The Growing Role of Data Science and AI in Improving the Digital Customer Experience

What is customer experience? Customer experience or CX focuses on the relationship between a brand and its customers. It includes every interaction, short or long, even if the conversation does not result in a purchase.

That said, a few years ago customer experience meant how attentive retailers were to meeting customers and their needs in a store. And if it was done right, the results were: increased sales, customer acquisition and loyalty, thus building customer confidence in the brand.

However, times have changed.

Today, the way customers and brands interact with each other has evolved. It’s not just about window shopping or browsing a brand’s website anymore. Additionally, the pandemic has further accelerated the transition to a more digital world while changing the online shopping behaviors of consumers in the absence of physical retail stores during the pandemic-induced lockdown.

This led to another critical transition, in which customers, who were previously adept at shopping online, began to demand that brands go digital in the age of social distancing.

For example, they are increasingly embracing the idea of ​​contactless shopping, where several brands are turning customer lounges into 3D test rooms using augmented or virtual reality technologies.

These changes in shopping behavior are likely to stay with us for a long time, if not forever! Additionally, brands have identified that chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) powered systems, including virtual assistants, instantly solve simple but relevant customer issues.

Realizing the importance of improving the customer experience with the changing times, companies / brands are leveraging the capabilities of AI, ML, and data science to elevate the same.

Let’s see how.

Focus on relevance

Now, it is clear that in the current scenario improving CX is vital, and this is only possible if companies fully understand the buying behavior of their customers. In addition, with shopping becoming mostly digital, speed and convenience are a few other critical factors in meeting increasing customer expectations.

Today’s customers are also more informed and have many choices, unlike yesterday. They look at the offers on various ecommerce platforms and expect retailers to guess their preferences and interests based on what they have already purchased online. This creates increased competition between brands / businesses online in an increasingly remote digital environment.

This is why it has become imperative for businesses to focus more than ever on the relevance of products and services.

In fact, to deliver a great experience, all customer-centric business units such as sales, customer service, and marketing need to work together and effectively leverage new age technologies for common goals.

This is where AI-powered data analytics plays a critical role in generating actionable insights for brands.

Using these datasets, brands will be able to analyze new inbound customers and loyal or retention customers, identify their choices, etc. Additionally, AI and ML will help them identify daily changes in consumer behavior like most products / services wanted for the day or week etc. Hyper-personalization is another area that combines AI and real-time data to deliver content. particularly relevant to a client.

So, to deliver more of such customer experiences, companies across industries are increasing their data analytics spend. With such a development, brands will even be able to predict and gain a deep and accurate understanding of what people might want to buy in the future – and these data-driven inputs will help them deploy products / services. tailored.

Monetize long tail content

At the same time, data science will allow organizations to monetize their long tail content. Businesses can use data-driven analytics or move to a predictive analytics model from a rules-based model. Such an approach can help them identify customer preferences, preferred price range, etc., and they will be able to efficiently deliver what the customer wants. This will further lead to increased customer engagement. It is also this by using the power of AI.

Brands can connect with customers on a more personal level, improving loyalty and ensuring their trust not only for now but also for the future.

Overall, the customer experience is a competitive engine of growth, and companies that fail to deliver top-notch CX will be left behind in the global race, where consumer behaviors evolve in more markets. more competitive.

Along with this, also come the expectations that force companies to amplify their core values ​​and their product / service offering. More and more companies are therefore applying data science and AI to improve customer-brand relationships.

These new era technologies will eventually help businesses make much more informed decisions about potential changes to improve products and services. And it will just speed up with the global AI market is expected to snowball over the next few years – expected to reach a market value of $ 309.6 billion by 2025.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)