Why AI will humanize the Internet in the new era of Consumer Experience

Most businesses are adopting AI to enhance customer experience. The idea behind using AI is to make customer experience more personalised, relevant and engaging. AI is available 24/7, is efficient, and cost effective. The data collected from customer interactions leads to meaningful insights, which help humanize the internet and consumer experiences in several ways such as:

 

1. Unifying the data collected: A customers data is collected from multiple touch-points such as customer interactions, website visits, social media, etc. AI along with a customer data platform can analyse data nd present insights that can be missed by humans especially when referring to just one source of data. AI helps businesses create unified customer profiles that can be referred to while targeting each customer not just for marketing but healthcare and education. Therefore, customising every experience the customer might have.

 

2. Combating loneliness: In the digital age we are all connected via various touch points on social media. However excessive connectedness has also lead to extreme loneliness as well. AI can act as a great companion since it already has vast amount of data on a customer. AI companions can bridge the gap between people looking for companionship in the digital. These a designed to engage in human like banter, and real time conversations. However, one must also know that these AI companions mimic human emotions but don’t actually have them. These could also lead to a false sense of how a partner should be, potentially causing difficulties when interacting with real humans.

 

3. Sentiment analysis: AI continuously learns from all customer reviews, interactions, social media to build extremely rich and holistic profiles of each customer – their personality, sentiment towards the brand, behavior patterns, propensity to purchase, etc. AI based customer analysis helps businesses understand what they feel about their customers. AI can flag frustrated customers and suggest methods for resolving their issues. AI can also suggest methods for maintaining happy customers and try upselling or recommending similar products/services.

 

4. AI based content creation/marketing campaigns: AI is the future of marketing. AI automates repetitive tasks to personalise content and provides real-time predictive insights to frontline employees on the best way to engage each customer in that moment based on their profile and context. Many large companies have utilised AI in mass marketing, for example is the famous ‘Billion films for a billion fans’ ad by Seagram’s Royal Stag. The brand utilised deepfake technology to swap their fans face and voice with that of the model and feature in an ad with their favourite cricketers. The fans received these personalised videos via whatsapp.

 

5. AI based recommendation systems: These systems recommend content based on a user’s past experience, search history, browsing history, behavioural data etc. Making the customer feel that their preferences matter and the platform thinks about them. Platforms such as netflix, google news, amazon, spotify and youtube all utilise these systems to build a great user experience. This system is the backbone of the business that makes using these apps so addictive. These systems rely on implicit data i.e browsing history and past purchases along with explicit data i.e. user ratings to not just hook the customers to the app but also increase sales.

 In essence, by infusing customer experience with conversational AI, brands can interact with customers in highly naturalized, personalized and “humanized” ways at scale across all digital touchpoints. AI’s ability to truly understand humans even if it is as data, it re-humanizes digital interactions to build deeper loyalty and engagement. As a result, it places a greater burden on marketers to utilise AI and create interactions that feel genuinely human.