How your Enterprise can leverage AI for Customer Success
Are you spearheading a billion dollar business with a global presence across multiple industries and having vast amounts of customer data?
If you responded with an emphatic “Yes!” to the above question, then it’s time for you to explore how you can leverage Artificial Intelligence to further your business’ vision by applying the technology across your value chain.
Applications of AI across the Value Chain
IMHO, what you need to get started is a compelling use case (for a specific area of the value chain), pick the right problem and the suitable “power-up”. In this post, I’ll talk about the customer engagement aspect of the value chain (Promote: Targeted sales and marketing; Provide: Enhanced customer experience) with an emphasis on driving Customer Success with the Machine Learning power-up.
Why Customer Success matters
Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities.- Gainsight, Inc.
Leading global CEOs of enterprise businesses have reckoned customer behavior as one of the “top industry disruptors” after regulation and competition, as per a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). According to a McKinsey research, organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin. Hence, the ever-growing focus of the enterprise on understanding customer behavior, optimizing the customer experience to get, keep and grow customers, and maximizing the value of the product/service for the customer. That essentially what customer success is all about.
If driving Customer Success, at scale is the ‘moonshot’ you are aiming for, then the ‘rocketship’ you need to build is Intelligent Decision Automation. The ‘propellant’ to be used is the vast amounts of customer data and the ‘engine’ comprises of the Machine Learning models.
Getting to Intelligent Decision Automation
“You need large data-sets to carry out AI properly. Since the computers can crunch a lot of numbers to fine tune the machine learning models, Enterprise is the natural place to go.” ~ Jean Belanger, CEO, Cerebri AI
Machine Learning has ushered in a new era of Data Analytics capabilities — from merely descriptive to potentially prescriptive analytics to help automate decisions for your enterprise.
Gartner refers to Intelligent Decision Automation as an advanced analytics capability that will automate and optimize decisions in structured and well-known, decision-making scenarios. This is the capability that your enterprise needs to target, to drive customer success at scale.
“One critical area in which companies fail to exploit their AI is in ignoring or under-utilizing its capacity for gathering information about customers during its interactions with them. At this point, too many businesses have used data gathered during customer interactions to do little more than improve conversational performance, ignoring a gold mine of real-time market research derived from those interactions. The most fruitful exploitation of AI lies in its “network effect,” according to which a platform becomes smarter as it gathers more data. The effect is similar to compound interest.”
~ Shama Hyder, CEO, Zen Media
With vast amounts of customer data at your disposal and a machine learning power-up, your enterprise has the potential to leverage Intelligent Decision Automation capabilities to predict customer behavior, reduce churn, improve your product/service and thus, drive customer success.
Use Cases
Given below are two examples of industries where enterprises are leveraging AI for Customer Success. Given my bias towards startups, I have featured two trailblazers in Financial services and Retail, respectively: Cerebri AI & Rubikloud
These AI startups are empowering the enterprise customers with the machine learning power-up and helping their customers progress towards Intelligent Decision Automation.
- How Cerebri AI is driving Customer Success for Fortune 500 Financial service companies:
2. How Rubikloud is transforming the Global Retail market with AI
