Digital proactive messaging can be overwhelming. We’ve all been there—opening a website and swiftly swatting off the lightbox promotion for 10% off your first order. You scroll to find the information you need, and an autoplay video encroaches. When yet another pop-up appears, we huff and puff and close the website completely.
With examples like these, it’s no wonder that brands shirk away from any mention of “proactive messaging”. The problem though isn’t that these messages are proactive, it’s that they are impersonal and don’t come in at the right time. Think instead if that 10% off your first order notification came at the purchase stage; the likelihood of people engaging with it would skyrocket. While before customers were only browsing, now they’re ready, and now they’ll make that step!
Making the first move will set your CX apart from your competition. It's a great way to build relationships and brand loyalty—done correctly, proactive messaging can lead to a 170% engagement rate with your customers. The key is personalization, and using customer insights to anticipate customer needs.
In this article, we’ll dive into some of the challenges businesses face while creating personalized, anticipatory experiences, and how a robust conversational AI can solve them.
According to a Forrester report on anticipatory experiences, brands accept that anticipating customers’ needs creates value, but they lack the confidence in delivering effective proactive messaging. The biggest challenge is data.
For most businesses with siloed departments, customer data is fragmented, if at all available. Successful anticipatory experiences demands holistic, real-time data and insights, such as:
A robust conversational AI platform allows you to centralize all this data in one tool. The data is updated in real-time based on customer interactions, conversations, and web events. You can then leverage AI to learn from this data and anticipate customers’ needs—which is the first step towards creating a successful proactive campaign. This is very important because data on its own doesn’t tell a story, the insight generated from it does.
So now you’ve got the data and the insight, what do you do with it? Anticipating customer needs is just the first step—you then need to use those insights to take action. The problem is, many businesses lack the strategy and/or tools to act on those insights effectively.
Conversational AI enables you to act on insights and proactively reach out to customers with personalized support or suggestions—before they even know they need it. And the best part is that you can do that at scale without sacrificing personalization!
The AI will learn from your customer’s history, preferences, context, and intent to guide your proactive efforts. You can leverage it to trigger messages based on real-time data and web events and orchestrate automated outbound communication across different channels.
Creating the proper tech infrastructure is instrumental in automating data collection, insight generation, and personalized, proactive outbound communication at scale. Allow me to phrase this in no uncertain terms: you need a conversational AI platform, but your AI is only as good as the business systems it connects with—the more integrated it is, the more personalized and effective your proactive messaging can be. Look for an AI platform with a wide variety of codeless or out-of-the-box integrations, which will empower your non-technical teams to take the CX reins, and reduce the load on your IT department.
In response to the in-person limitations of COVID-19, brands are rapidly rolling with the punches, but speed can scare customers away. A paced approach is the key to successfully anticipating customer needs. Focus on collecting and centralizing the essential data outlined above before making any plans for proactive messaging.
One of the biggest challenges facing brands is a lack of internal staff to create, support, and execute CX strategies. Partnering with an Automated CX (ACX®) platform can help brands:
A clear vision can transform operational challenges into deliberate solutions. As the old adage goes, time is money, and brands need the agility to test anticipatory CX and learn quickly. The answers lie in the actions and interactions of existing customers, and a strong partnership with an ACX platform enables brands to simplify, streamline, and execute on these insights.
To create the kind of meaningful connections people are craving in the post-COVID world, you need to infuse every conversation with empathy and emotion. And you need to do it at scale.
Create personalized chat interactions and product recommendations to reduce the number of tickets your support staff is handling.
Using data from +125 million automated interactions, we identified key customer behavior trends to help you prioritize CX investments and plan for 2023.
