Against the backdrop of rising expectations by both brands and consumers, the customer service landscape is being reshaped by new technologies, platforms, channels, and customer preferences. It is no longer enough to provide personalization based on internally available data.

Microsoft has reported that by 2025, as many as 95 percent of all customer interactions will take place through channels supported by AI technology. Analytical models are needed for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive and predict context and provide the individualized communication that will drive engagement and attribute conversion to marketing communication.

Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world. However, many companies still take their evolved, digitally-enabled customers down engagement paths fraught with legacy, inadequate systems that deliver outdated, unproductive journeys.

This is where AI can be successfully employed to provide an effective, convenient, and relevant customer experience at any point along the customer journey. The result: re-imagined customer experiences and end-to-end journeys that are integrated, more personal, and more natural for customers.

Here are some key ideas for delivering delightful customer experiences with intelligent AI.

Understand personas, propensities, and contexts

AI makes it possible to compare each individual customer against existing internal data to ensure they are classified with look-alike personas, which paves the way for more targeted marketing communications.

It also enables brands to harness audience propensities in terms of time, channel, content, and more so they can answer crucial questions around the when, where, and how of customer engagement. Moreover, with AI-enabled tools, brands are able to detect, analyze, and analyze individual customer contexts in real time to ensure the relevance of every communication and facilitate desired outcomes.

Personalize experiences deeply

AI/ML models can use the derived context to deliver the appropriate content and offers tailored to the individual. This empowers marketing to move away from cookie-cutter approaches, base decisions on the model outcomes, and constantly tweak their efforts based on the continuous feedback.

“Data, properly harnessed and totally unleashed by AI, will define the future of digital marketing. As visionaries and innovators across the world continue our collective efforts in elevating AI-enabled engagement, organizations can expect to accelerate their growth with customer experiences that are truly personal, continuous, and measurable,” Redickaa Subrammanian, CEO and Co-founder, Resulticks

AI-based automated nurture campaigns

AI can help nurture engagement by defining customer journeys according to each person’s interests. This also empowers brands to manage a customer journey through automated paths that evolve with the individuals rather than relying solely on rule-based, one-size-fits-all approaches.

Trigger-based communication

Brands simply cannot rely on manual processes to respond properly to the scale and complexity of digital customer activities today. An AI engine can detect patterns of customer behavior and create triggers that enable automatic, personalized communication. Without AI, marketers would have to use less-refined, more error-prone manually created lists.

“Data-centric marketers and digital practitioners are increasingly coming to appreciate the value of AI. We have been fortunate to interact with and work with  future-forward organizations across the globe. We have noticed their unanimous interest in the multi-faceted, exceptional potentials of AI-powered marketing,” Dinesh Menon, Global CMO, Resulticks

AI-enabled self-service

With AI-driven notifications delivered in context and at the right time, brands can take their customers on seamless journeys and nudge them towards desired actions, with minimal manual intervention. Done successfully, this could be a good differentiator as more and more consumers are expecting to navigate brand experiences on their own terms without unnecessary impediments.

AI-enabled targeting

Thanks to AI, brands can do much more than refine their audience segments with a rich array of attributes, filters, and more. They are now able to optimize targeting thanks to AI’s ability to derive deeper insights based on customer interaction at distinct touchpoints on their journey.

“There is no getting away from the deepening links between data, AI, and the new generation of enterprise solutions. While some may continue to opt for cheaper, modular tools, more will come to see the value that AI-based solutions can bring to their growth goals,” Dakshen Ram, Co-founder & Chief Innovation and Product Officer

As AI becomes increasingly woven into the fabric of customer experiences, its strategic adoption by future-forward companies will be inevitable. This will not just be a tactical adjustment. Instead, with AI-powered tools and approaches, marketers and their companies stand to transform customer engagement to be truly individualized, measurable, and contextualized in real time—the key to continuous growth.