AI categories that impact marketing: personalized customer journeys

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AI can help brands provide the personalized experiences that consumers are increasingly expecting. Many brands have begun their journeys with personalized customer experiences, but few have achieved the holy grail – an end-toend, orchestrated, personalized and omnichannel customer journey.

This third article in the series will examine personalized customer journeys and how artificial intelligence plays a key role. We will also look at the platforms and tools which make these journeys possible.

Marketing automation is not the only way to create a personalized customer journey.

We mean by personalized customer journeys that we go beyond marketing automation. The customer experience is customized to the individual’s behavior and their propensity to buy/engage specific products and services. These platforms and methods, which use AI and machine-learning, put the customer in the center of action.

Platforms that enable personal customer journeys include:

• Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO), platforms enable mapping, automation, and measurement of the customers journey across multiple channels, with a user-centric approach.
• Real time interaction management (RTIM ) platforms have similar characteristics to CJO. However, they are driven by the need of the business to communicate something specific in the moment.
• Next Best Action or Offerplatforms use AI-driven propensity model to recommend an offer, product, or service to a client based on his or her preferences, and other criteria such as recent purchases or other behaviors.
• Images and videos personalized to the customer create an immersive experience. Brands can create an engaging experience by combining generative AI with personalizing customer journeys. This approach is being adopted by several platforms and will be followed by many others.

However, these platforms are rarely used in isolation. These platforms are not isolated. They require customer data, a CRM, purchase history, and a Customer Data Platform.

This means that there must be an ecosystem in which the “brain”, or the platform for real-time decision making or the next best action, is a CJO. There should also be a suite of tools to link customer data with the communication channels likely to have been used by the customer. It can be any of the channels, such as email, mobile apps, SMS, or social media. To truly achieve omnichannel marketing, brands must engage with their customers across and channels.

Today is a day that deserves attention

Brands need to focus on the personalized customer journey for several reasons. There are some things to consider and reasons why brands pay attention to the area of personalized customer journeys.

Expected and appreciated is personalization

Customers expect personalized content and experiences and reward brands who provide them with repeat customers.

The consumer is channel-switching

Customers use multiple devices during the purchasing process and even after. Brands that understand this behavior will win loyal customers who get what they want when, where, and how they want.

The platforms are now ready for primetime

Platforms are mature in many cases and ready for enterprise usage.

Focusing on personalized customer journeys is a good idea for many reasons. AI-driven tools are becoming more sophisticated and able to integrate across all channels. This area will continue to grow in the months ahead.

Near-term Potential

Many brands may not be able to achieve omnichannel, personalized customer experiences across the entire buying experience (and after-purchase), but you can still make progress by using AI-based tools.

We’ll explore some ways that brands can make a first or next step. Remember that the more channels you reach, and the more they encompass the whole customer experience, the more effective personalized journeys will be.

Brands can take the following steps to begin personalizing customer journeys:

• Create more automated drip campaigns that are based on interest or behavior.
• Include more personalization. You can still increase the amount of personalization in standard communications, even without cross-channel coordination. This is a great first step.
• Automate customer conversations. You can also utilize chatbot/conversational AI to speed customer interactions and provide a tailored experience.
• Implement CJO on only one or two channels. Even if you are not ready for a full omnichannel customer experience, Customer Journey Orchestration is still incredibly useful, even when it comes to small parts of the experience.

If you create personalized journeys this way, you can adopt AI in a meaningful but incremental way. This allows you to learn quickly and then apply these learnings as your programs grow.

What to look out for

While this is a promising area of AI, it’s important to be cautious when rushing to create a personalized journey for customers.

Silos: start thinking about them early

This could be teams who need to work together in order to deliver an omnichannel service, data silos or platform silos or even all three. To deliver an omnichannel service, you need to coordinate a lot. So start from the beginning.

Start small and iterate

It is exciting, but there are a lot data, teams, and platforms that need to be connected. It is easy to try and do too much, without testing, and then improving with time. Do not start with a broad scope without testing and learning from the results. This is true even if your tests only cover a few channels, or a very small part of the customer journey. It is important to keep this in mind when you are incorporating AI or machine learning models for your personalization. These models take time and effort to learn what works best.

Do not over-prescribe your journeys

Ensure that the customer is in control, and has the option to “opt out” and move onto another journey. It’s a balance between the brand telling AI what it thinks is best and the customer deciding on what they want.

Avoiding common pitfalls will ensure that you and your clients have a better experience as they embark on their personalized journeys.

AI personalization: a powerful tool for maximizing value

Artificial intelligence can be used to create personalized customer journeys that have great potential for the future and present. The results can be extremely valuable for customers, even though coordinating teams, data, and platforms to create a personalized customer journey is a difficult task.

The next article will explore the fourth area in which AI can have a positive impact on marketing teams. This is workflow and task automaton.

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