AI In Customer Marketing

The AI boom brought a lot of hype, but also new technologies. One sector that is noticing the impact here of is marketing. New products are emerging the employ of machine learning to boost customer interaction and improve personal experiences. The good news? These smart marketing automation technologies powered by artificial intelligence are applicable to small & medium sized enterprises. Let’s discuss today’s available tools that assist customer marketing & service specialists.

An important piece of marketing history

Let’s begin with an important piece of history. It’s the 1800s and cities are bustling with revolutionary new technologies of atomization. People started to gain time and money for leisurely activities and products. Accompanying this change is the need for companies to distinguish themselves. Behold, the birth of modern marketing. Cities filled with magazines, posters and billboards.

The slow decline of paper marketing
This new sector easily flowed over to new technologies, such as radio, television and telephones. In the 1950s we see how television commercials have a boom in revenues, while influencing a whole generation. Sadly, the 1970s are well known for their telemarketing antics, while also introducing the slow decline of paper marketing.

Introducing personal computers
The 1980s renew print advertising, while also introducing the device of its demise, personal computers. In the 1990s customers are introduced to SMS marketing as the introduction to connected-device ads. Online advertising comes into existence together with search engine optimization, blogs, digital analytics and the famous dot-com bubble emerge.

Modern day marketing
All those events lead up to modern day marketing. The 2000s have introduced a new age of marketing and customer service. Search and site analytics are well developed, while social media communications have become commonplace. Real-time search results and high-speed wireless communications have ushered a new level of high-speed collaboration.

Highly personalized service and marketing
Companies now understand the importance of being able to provide highly personalized service and marketing to their customers. These changes also create expectations in the clientele, such as relevant advertisements and quick personal assistance. Which raises the question of how marketing specialists can achieve such goals. The answer lies in intelligent machines.

A boom in A.I. technologies
The 2010s have clearly shown a boom in A.I. technologies. Famous examples such as self-driving cars and game-playing machines show that A.I. can be used to automate highly specialized tasks. Artificial intelligence enables the move from the 1800s maximum reach towards the modern-day approach of maximum impact. This is where companies change marketing separated from customer service to customer marketing & service as a single goal.

Ready to implement AI tools

Introducing artificial intelligence might seem infeasible to some, but don’t assume this too quickly. Examples exist of how A.I. can be used to improve customer marketing & service. Some quick examples of ready-to-implement tools for an existing infrastructure.

Chatbot
Being able to provide a personal interaction without needing a customer service centre. Chatbots like the Microsoft bot framework make this feasible, even for medium to small businesses.

Demographical fitted story
Personalizing stories for various demographics can be very laborious. Luckily tools like Quill can be trained to transform existing data into a story fitted for each target demographic.

Customer-friendly written reports
Automated reporting already exists, but providing reports in natural-language is state of the art. The Arria platform provides options to convert expert data into customer-friendly written reports.

 

Tools to micro-cluster your customer database

Customer oriented marketing requires micro-clustering of a company’s customer base. Examples of tools that fit in existing infrastructures are also available.

Automatically recognize segmentations
Generating customer segmentation from existing data used to be a tedious and manual task. Intelligent machines can learn to automatically recognize segmentations. The generated data can help gain insights into customer interaction. This allows companies to identify critical marketing points and roadblocks.

(examples: Kissmetrics, Popcorn Metrics)

Automatically collect and visualize insightful reports
Gathering analytics data used to require a specialist. Existing smart suites can combine analytics across various channels. This data helps to create automated actionable insights that assist customer purchases. Visualizing these insights can also be challenging and laborious. The Azure A.I. combined with Microsoft PowerBI suite can automatically collect and visualize insightful reports about a customer base.

Your customer journet across various channels

Of course, segmentation insights would have no value if their gains couldn’t be applied. Again A.I. can help improve the impact of gathered data. Various tools exist to manage the customer journey irresectable of their chosen interaction channel.

A cross-channel voice
Imagine a world where you spend less time deploying marketing campaigns and more time connecting with your audience. Ensuring that you reach consumers with personalized experiences that are relevant, valuable and inspiring can be quite complex. A cross-channel voice and chat would help create dialogues across various platforms. Supervising the customer experience on these platforms can also be challenging. This is not the case when you let an intelligent engine transform your media to fit each platform and customer segment.

(examples: Cognigy, Boomtrain)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Managing your customer relations is important. This management can partially be automated using the right platforms. Environments like Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help in this case. These tools are often augmented with A.I. to ensure that you have the most complete and accurate data available.

AI to improve your company’s impact

These two aspects show that A.I. can be employed to assist any customer marketing & service specialists. This post has only touched a small aspect of the customer journey and how A.I. can help improve a company’s impact. Many more options exist and maybe you can think of something that could improve your companies impact. Why not discuss this with one of the in-house Data Scientists at Mediaan?