Role of Artificial Intelligence In Customer Need Identification

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no more a topic of science fiction novellas. Today, it is a reality with a promising future. Powered by analytics, it is setting new benchmarks in healthcare, smart homes and customer engagement, amongst others. A Pegasystems survey states that 100% of the top performing organizations are dabbling in Artificial Intelligence. 

More than ever, companies are realising the value of deploying AI-enabled systems for customer engagement. Coupled with predictive analytics and utilised effectively, AI tools like chatbots are proving to be instrumental in creating need-based contact with the customers. A chatbot is a software program which simulates a conversation between itself and human users.

Artificial Intelligence In Everyday Life

With chatbots a company’s dependency on a human-to-human interaction reduces. Ebay’s chatbot acts as a shopping assistant enquiring customers about what they want to buy and helping them with options. Bots are relieving customer care executives from the task of handling calls so that they can be smart problem solvers instead.

No more would an executive have to greet a customer every time they call and ask their name and problem.

A chatbot will sit right on a messenger in a customer’s phone and intuitively know most things about them. For example, it will know that the customer just landed in a new country and may suggest places of interest or how to get a cab. The charm of chatbots for companies also lies in their all-pervasive nature.

As chatbots live on messaging apps like Skype, Facebook messenger or WhatsApp, they are ever accessible to the customer. They constantly learn about customer preferences and their purchase patterns. Pretty much like a personal assistant, they know the customer’s lifestyle and are able to advise them when asked.

Customers are delighted to have a chatbot book hotels and flights for them, give them fashion tips, restaurants suggestions and order food online. 

AI makes it possible to anticipate customer needs. It helps sales teams to identify customer purchasing patterns pre-emptively. It assists customer care executives to provide relevant solutions. It also allows marketers to analyse data to identify high potential future customers basis past behaviour.

Capabilities Of AI In Anticipating Customer Needs

There are two main capabilities of AI which are the cause of all these breakthroughs – machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Machine learning is the processing of large amounts of customer-related data allowing companies to learn about the customers in a pre-emptive manner and create solutions for them.

Natural Language Processing is a system that allows human users to interact with the AI software like chatbots with their ability to process and interpret voice or text messages.

Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa or Apple’s Siri are perfect examples of Natural Language Processing. 

This cognitive ability of artificial intelligence gives companies an edge when it comes to understanding customer needs. A Gartner report recently concluded that 55% of reputed companies were already investing in AI capabilities or planning to do so by the year 2020.

Advantage, Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has just begun to sound real and it is already being leveraged by major corporations like Facebook, Google, Pizza Hut, Sephora etc. As predictive analytics makes AI increasingly proficient in making sense of both unstructured and structured data, AI will keep trying to match human reasoning and decision making.

Currently, AI is riding on machine learning algorithms, computer vision, natural language processing and generation etc making customer analysis more organic compared to traditional methods. It is helping companies scale up customer analysis and churn out useful insights for outbound marketing allowing marketers to automate prospecting processes and marketing campaigns. 

AI helps companies across a plethora of domains like new product development, outbound marketing, customer support and grievance redressal etc. The above-mentioned trends are just a beginning of a revolution that is about to alter the customer marketer dynamics.

About the Author: This article is contributed by Amit Dua – Co-Founder & CEO at Signity Solutions and ValueAppz.