Customers are the lifeline of all businesses, and acquiring and retaining them is the fine line between success and the ultimate demise of many startups. The key to raising an army of loyal customers is to offer a stellar customer experience. However, to improve customer experience, knowing the customers, their pain points, likes and dislikes, and preferences are crucial. What makes your customers tick? What motivates them to make a purchase? How do the consumers perceive your brand in the market? How do they want to be treated? How can you provide better value for your customers?
When you speak the customer's language, you can anticipate their needs and develop solutions to problems that haven't been voiced yet.
Fortunately, there are plenty of AI-driven customer strategy tools that help you nurture strong relationships with your customers, boost engagement opportunities with your products and help you power your actions with robust, unique insights. Here are five tools that all businesses need to gain a competitive advantage and gain market share.
1. Customer profiling tools
You need to understand your users to better cater to their needs. Therefore, you need a cutting-edge profiling tool that gathers the relevant customer information collected at different business touchpoints to identify, segment and define your target audience profiles. This allows you to create portraits of customers to enable strategic decision-making and offer personalized experiences. When you truly understand your customers, you can tailor your messaging to acquire, engage and retain them. Understand how your target customers interact with your business, their buying preferences, and where they are located. With an advanced customer profiling tool, you are better able to nurture life-long relationships with customers, personalize marketing campaigns for different target groups, and leverage cross-selling opportunities for your current customer base. In addition, a customer profiling tool helps you with:
- Demographic segmentation: Dividing your customers by demographic factors, such as age, family structure, gender, ethnicity, and income, helps you get more specific with your marketing strategies.
- Personality segmentation: Divide your customers by factors that influence buying behaviors, such as beliefs, values, interests, preferences, lifestyle, social status, opinions, and activities.
- Behavioral/Interests segmentation: Group customers based on the behaviors they exhibit, such as purchasing and usage behavior, occasion purchasing, customer loyalty, etc.
- Geographic segmentation: Narrow down your audience base to people who live in or shop at a particular location.
2. NPS platform
A Net Promoter Score tool helps you deliver impactful business outcomes by enabling you to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. Reach out to your customers with multi-channel NPS surveys, uncover customer loyalty drivers, identify unsatisfied and at-risk customers and tackle their issues to protect your brand image and improve your user experience.
Now is the time to move beyond legacy customer feedback collection and improve your response rates by engaging customers on the devices and platforms they want to use. A state-of-the-art NPS platform helps you get the correct information, to the right people, in real-time so that you can step in when customers need it the most.
3. Sentiment analysis
Analyze social media comments, reviews, articles, shares, and any other unstructured to uncover your customer's intent from conversations and better understand the different opinions that people have expressed about your brand. If you offer an omnichannel experience, a robust sentiment analysis tool allows you to leverage qualitative feedback to create and shape effective business strategies. Sentiment analysis tools integrate with your social media channels to help you discover how customers genuinely feel about your products, services, and marketing campaigns. Garner AI-based data about positive, negative, and neutral mentions, and track reach and engagement of your posts. Learn how many people have liked or commented on your latest post and power your actions by robust, unique insights.
4. Recommendation engines
Give your customers a personalized user experience by offering real-time product recommendations and hyper-relevant promotions based on analytics. Cutting-edge recommendation engines allow you to connect customers with products they want to buy. The most significant benefit of recommendation engines is that they can dynamically adapt and personalize your recommendations to each users' preferences, browser behaviors, category affinity, and real-time intent. A recommendation engine can create customer profiles based on what the current visitor has clicked or bought, as well as the items currently in the cart or that were previously abandoned, and even increase average order value by showing customers popular recommendations, such as “recently viewed,” “bought together,” or “best-seller. Create experiences that deliver a consistent brand experience and win over your customers.
5. Live chat
Communicating with customers in real-time is the future of customer support. Live chat gives your customers a way to reach you as soon as they have a question or a problem rather than go through the hassle of sending an email to a support team and waiting for a reply. Not to mention, tech-savvy customers have high expectations from brands, and brands need to add live chat to their omnichannel support if they do not want to lose a significant chunk of customers. A dedicated chat management software, such as LiveChat or HappyFoxChat, helps you keep the customer support process as simple as possible and gain valuable data to aid in informed decision-making.
To wrap it up
Thanks to advanced analytics, machine learning, behavioral recording tools, and more vital customer touchpoints, it has become easier than ever to understand your customers on a granular level and boost your customer engagement efforts. After all, isn't the end goal of marketing to get new customers and foster customer loyalty!
Irfan Ak
Irfan Ak is an tech savvy & experienced digital content strategist at Branex. He is a regular contributor on various websites. He has worked with several brands and created value for them.
