3 Ways Brands Need to Use AI to Deepen Customer Relationships

min read
3 Ways Brands Need to Use AI to Deepen Customer Relationships

In today’s business landscape, it’s more important than ever to forge deep and meaningful customer relationships. If you don’t, buyers will seek out your competitors, who are only a call or click away. In fact, 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience. 

Is the spark missing from your customer relationships? Have you been struggling to reignite it? The answer isn’t flowers, a trip to Cancun, or weekly counseling sessions. You need a grand gesture that will truly knock their socks off — that’s right, I’m talking about artificial intelligence. 

With AI, you can create highly personalized experiences that make customers feel valued and known. You can guide them through the buying journey seamlessly, minimizing headaches and customer service issues. Quite simply, using AI is the best way to show customers that you care.

If you don’t use AI to improve experiences, you’ll fall behind your competition. In a recent study, 86% of CEOs said AI is mainstream technology in their office in 2021. Did I create enough FOMO for you yet? Read on to learn some of the best ways you can use AI to deepen your customer relationships. 

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a machine’s ability to mimic human intelligence to perform tasks. AI can iterate to improve its performance based on the information it collects. Many top SaaS (software as a service) solutions use AI to increase productivity and scalability. 

1. Use Conversation Intelligence to Create Seamless Conversion Paths 

To earn brand loyalty, you need to create seamless conversion paths for your customers. This will allow them to quickly find what they need and make purchases without headaches. Though many brands are tracking online conversion paths, they’re not attributing conversions from one of the most critical channels — inbound phone calls. According to a recent study, 62% of marketers fail to attribute revenue to inbound calls.

Conversation intelligence tools give you visibility into the role phone calls play in the conversion path. Solutions like Invoca allow you to understand which of your marketing channels, campaigns, and webpages are driving phone calls. But conversation intelligence goes beyond just telling you that phone calls happened — it uses AI to understand the intent of each call and surface actionable insights from the conversations at scale. 

With your conversation intelligence solution, you can identify your “problem” webpages — the ones that are driving customer experience issues and abandonment. A pattern may have already jumped out at you, but to make sure you’re correctly diagnosing issues, you should dive into the call recordings and transcriptions. 

With call recordings and transcriptions, you can see exactly what your customers are saying when they call you. You can sift through your transcriptions manually, or you can set up AI signals to automatically detect certain words or phrases. For example, you could set up a signal that identifies when customers ask questions about pricing or when they mention an issue with your website. This will allow you to scale your process and identify patterns more quickly. 

Sample Invoca call transcription. Request your demo to see more.

By digging into your recordings and transcriptions, you can identify the inefficiencies in your conversion paths that are frustrating customers. You may find that a certain product page doesn’t offer enough specifics for customers to make a purchasing decision, you may learn that your checkout process is long and overly complicated, or you may discover that your online shopping cart is stalling out from a server or backend issue.

To more precisely spot frustrating online experiences that are driving low-value phone calls, you can also integrate Invoca call data with website experience analytics platforms like Decibel and Fullstory. By combining web experience analytics with conversation data, you can fix breaks in the online conversion funnel and also optimize for certain purchases where driving a phone call presents significant revenue opportunities. The result is that every customer gets the seamless experience they deserve and you drive more revenue and higher conversion rates. Learn more about how Invoca works with website experience analytics here

These issues can cause significant abandonment and churn if you leave them unchecked. With AI-powered conversation intelligence, you can quickly identify these problems and make data-driven improvements to create seamless experiences that build customer loyalty.

2. Capture First-Party Data from Phone Conversations to Personalize Customer Interactions 

Today’s consumer expects personalization in nearly every buying experience. In fact, 72% of shoppers act on marketing messages only when they are customized to their interests.

To deliver meaningful personalization, you need to collect rich data from your audience so you can learn who they are and what they need. But restrictions around third-party cookies have made capturing customer data more difficult. To solve this challenge, marketers are tapping into more of their first-party data and using these rich insights to inform personalization. First-party data sources include data from CRMs, website visitors, social media followers, email subscribers, and transaction records.

But marketers shouldn’t overlook one of the richest sources of first-party data available — insights from inbound phone conversations. In these conversations, consumers are literally telling you their intent, product and service interests, sentiments about your brand, and more. 

AI-powered conversation intelligence solutions like Invoca capture these insights at scale. With Invoca you can integrate these conversation insights with your customer profiles in tools like Salesforce, Adobe Audience Manager, Google Marketing Platform, and more. Once you’ve enriched your consumer profiles with conversation intelligence data, you can start to deliver deeper levels of personalization. 

AutoNation, America’s largest auto retailer, uses Invoca to personalize customer interactions. AutoNation sends buyers customized marketing campaigns touting the type of features they mentioned over the phone. For example, if the customer expressed interest in safety features, AutoNation’s can retarget them with ads and landing pages showcasing this value proposition. AutoNation also gives its sales agents access to those insights, so they can tailor the conversation to win the sale. This creates a seamless omnichannel experience that makes every customer feel acknowledged and valued as they move from online interactions to phone conversations and back again.

3. Automatically QA All Sales Calls to Ensure a Consistent Brand Experience

Customer experience expectations are at an all-time high — 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone. To earn brand loyalty, you need to ensure every customer interaction is on point. But consistently delivering high-quality brand experiences can be a challenge — especially for franchises and multi-location businesses. 

Phone calls are a critical piece of the brand experience in many industries. In our recent study, 68% of people said phone calls were their preferred way to communicate with businesses. To forge deep relationships with your customers, you need to ensure every phone conversation lives up to your brand’s standards. 

If you’re like most sales teams, you’re listening to calls and applying a manual QA process to ensure your agents are meeting your brand experience standards. But there are many flaws to this approach — manually QAing calls is expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with human error. In addition, your QA team is only able to listen to a small sample size of your agents’ calls, which may not be a reliable indicator of total performance. They may have caught some of your best agents on their worst days or vice versa. 

What’s the solution to this challenge? Take a wild guess. That’s right, artificial intelligence. With tools like Invoca for Sales, sales teams can use AI to automatically and objectively score agent performance on every call. No two sales organizations are the same — that’s why Invoca for Sales allows you to set your own unique criteria to score sales agent success. For example, you may want your sales agents to start with a greeting script, mention an upcoming promotion, and then ask the caller to schedule an appointment. The call scorecard uses AI to automatically detect which of these criteria are met on each call and assign a corresponding score.

Sample Invoca sales agent scorecard. Request a personal walkthrough to see more.

With automated QA, you can ensure that every phone conversation at every location lives up to your brand’s standards. Your agents will also receive instant and objective feedback about how well they’re performing. This will allow them to quickly make pivots to better serve and delight your consumers. As a result, you’ll build brand loyalty and keep customers coming back time and time again.

To learn more about Invoca’s AI-powered conversation intelligence solution, check out our Ultimate Guide to Conversation Intelligence or request your personalized demo.


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