTech’s technology. Even businesses that service millions of people can deliver a customer journey where every interaction is based on individual preferences.

The definition of good customer experience may differ from person to person. But understanding those differences and the ability to deliver a positive customer experience to every individual is the most important competitive advantage in business today.