AI is having its breakthrough moment. Your brand (hopefully), your B2B competitors (almost certainly) and your customers (likely unknowingly) are all learning how AI can boost the consumer experience.
The next step will go beyond the public’s current fascination with large language models, as brands rush to take their consumer experience (CX) to new levels. By incorporating machine learning and generative AI, B2B marketers may be able to gain a better understanding of their audience and develop paths to faster, deeper engagement along their buyer journeys.
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But what do those executions look like? This article explores the ways marketers across industries are already using AI-powered tools to boost the CX of their B2B audiences, and how you can get started.
AI personalization: Turning data into better recommendations
AI tools like supercharged CRMs are opening up new ways to engage your customers and provide a more rewarding buyer journey.
Savvy consumers understand they’re sharing their data with brands they trust in return for more personalized service, and they often reward businesses who execute those personalizations well. Twilio Segment’s State of Personalization Report 2023 found 56% of consumers said they’d become repeat buyers after a personalized experience, up 7% from the previous year. That was echoed by 62% of business leaders in the same survey, who said they saw increased retention as a benefit of their personalization pushes.
Here are three examples of how marketers use AI to instantly analyze data and return personalized recommendations, all of which help improve the consumer experience.
- Salesforce’s Einstein collects and analyzes information throughout the customer journey, proactively providing sales and marketing teams with previously hidden insights to inform better choices, automate tasks and prioritize leads. This frees those professionals up to spend more time growing customer relationships.
- American Express uses machine learning and AI to both speed credit approvals for small businesses and enhance fraud detection.
- Cisco uses AI and machine learning to analyze customer data and provide personalized recommendations regarding its network products and services, leading to an overall better CX.
Chatbots are your stealth self-service marketing solution
Chatbots – many of which are now powered by generative AI in the form of large language models – are becoming marketing teams’ unsung heroes.
They still fill the traditional role of answering customer queries, while also adding a new depth and sophistication to instantly change customer journeys based on nuanced user questions. With nearly all B2B consumers now preferring to self-serve at the start of the buyer journey, chatbots can provide B2B marketers a way to make a good first impression before the lead gets passed to sales for a first official contact.
While the largest retailers have led the way on chatbots, Wal-Mart’s overview of its automation efforts especially stand out. The retailer started working on the consumer experience with AI early. It not only uses AI-powered chatbots and natural language processing (NLP) to help online customers place voice orders and text-to-shop, but it has also used AI-powered chatbots to negotiate contracts with its smaller suppliers.
These developments are exciting, but also require perspective: marketers shouldn’t expect chatbots or other AI executions to replace their holistic demand generation or brand-building strategies.
“Customers’ trust in an organization’s products and services is built upon human values, loyalty, empathy and sincerity,” said Cyril Baffour, senior product designer focusing on user experience at Informa Tech. “If marketing channels become totally dependent on AI interactions, the ‘accepted’ absence of these human traits by the customer may lead to a blanket rejection of any form of engagement.”
Optimizing with AI: Where should marketers start?
Marketers aren’t CIOs, nor does anyone expect them to be. Instead, their role in AI implementation should be identifying what tasks need to be automated and why, and then launching their buyer journey – in concert with IT – to find the most viable solutions.
The good news is large businesses are already seeing return on AI investments. Omdia’s “AI ROI: 2023” report found more than half of the 368 enterprise-level businesses surveyed were already achieving a positive return on their investment from their AI deployments.
Informa Tech’s Baffour suggests marketers take these three steps when starting their AI journey:
- Perform discovery and due diligence on what type of AI solutions you believe you need, why you need them and when you should integrate them.
- Explore customer expectations around AI generative content in your market. Are you going to be the leader of the pack, or do you need to move now to keep up?
- Establish rules for intellectual property at every step from concept through any outputs your generative AI will create.
“A standout opportunity for utilizing AI technologies is the ability to automatically iterate customer experiences,” Baffour said. “If sufficient guardrails are in place to protect brand integrity, AI can enable brands to closer follow the needs of their customers.”
Informa Tech delivers high-performing digital marketing services across the customer journey. Learn how we can help you build your brand, earn trust, and drive demand.
