| Wishing all the wonderful women, a Happy Women’s Day. |  |
Have you ever questioned yourselves that understanding women & understanding customers has always been a key to success?
Don’t you think? Understanding women is more like an art, the more you give time the more you uncover abstraction, the more you polish the more it shines ! It is that skill where people have been trying from centuries and will continue :).
With that in mind, think of the customer satisfaction, customer behaviour and better understanding of customer needs, its an ever ending journey isn’t it?. Gone are the days of running a business on gut feeling alone. Sure, intuition can work! but it can be an attitude. When it comes to making strategic decisions, you need cold, hard data.
So, the question arises –
How can we enable business decisions less of questioning like “Guess What’s in the Box?” and more affirmed confidence like “I bet this is how it works !” ?
Understanding the Customer Journey
Unified Customer Profile: I am so sold on this line from W. Edwards Deming – “In god we trust; all others bring data”. If you have data, you can do wonders. The critical starting point towards Customer satisfaction is understanding the Customer journey by analysing Customer data.
EI helps gather Customer data, It collects all the clues scattered across the company – sales data in the CRM system, customer interactions hiding in email threads, lurking in websites data from analytics, social media, and support tickets. This consolidated view helps understand the complete customer journey, from initial awareness to purchase and beyond. (Note: It’s not just data gathering, it’s much beyond that)
AI-Powered Insights: Once you have all the data, AI analyses this comprehensive customer data to identify patterns and trends. It can uncover preferences, predict future behaviour, and even pin-point potential customer experience pain areas. Imagine being able to anticipate customer needs before they even arise! Imagine being able to see exactly what makes your customers engage with you, or pin-point which marketing campaigns are duds faster than you can say “unsubscribe.”
Personalisation
Targeted Communication: EI facilitates real-time data exchange. This means you can send personalised messages based on a customer’s recent activity. For example, if someone abandons their shopping cart, you can send a targeted email reminding them of the items they left behind (which is already there in few portals), but what if you say ‘you have left these items in the cart, had you bought it then, then it would have solved you such-and-such problems’.
AI-Driven Recommendations: Forget psychics with the colourful crystal balls, AI uses historical data to build models that predict future trends. If you see the AI maturity today, AI goes beyond the basic pattern of “people who bought X also bought Y” recommendations. It uses complex algorithms to unearth hidden connections. For example, it might recommend a mango-shaped cookie cutter mould because you love mangoes and recently bought a recipe book on how to bake coconut butter cookies.
Proactive Problem Solving
We have been hearing much about proactive problem solving. How much have we put to use?. In my opinion very less. The reasons may be organisation priority, IT Priority, piled up problems, unresolved backlogs many more.
Real-Time Analysis: EI facilitates a real-time data exchange, like having a super-fast jet delivering updates at lightning speed through a hyper-loop. This allows you to address customer concerns the moment they arise. AI can then analyse this data to gauge customer sentiment. By identifying negative sentiment early on, businesses can proactively address customer concerns and prevent issues from escalating. Imagine seeing a negative review pop up and being able to respond with a personalised apology before it escalates into a social media firestorm (because nobody wants a flood of angry tweets and negative publicity!)
Predictive Maintenance: In some industries, EI and AI can be used to predict potential customer issues before they occur. EI connects all data sources, allowing to hear the machines. Imagine having sensor data, maintenance logs, and even historical breakdowns all in one place. This lets you identify patterns and predict potential issues before they become showstoppers.
By working together, EI and AI create a powerful feedback loop. EI provides the comprehensive customer data, while AI analyses it to gain deep customer insights. This understanding empowers businesses to tailor their offerings and interactions to individual customer needs, and might result in a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As I understand from the time I started my Enterprise Integration (EI) journey, EI along with AI can blend to create a mix that can enable business decisions less of questioning like “Guess What’s in the Box?” and more affirmed confidence like “I bet this is how it works !”
Sarma San
Name : Sarma Kalamchety
Interest : Satire, Movies, Cooking, Badminton, EI
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