Mark Floisand Chief Marketing Officer , Coveo
Mark Floisand is Chief Marketing Officer at Coveo. He has over 20 years of marketing, sales and general management experience in the technology industry, spanning blue chip and start-up companies across three continents, including Apple, Adobe, BusinessObjects, SAP, Total Defense, Untangle and WeVideo. Mark was most recently with Sitecore, a Coveo technology partner, where he led product marketing. Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; and an MBA from the University of Durham in the UK.
Digital transformation is atop the list of every marketing leader’s initiatives. While there’s a lot of hype around AI and machine learning, there seems to be less understanding of what it does and how it can help move the needle on business-critical goals. I’d like to demystify it and show you how you can use it to better understand your customers and how doing so can have a significant impact on your bottom line. In a time where acquiring a new customer can be 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer, leveraging AI to enhance your customer experience is something you’ll want to include while preparing your digital transformation roadmap.
Here are three ways you can use AI and machine learning to give your customers the experience they deserve:
Historically, marketers have created segments that group customers of a kind together and the whole group receives a similar experience. Inevitably, this means they end up shooting wide and hoping something will stick. But each customer is different and in the era of personalization, this kind of batch and blast marketing simply doesn’t cut it.
Fortunately, with usage analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities, you can utilize your customer data to deliver a unique experience to each customer. Engagement, time on site, click-through rates, search patterns, real-time activity, product preferences, purchase history, past queries or help tickets—this information provides a holistic profile of each of your customers, from which machine learning models can predict their wants and needs, sometimes before they even know themselves.
The key here is to connect the data horizontally as well as vertically to avoid isolated data silos. Unifying your data will help you automatically deliver relevant experiences for each unique customer. AI and machine learning give you the ability to offer dynamic content, allowing you to influence customers in real time with promotions and messaging that speak to the context of their visit and their intentions at that moment in time. With each new visit, that content will be tweaked as context and intentions change. Personalization at scale has never been more accessible as it is today. Every day that goes by without AI harnessing your data is a missed opportunity to delight and convert your customers.
Your customers actually do want you to use what you know about them to personalize every step of their journey - they expect an optimized, flawless experience. In fact, more than half of customers are willing to pay more for intuitive and personalized service. This includes the ability to find information or the answer to a question themselves, with the least amount of effort.
Empowering your customers to self-serve just makes good business sense. Not only do your customers prefer self-service, it helps to facilitate a frictionless digital experience. And it lowers your organization’s support costs by having fewer calls come into your contact center and less tickets that need to be handled, increasing operational efficiency. AI-powered websites and applications get better with every use, allowing you to scale your customer experience with ease. When your customers find what they’re looking for, the moment it’s needed, they’ll have no need to go elsewhere. Relevant interactions ensure customer retention and improve your bottom line, and it’s only possible with AI.
Medallia, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that helps businesses win through customer experience, was looking to overhaul its own customer experience. Siloed information prevented their customers from finding what they were looking for. The less their customers engaged online, the less information Medallia had to A/B test and personalize the experience; consequently, customers were dissatisfied, and loyalty suffered. Introducing AI-powered search and recommendations as part of its digital transformation initiative resulted in a12% increase in click-through rate and 5 point increase in its Net Promoter Score within one quarter.
Marketing owns a big piece of the customer experience—from building awareness, to online engagement to lead conversion— but the customer experience doesn’t end once leads are passed off to Sales. As a marketing leader, it’s important for you to understand how your efforts, as well as your martech stack, can benefit the rest of the organization.
The same AI-powered search and recommendations you implement on your website can be applied across your organization. The insight you get from your customers’ online engagement, behavior and preferences will ensure that your sales team can customize their offers or pitch in a way that best resonates with their prospects and genuinely meets their needs.
The insight your organization has on customers’ visits, search trends, community engagement and purchase history give your Support team a holistic view of what your customers have been looking for, where they are getting stuck and how Support can best remedy the situation. Having case-relevant information at hand will enable your agents to deliver personalized assisted-support and ensure the process is as frictionless as possible. If your customers don’t find what they’re looking for on your site or app, it could be an indicator that there’s a content gap, which your team can easily address and make available. Or, perhaps they’re looking for a product or service that doesn’t yet exist, which could be great insight to pass to your product development team.
Simply put, everyone in your organization touches the customer experience, and by leveraging AI, your marketing team has the ability to significantly contribute to growth targets organization-wide.
Every customer is different. In the past, this was the key drawback to broad-based marketing - it missed the mark for most people - but in today’s plugged-in world, it’s an opportunity. Your customer data, paired with AI and machine learning, allows you to track each customer’s behavior, understand their preferences and tailor your approach to their needs automatically. AI-powered search and recommendations ensure they see the most relevant content and are able to access the best information to meet their needs in that moment, allowing you to wow them at every touch point of their digital experience and earn their trust.
Today, customers’ decisions to engage with a brand hinge on relevance and purpose. We’re living in what’s being referred to as an empathy economy; a human-centric way of doing business that truly understands and adapts to the needs of the customer with a goal of improving their lives. Offering personalized experiences that empower your customers to be in control of their digital experience and delivering top notch customer support are some of the surest ways to future-proof your organization.
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