Harnessing the right offers to the right person can set businesses up for immediate and long-term success.
Customer experience is just as much about engaging with your organization’s services as it is about engaging with customers. Businesses have to collectively make CX a differentiating success factor for the customers they serve, and a big part of successful engagement is framing the right perspective around why CX is important — and why now.
COVID-19 has caused a once-in-a-lifetime upheaval, changing the economic landscape almost daily. There’s so much internal uncertainty on how businesses can approach the pandemic that the external customer experience suffers. Consumers are rapidly changing their previously predictable purchasing habits, which undermines traditional strategies that drive brand inventory and marketing that support the full customer experience journey.
But by using artificial intelligence, businesses can instead proactively plan for the future instead of depending on what traditionally worked in the past. Far too many brands simply think the right offer is the same offer they’ve been running forever. But putting an offer out into the market and assuming products will move off shelves is too reactive in the current environment. Delivering the right discount is more important than ever since many businesses are experiencing financial hardship. One-size-fits-all, site-wide sales scream desperation.
With AI, brands can change the focus from what they think are primary targeted customers, to delivering optimal offer values to the right person and increase marketing effectiveness and campaign ROI across the board. In the long-term, these AI-backed strategies can forge deeper connections with the source of business profitability (both internally and externally) throughout this difficult time. Brands are leaving money on the table whenever they neglect personalized CX pricing.
Blazing that trail requires strong internal processes to plan how to use AI effectively to bolster CX success. From our experience, AI effectiveness beyond the pandemic will boil down to two factors.
Improved Personalization
AI helps businesses to build a more interactive, personalized CX to ensure that “right offer to the right person” mentality. For example, the rinse-and-repeat strategy of A/B testing against the ROI of a 20 percent discount versus a 10 percent discount can compile effective but limited datasets. Insights can be taken a step further.
We can empower that data with AI to improve existing results, and analyze real-time behavior to determine price sensitivity thresholds for COVID-wary types of consumers. It improves personalization to predict a consumer’s offer receptiveness and to maximize the likelihood of future purchases.
Unified Data
In most cases, the size of a data set doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is that systems usually don’t have a lot of validation. AI knows what to do with that data. It’s not a totally hands-off, machine learning approach. AI systems will continually observe and learn from customer journeys. But the ongoing process requires unified and updated information on yet-to-be observed consumers to ensure accurate and optimal performance.
This means that brands will continue to be able to determine what type of offer will motivate appropriate actions for consumers and tailor the ongoing experience as well.
RevTrax’s AI-based methodology recommends and changes offer-values for CPG and retail brands across consumer segments to target various engagement levels for optimal ROI. These recommendations are based on over a decade of experience studying consumer response to offers and state of the art machine learning algorithms.
With an AI component of our Offer Management Platform, every dollar of a brand’s promotional budget will work harder and be more effective during these uncertain times.
If you’d like to learn how RevTrax AI Offers can help you transform your customer experience, contact us to speak to a specialist.
