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The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is here. You can make it a positive part of your business and customer interaction strategy, or just let your competitors lead and jeopardize your future. Based on my own experience with the technology, I recommend to my consulting clients that AI is ideal for use in optimizing the total customer experience, if used in a transparent and ethical way.
In a new book, “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI,” by Mark Abraham and David Edelman, I found some practical guidance to supplement my own on how you can implement this strategy for your business. Use AI to take your customer personalization beyond customization of your product or service, to provide a memorable relationship that pays big dividends.
These authors are recognized marketing and consulting experts who bring their experience from helping dozens of iconic brands already moving down this path. They demystify delivering personalization at scale, and empower us all to develop a strategy and technology framework, addressing the following keys to a full customer personalization strategy:
1. Let customers select the starting context (empower me). You must put the customer in the driver’s seat of the relationship. Anticipate when they are starting a journey and seamlessly deliver progress from across multiple channels to lead them to their desired goal. Build affinity and cultivate trust by minimizing menus and personalizing options.
2. Address individual customer needs now (know me). Use AI with digital permissions in place, to securely capture, organize, analyze, and synthesize individual customer data in a helpful way to show value and help them achieve their goal. Make every experience simple, tailored, and fast. Show awareness of their current situation and expectations.
3. Connect at the right time and place (reach me). Use AI technology to optimize when to reach out based on the customer’s physical and virtual location, device in use, time of day, weather, or another relevant trigger. Ask permission for how and when to initiate contact, respecting customer privacy. Deliver the right experience or nothing happens.
4. Present only timely and relevant options (show me). Avoid generic and uninspiring interactions. Design creative content and processes that can be personalized for every type of customer. Use GenAI to adapt your message to different customer cultures, languages, and personas. Use technology and content libraries with dynamic templates.
5. Make the whole experience memorable (delight me). Make the personalization feel magical to the customer. One interaction won’t be enough to discover what delights any individual customer. Design your system to learn from every interaction and try new ways of improving the accuracy of the experience. Push the limits to truly delight customers.
In case you hadn’t noticed, consumers and business clients are already judging businesses like yours less by products and services and more by the personalized experience they deliver. It is time to utilize your team’s technical talent to build a personalization engine, harnessing the power of data to understand customers and provide scalable experiences through targeted content.
The explosion of customer data you can capture allows you to map desirable customer journeys for both you and them, across a wide range of marketing environments and customer needs. Don’t forget to track and measure the success of your efforts to facilitate continuous improvement and quantify payback in the eyes of top management and other constituents.
If you are like many others I meet, AI is still a bit of a mystery to you, and you have qualms about its positive versus negative value to your business. I urge you to use the strategies outlined here to learn more about its ultimate potential, and capitalize on what is already known to become a personalization leader in the more and more demanding and competitive global environment.
Related: 7 Essential Keys to Boosting Your Career Through AI Collaboration