Rohit Prabhakar

I build agentic revenue systems for Fortune 50 companies

Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey

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When enterprises work on the customer experience, they focus on touchpoints – the single transactional points where a customer interacts with different facets of the business and its various offerings. And it is quite logical as well. These touchpoints represent critical points in the customer life cycle that must be understood and served very well. Data and Technology are the Key enablers to delivering the right and just-in-time experience. Unfortunately, most of our enterprises struggle with disconnected data and not-so-well integrated technology stacks. Even companies that have well-integrated MarTech stacks often struggle with silos of data. As we solve these silos, it is critical that we also understand this concept of Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey. Yes data has it’s own lifecycle!

Understanding every aspect of customer experience and the end-to-end customer journey over a period is vital for businesses. Opting for a data-driven, outside-the-box approach toward customer experience journey helps to put customers at the core of business strategy, thus driving loyalty and revenue. The data generated and sourced from various touchpoints and its analysis can be of different forms. It can be descriptive analytics based on operational data to deducing customer sentiment and behavior from real-time data feeds from all channels and applications. Powered by a range of data analytics tools for operational, streaming, and processing unstructured data, businesses can connect the dots among the key touchpoints to optimize the customer experience journey.

The 4 main types of data that make the Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey are:

  • Intent Data: Collection of behavioral signals from Deep Web that help interpret purchase or renewal intent.
  • Behavioral Data: Data that reveals new insights into the behavior of customers on the web, eCommerce platforms, online games, mobile applications, and IoT.
  • Customer Data: Wide variety of data like demographic, personal information collected by businesses to understand, communicate and engage with customers.
  • Product Usage Data: Data that helps to understand how how-often users interact with your product and their behavior while using the product

Here is a highly recommended article to read about the various technical systems like DMP, CDP and Data Lake to identify what your enterprise needs to connect and use these data types.

Data Life Cycle in Customer Journey

Phase 1: Discovery

Also known as the ‘Reach’ or ‘Awareness’ phase, this phase marks the official beginning of the customer lifecycle. Though it is tough to pinpoint the customer’s exact first contact with the business, it is vital to track the initial touchpoints as accurately as possible to design further marketing and advertising strategies. The data that can be collected during this phase includes the typical search terms, which are bringing people to the business website, the number of new visitors on the website, the point of return of visitors to a website, online reviews, new followers on social media business page, customers’ interaction on social media, data from AdWords and pay-per-click, and the usual prospects and current customer surveys.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Intent Data is available mostly as anonymous data that is stitched together to make a best guess on the intent of that account or customer. ABM Tools are a very good example in B2B marketing space.
  • Behavioral Data is also available as anonymous data which can be stitched together to a specific anonymous profile.
  • Customer Data is available in case this is an existing customer trying to buy a new product.

Phase 2: Acquisition (Learn/Educate)

The contact initiating phase begins when the company comes on the radar of the prospect. The sole purpose of this phase is to convert the marketing contacts into leads or potential sales contacts. During this phase, it is vital to know the audience and develop messaging strategies according to specific buyers’ persona. The acquisition phase can provide factual data that is easy to analyze. Now, here there are two types of data involved: what and who. What data includes the view sources and referrals, traffic, event, and goal-related data. Who data consists of the business website’s viewers, their landing point after signing up or registering, and how the business website or app is utilized.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Intent Data is available mostly as known data that is stitched together with behavioral data to make more targeted and personalized experience.
  • Behavioral Data is the best data available at this stage. As the prospect has clearly identified themselves, hence all their web history can be stitched together to understand their journey on your owned media to be more targeted and useful in their journey.

Phase 3: Conversion (Register/Sign up for Trial)

Conversion is the phase where the rubber meets the road. Here the company completes a qualification event when the sale is completed and a prospect is turned into a customer. The pillar on which this phase’s success lies in selling not just the products or services but the relationship. For instance, customers interested in B2B SaaS solutions aren’t merely looking for suppliers but businesses that can become their partners. Here the most critical data is conversion rate, which showcases the percentage of leads that turned into customers. Conversion rate can be tracked in respect to other metrics as well, such as website traffic. Now all prospects will not convert and will abandon the journey. It is the point where the customer lifecycles of such prospects will come to an end. Analyzing the data and finding out what went wrong with these prospects can help tweak the future marketing and strategies.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Behavioral Data changes from a prospect and marketing behavior to behavior within the product and other customer-facing digital media.
  • Customer Data is officially in play at this stage as we start collecting and processing that data
  • Product Usage Data may be minimally available to inform any recommendations

Phase 4: Support

Once the customer onboarding process is complete and the product utilization is started, it becomes vital to keep all communication lines open if the customer has any issue or query. This is especially critical during the first 90 days because if the customer fails to see or leverage the product or business service’s value, he will likely leave the association. This is what is called churn. In other words, the churn rate is the percentage of existing customers a business is losing and the speed of this loss. To make a customer experience journey rich and seamless, a proactive approach toward support is the need of the hour. This phase involves different data types such as total volume by channel, the average response time, first contact resolution rate, help delay and abandonment rates, and moments of delight. The complete analysis of this consolidated data can help businesses provide their customers the best support experience possible. At this stage product data becomes a major player especially product onboarding and usage data is a critical indicator.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Behavioral Data and
  • Product Usage Data In product customer behavior data becomes one of the most important but mostly under utilized data at this stage. In most companies, this data lives in silo behind the walls of product teams.
  • Customer Data continues to become mature and can be used to stitch together the best experience to wow a customer.

Phase 5: Expansion

For several companies, upselling and cross-selling are a way of drawing out as much revenue as possible from every client and customer. But this approach can backfire negatively. Instead, the company’s expansion approach should have the goal to help their customers draw out the maximum value of the purchased product or services. This value optimization can be done by creating a customer experience that delivers growing value over a while, developing a natural increase in base-product utilization, a sensible expansion into the additional features and functionalities, and adoption of logical and suitable other products or services of the company. This is the phase where data generated and gathered in the first four stages is consolidated and analyzed to launch an intelligent, insights-driven expansion strategy, one that is designed to deliver the true value. Additional datasets like product data and customer data is of great use at this stage as you identify what is the next best product can offer.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Behavioral Data
  • Customer Data
  • Product Usage Data

Phase 6: Renew

It would be a bit unfair to call the renewal phase as an individual phase as it is the resultant of a robust customer lifecycle management. Renewals don’t lead a great customer success; rather they are the outcome. If an organization is facing the challenge of lower renewal, it is due to the dissatisfaction in the lifecycle such as issues in onboarding, incomplete adoption of the product, failure of utilizing the complete features that would have brought the desired value to the client, issues with ROI, etc. During this phase, a general customer consensus can be achieved by conducting surveys or through online reviews. Another key performance metric of this phase is churn rate. To sum it up, the data gathered in all the above-mentioned stages, its analysis, and utilization decide the success of the renewal phase. Most importantly, this activity should start few months before the renewal date and not few days before.

Key data from Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey at this stage are:

  • Intent Data is available mostly as known data that is stitched together with behavioral data to make a targeted and personalized experience. Also, data from the deep web can be stitched together to understand if the customer is shopping around and should be offered appropriate offers or solutions to create stickiness.
  • Behavioral Data especially Product Usage Data come together to put together a very customized experience to ensure that the strong value proposition and ROI can be demonstrated to the customer so that they are motivated to renew the service. This data can be combined with Customer Data to offer the best promotions or renewals with no promotions.

Mapping the entire customer experience journey with the right type of data at each phase helps a business understand their customers’ experience and delivery an amazing experience at every touchpoint. To sum up, it is a CONNECTED and COMPREHENSIVE data-driven, outside-in approach to deliver an outstanding, seamless, and rich customer experience that wins both the game of customer experience and business growth. I hope this Data Life Cycle in Customer Experience Journey helps you enable great growth for your enterprise.

You can follow the discussion at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/data-life-cycle-customer-experience-journey-rohit-prabhakar/

We cannot be everything to everyone!

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Learnt this wisdom from a serial entrepreneur today – “We cannot be everything to everyone!” When we try to do that, It is confusing not just for others but for ourselves too. We must prioritize what and where we should focus on. Clearly defining the “Why” behind what you we are doing is absolute must to define what we are focused on.

Know your why, define what you must focus on and then execute.

Power lies in Product Adoption

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Power of system is realized when users adopts the system. Number of subscriptions or units sold is a great metric to calculate revenue and initial success of a product but the true to success of the product is based on how well it is adopted. Once a product is well adopted, it confirms all aspects of its success like product objectives, customer impact, profitability, market share etc. As product managers we must focus on adoption as the key goal/OKR besides the normal financial metrics.

Most importantly, adoption doesn’t means it has to be a fancy solution. On a product demo from a vendor, I learnt that the most adopted feature of their financial planning tool for CFOs and their financial teams; is the ability to generate data loaded cubes in excel. Who will believe that in today’s world, but that is what finance teams want. Providing the solution that the customers need and continuous improvement is the key to product adoption.

Top 5 Leadership Values and Principles Essential for Leaders

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Skillful leadership is essential for the success of a business and achieving set goals. Some people are born leaders, while others develop the skills and abilities to lead business efficiently. A leader in an organization have specific day-to-day duties that bound them in a pattern and addresses only the pressing concerns. Many leaders have fallen into this trap, watching their next step and not being able to see what’s down the road.

A leader helps a business to make detailed plans with a vision in mind and set smart goals to achieve them. The leader’s role is to design a strategy and execute them to make the most of it. The key is to understand how to create a winning strategy and work collectively to reach the desired goal.

This article will read about guiding principles of leadership and values that help leaders shift their focus from single steps to the bigger picture.

core leadership values and principles

Assign Responsibility and Encourage Ownership

A leader has a lot to learn about core leadership values and principles from history. History remembers leaders like Napoleon and Genghis Khan for their strategic leadership as they shaped the world as we know it. It’s important to understand that none of the great leaders accomplished on their own. Both leaders had a loyal army at their back, who trusted their commander’s order and believed in their leaders’ great vision. There is a lot to learn about leadership qualities from history, although you may not be focusing on conquering nations. A leader’s role is to find the right people, assign them their responsibility and give them adequate resources and autonomy to do their job well.

While handling a new project, it is essential to make a plan first. Don’t start assigning responsibilities, duties and micromanage your team or soldiers. If there is a need for additional training or assistance for handling a particular task or entire project, make it your priority. Encourage team members to take ownership of their duties and be accountable for the task’s success or failure. Lastly, a leader needs to give commendation to the right person who did the work.

Take Strategic Risks

You can’t get a job unless you apply, you can’t get a date unless you ask, and you can’t paint a masterpiece without putting color on the canvas. In business and life, there is nothing that comes with 100 percent surety. As a strategic leader, you should not be afraid to take risks. However, there is a big difference between a “risk” and a “gamble.” Like a poker game, you evaluate all the possibilities for risk or failure and take strategic risks to mitigate losses and get the most out of the opportunities. Even though most people consider “Poker” as a gambling game, it is truly a game of skill. 

A leader, just like a poker player, needs to predict the success of a plan or decision with relative accuracy, even when the odds are not in favor. For a leader, it is essential to have a clear understanding of what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose. A leader should take the risk in business in the same way. Not to go all-in on something that has a marginal chance for success or where there are only meager returns. Examine your options and make prudent decisions, but don’t be shy to bet on the winning hand.

Encourage Collaboration

The rise of AI and digital technologies has changed how businesses used to operate earlier. To adapt to this changing environment, a leader needs to create a collaborative ecosystem to speed up the evolving process. Companies that struggle to keep up with the breakneck pace risk being shut down. There is always a risk that a business will isolate itself and fail to adapt to the changes happening around us.

Organizations are further divided into departments and individuals that often fail to meet the larger goal by not realizing how they as a team or individual can contribute to achieving goals. A leader’s role is to create a collaborative culture and ensure every employee knows how they can contribute to achieving the bigger goal with resources available. Encouraging a collaborative environment in an organization makes sense of inclusion, and team diversity can cultivate innovative ideas.

However, not every department needs collaboration. For example, there is no need for the manufacturing team to collaborate with the accounts team to keep records in the car manufacturing industry. Keeping the communication channels between the different departments of the organization is a great idea, especially when one team’s efforts impact the other team.

Vision

Having a vision is a vital leadership value for a leader. To reach a destination, you need to know where you are going and how to get there. A journey without a goal is just wandering, and a leader can’t afford to wander in this highly competitive environment. To be successful, it is crucial to explain to his team what success looks like for the organization, the team, and every individual that is part of the project. Describing the vision to everyone will give them an idea about what steps need to be taken to achieve that vision. A goal needs to be reasonable and well within reach, but something makes the team stretch a little while attaining it. A leader must set a goal after analyzing the relevant information and using strategic thinking skills. Before setting a goal, a leader should set standards on achieving a goal and measure its success and failure; otherwise, the vision will be flawed.

Drive Change

We have already explained how a leader should encourage collaboration among different organization departments to adopt advanced processes faster. A business and a leader need to drive change to keep up with the new technological trends and excel in the professional world.

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg is a famous name that adapted to the change and brought a new revolution in the business world.

A leader needs to take strategic risks and be ready when presented with a good idea or an opportunity. Change is necessary, and at some point, organizations and individuals should realize that they can’t continue doing things the same way. Eventually, for survival, a business needs to change, and it’s better to change sooner for the more significant benefit of the business.

Final words

It’s not that easy to become a leader, and implementing these principles certainly requires some hard work. If you are worried about how to develop leadership principles and values, to become a leader – work on these leadership values until the hard work pays off. Leaders become the trendsetter and steer their organizations through dangerous waters while going through changes and innovation. If this is what you aspire to become, it’s time to start implementing these leadership values and principles.

7 Ways in Which Digital Transformation Is Transforming the Businesses

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The digital world is changing very fast, and businesses worldwide adopt the digital business model to make use of the new technological advancements. Continuous innovation and development help a business remove incompetencies from its internal and external business processes to improve overall efficiencies and growth. Adding these new technological advancements to your business is no longer an option but a necessity. Even though digital transformation has numerous benefits, some businesses see it as a disruption, while they should be considering it as a golden opportunity to add value to the business. This blog will discuss the benefits of digital transformation and how digital transformation is reshaping the business. 

Streamline internal and external processes

The most significant impact of digitalization on business is that it has provided an opportunity to give a makeover to business processes. Both internal and external processes that are redundant, time-consuming, and outdated must be changed with time to improve overall business efficiency. These types of change in business processes can be made simple with digitalization – the new-age technology. Digitalization helps businesses streamline and simplify data storage, communication, and analytics and become more adaptable to new technological improvements. All these further technological improvements will result in maximizing the returns and making things swift. Digital transformation is helping businesses to move at a fast pace and allocating resources for improvement and advancement.

Paves the way for future developments

The digital business model creates a data-driven environment for management to make well-informed decisions and be aware of all possible improvement and growth opportunities. A robust digital workspace with a strong customer base and relations, swift flow of information, and automated workflows make it easier for an organization to grow and expand. For example, an organization with a strong website can improve the website’s logos, interface, adding new high-tech features, and only looking ahead to grow and expand the business. More organizations are joining the digital revolution to create more development opportunities for the business, workforce, and benefits for consumers; this trifecta as their main goal and achieving this means all-around success for the business.

Improves customer experience

Every business heart and soul are customers and are the main driving force behind any business change. This is the reason why customers are important for the success of a business. In this technologically advanced world, digital business provides a better customer experience than traditional business. With the collaboration of data, analytics, and communication, the flow of information is quick, which means faster improvements and appealing products. Business products such as a logo maker, a website builder, and other similar tools made their mark because they see the need and market for such products. With digital transformation, businesses can branch out and offer new features to their old and new customers, thus increasing sales and returns.

Provides more flexibility and efficiency

The digital transformation has made the inter-departmental flow of information and data quick. This helps businesses prevent the bottleneck of data, information and redundant tasks for increasing business efficiency. By eliminating repetitive and old processes, a business can reduce the operating costs associated with complex and time-consuming workflows. With streamlined processes, a business can adopt a flexible approach for changing the priorities and goals of a business. Automating these processes enables organizations to address customer’s needs efficiently and quickly. A strong digital workspace means future-ready business and exponential growth by using technological advancements of the industry.

Establish more reliable customer relations

Every business process is targeted to offer better products and services to the end consumer. The customer’s needs and expectations are heeded right from the beginning because the customer is the king. In the success of a business, the customer plays a central and vital role. That’s why the relationship between the business and the customer must be given due importance. The digitalization business model made the flow of information swifter than ever before. A business now can access the past buying history and other preferences of customers to serve them better and provide this valuable information to the customer relationship team for establishing a reliable customer relationship. With this reliable information, organizations can build and maintain lasting relationships with customers.

Adopting a quick marketing approach

The speedy flow of information within the organization resulted in organizations following a quick marketing approach and better serving their customers. Digitalization is allowing organizations to give quick responses to the feedback received from the customer. The automated processes ensure that the products’ improvements are made quickly to deliver the best to the end consumer. Digitalization is assisting organizations with improving their products and services and creating marketing channels to spread awareness about new products. 

Empowers the workforce

The main goal of adding innovative technology to a business is to make the flow of information easy and remove redundant processes with new ones to make day-to-day tasks easy for everyone. With the introduction of new techniques, an employee can get their daily done swiftly and efficiently, improving the organisation’s overall performance. Digitalization is vital for the organization in getting an edge over its competitors and being future-ready. Digitalization allows the workforce to learn new technologies and efficiently use AI-powered tools and get more tasks in less time and with higher accuracy. AI-powered tools enable employees to enhance their skills and instils them with confidence.

Final words

Digital is the new future for every business, and digital transformation, when done strategically, can improve the business performance and revenue in the long run. Automating business aspects such as marketing, operations, processes, and decision-making etc. makes them highly efficient and future-ready. Digital transformation is not that easy and comes with its own set of complications. An organization needs to plan and strategize, keeping the big goal in mind to make the transition and implementation process easy. Talk to your team, create a plan, distribute everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and take the first step to make your business digital starting today. 

Top 5 Benefits of Implementing Marketing Technology in Your Business Strategy

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Technology is moving faster than ever before and with this customer’s expectations are getting higher too. MarTech marketing technology is becoming key for organizations to meet and exceed customer expectations. MarTech helps organizations fill the digital gap created due to the rapid advancement in technology and evolving consumer behavior. The advancement in artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation helps marketers catch up with recent market trends and speed up the organization’s changes. This blog will discuss the top five benefits of implementing MarTech in your business strategy.

Data unlocking with analytics tools

In this fast-changing digital world, data is the key to sustainable growth for a business. With access to more data than ever before, marketers now can unlock data that most well-funded organizations just a few years ago. The data has now become the resource that needs analysis and refinement to deliver the best for a business. This is why the analytics industry is estimated to grow 10-15 % by 2022.

Analytics tools have now become necessary for companies to add in their marketing technology to utilize data fully. With this, an organization can increase the ROI and effectiveness of its marketing strategy. Due to this, companies are now bringing analytics into the center of the decision-making process to remove any bias and become data-driven to serve their customers better. Change in an organizational culture where data can be utilized to improve and optimize social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and email personalization.

Marketing automation for increasing efficiency

Brands need to maintain their strong presence in consumers’ minds to influence purchasing decisions. But due to so much noise in the digital world, maintaining a strong presence now becomes a challenging task for marketers.Automating the marketing efforts has become important for brands to scale up their efforts and engage consumers in this digital world. Move forward from one size fits all marketing policy to cut through the digital noise. Customers are moving away from products and ads that they don’t find interesting or improve their lives. Automating the market processes allows marketers to connect with consumers in a more personalized way that offers real value.

Marketing automation is improving the productivity of the business by 15-20 percent. Marketing automation is a critical component that helps in increasing and scaling the scope of campaigns. The number of people doesn’t limit a marketing campaign’s success as automation allows in increasing the digital world’s brand footprint and provides better ROI. automation is enabling the organization to sustain its relationship with the existing customers and attract new ones.

Increasing engagement with management tools

Social media has become a great medium for businesses to connect with customers and increase sales. Even after this huge popularity, some businesses are failing to make an impact on these digital platforms. With the right management tools, creating fresh content, responding to customer queries, and increasing brands looks like an easy and achievable task. Marketers need a MarTech stack to fill in the customer expectation gap; automate and optimize customer interactions with brands over social media platforms.

Social media management tools help in publishing and schedule posts when there is maximum engagement. Automatic reposting of high engagement content to increase reach and monitoring competitors to find the latest trends and topics to improve business marketing strategy. Social listening becomes an important tool for brands to understand and analyze what people are saying about their brand, products, and competitors. With these valuable and unbiased insights, businesses can improve their marketing and business strategies.

Improving customer experience

Marketers are expected to focus largely or entirely on customer experience with the brand in the next two years. Today’s consumers are more inclined to buy from brands that offer better engagement, relevance, and personalized solutions as per their needs. This seamless customer experience is hard for companies to achieve without a MarTech stack. Artificial intelligence helps organizations analyze and process vast customer data to give that personalized experience to their customers. In a survey, many marketing executives have shown concerns that their organization is not mature when it comes to providing a personalized touch to customers. This is a clear indication of organizations’ slow response and how critical marketing technology is to meet customer expectations. 

Without the MarTech stack, organizations will become an impossible task to track the buyer’s journey. Marketing technologies are empowering the organization to analyze the customer data and forge connections in real-time. A streamlined ecosystem ensures that every customer gets a seamless and personalized customer experience.

Improving ROI and productivity

Organizations are looking to streamline their processes and become more efficient in managing their digital assets with the help of digital asset management. Marketers are creating digital content like images, videos, audio, and other content to target every stage of the buyer’s journey. It is vital to create an easily accessible and organized digital library to track all these digital assets. The DAMs are helping marketers avoid duplication of the content and save valuable time while searching media assets. Digital asset management technology provides a way to give highly relevant content that gives the personalized experience consumer demand.

Experts believe that DAM software is estimated to 30-35 percent growth by 2024.

In addition to providing increased efficiency, this software enables organizations and marketers to track usage and digital assets’ ROI. These valuable insights are empowering CMOs to optimize their marketing strategy to get better ROI from further media creation. 

Final words

MarTech stack becomes essential for brands to achieve rapid progress in this digital consumer landscape. It has become an essential tool for the organization to get valuable insights from the data and to optimize for a better customer experience in real-time. AI and ML enable organizations to improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns and maintain that personalization touch that today’s customer demands. With that personalized touch, MarTech helps bring the brand closer to consumers, improve the ROI on marketing initiatives, drive more sales, and delight their customers.

How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Business Forever

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The world around us is changing very fast, industries are transforming, and small companies are slowly capturing the market with innovations. Robotics and artificial intelligence have faded the business’s word monopoly, and anyone with an innovative solution and right approach can establish their brand in the market.

Robotics and artificial intelligence

Importance of AI

Artificial intelligence is becoming more diverse as it provides businesses the ability to analyze the data, fraud detection, improving customer satisfaction, and building relationships. Companies are getting an edge over others and serving their customers even better than ever before. AI is providing solutions to complex human problems with the help of algorithms in a computer-friendly way.

Advanced ML and AI are now actively implementing businesses and industries as robots, self-driven cars, consumer electronics, and an application to improve business processes, products, and services. In the upcoming years, most business processes will be automated, and human efforts will be put into creative aspects of the business, such as brainstorming, innovating, and researching. AI-based apps allow business leaders to focus on business growth & save time by automating common business processes.

However, experts have made many AI predictions and how it is going to shape the business forever. Here are some of the business areas where AI has proved its worth and changed the way businesses used to operate.

Market & Customer Insights

Artificial intelligence is helping businesses to analyze market trends and customer insights. Data collected from system to web matrix and social media can be used in the predictive analysis to enhance customer satisfaction and build a better product. AI provides opportunities for start-ups to adopt different thought processes and search for innovative solutions for business growth. Businesses are optimizing marketing strategies, and AI helps them opt for effective marketing tools to target potential customers and eliminate unlikely customers. Social media has emerged as one of the greatest mediums for getting customer insights, and most businesses are using these platforms to connect with customers. Artificial intelligence effectively understands social media trends, and data mining allows AI to analyze different types of social media traffic. This will enable businesses to adapt to the changing market scenario and continually improve business performance.

Virtual Assistance

Virtual assistants and AI chatbots are becoming important tools for businesses to connect with customers and provide 24/7 chat support and customer service. Many companies have already added these to their website, and others plan to use artificial intelligence for virtual assistance. Many businesses are still skeptical about the idea of the customer speaking with the machine, but still, there is a potential for machine-driven aid with human-driven customer service. E-commerce industries are using AI chatbots to answer simple questions, while human-driven customer support can solve complex service issues. Chatbots and virtual assistance provide 24/7 interaction with potential buyers that is not that easy & effective to achieve with human-driven customer support. There is no doubt that next decade virtual assistants and AI chatbots will become an integral part of customer service. More companies are going to focus on improving and enhancing customer service.

Efficient sales process

AI has changed the old sales technique and moved businesses from cold calling and long emails to customers. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, print media, and TV commercials are becoming effective tools to connect with new and old customers. Artificial intelligence helps businesses adopt an innovative and effective sales approach to connect with the right customer on the right platform. AI helps sales teams know their customers better and offer tailored offers to convert a potential lead into sales. E-commerce platforms are using AI for conducting online surveys, asking questions to understand customer’s preferences. This enables these platforms to show products that are the best fit for a customer, increasing the chance of a conversion. AI has transformed and made the sales process efficient where customers are offered tailored solutions. Better conversion rates and getting customer insights are some of the major benefits of AI that help improve sales and serve them better.

Data Unlocking

Earlier businesses are generating relatively less data, which is easy to store databases in a structured way and also analyze it. Having fewer data to explore makes it easier for business leaders to give valuable insights from the collected data for business. But now, the entire business scenario has changed. With so much data from different resources, it isn’t easy to understand and categorize whole data in a structured way. Most of the business data from the digital platforms are unstructured that makes it hard to analyze. In the upcoming years, a business challenge is to effectively analyze this unstructured data and use it to take their business to the next level. 

AI helps organizations in data unlocking and provides businesses with opportunities to offer well-structured data and analyze it efficiently. Businesses are improving their sales and customer satisfaction by identifying customer personalities with the help of AI. 

Process Automation

Businesses have realized the potential of automation and, in the last few decades, automate their processes. Automation tools are helping businesses to innovate and develop solutions to make the processes automated. Automation tools were introduced in the home appliances and later paved their way in the industry as industrial robots. Now, in industries, humans and robots are working alongside to deliver the best results. Most industrial leaders have predicted this rise of AI will create a new era of automation. Even small algorithms are playing a major role in industries like retail, hospitality, and e-commerce industries. Automating the processes allows industries to do a task efficiently and work 24 hours without a break.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence in robotics has allowed big and small businesses to innovate and implement new methods to improve and meet their desired goals. Even new start-ups are actively using AI to get an edge over established businesses and setting them up as brands in the market. From self-driven cars to robots used in manufacturing processes to deliver better efficiencies compared to humans, there is no denying that AI has slowly become an essential part of our lives.