Bringing AI to Retail Communications Is Critical This Year
How Can AI Improve Retail communication? Read on to find out.
The recent disappointing holiday shopping season has added to retailers’ woes, along with rising prices for materials and shipping, and many consumers are cutting back on spending as they fear a recession coming soon. Eli Israelov, co-founder and CEO, CommBox, takes a closer look at customer behavior and how AI could help retail brands connect with their customers better.
Now, many brands are looking to cut costs and find their way back to a path of growth. One key way to accomplish this is by improving customer communications and service, a pain point for many brands, which are short on both retail, customer service and call center staff.
We must remember that customer service isn’t just about responding to customers, or helping them out in stores. It is also about allowing them to carry out routine tasks, like making returns, smoothly and efficiently, online and offline; and about reaching them with the most relevant information when it comes to sales and recommended products.
Critical to improving customer service is embracing AI and automation, especially when it comes to communication. This not only saves costs and relieves overworked humans. But it also results in better service, and, ultimately, increases business. When automation and AI are used well, customer service can become a growth driver rather than a cost center.
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Being Available Across Platforms – Including SMS
Although it is not the only part of customer service, responding to customer questions and feedback does play an important role. Poor communication experiences can indeed turn consumers away, and this is something that brands really cannot risk now amid a slowing economy.
An effective way to improve customer communication is to be available in the most obvious and natural ways that people want to communicate; today that means being available via SMS texting, social media platforms and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. When customers have a question, they do not want to download a brand’s dedicated app or deal with long phone wait times. They want to quickly send a message, the same way they would to a friend or family member.
By being available on all platforms, brands are no longer reliant on consumers to download an app or pick up the phone; they are meeting them in the places where they already are, like: SMS and Facebook Messenger. Brands can do this best by using a centralized customer communication platform that integrates all of these communication channels into one dashboard; this way agents can deal with all the different channels in one place.
Deploying AI to Help Both Customers and Employees
Consumers also want answers and information quickly through the communication channels of their choice. Brands can meet this need by using smart AI-powered bots that are properly trained and always supervised by humans. These bots can be deployed across existing communication platforms, including SMS, to respond to customers wherever they are. They should not be limited to a brand’s website or app–although they should be in those places, too.
By using unlayered neural network training models that are constantly learning and updating on the job-–much like the human brain – AI will work effectively. In addition, having a human in the loop will ensure the bots are working effectively, and will allow humans to step in seamlessly and take over tasks if needed. Well-built bots can also do more than chat. Increasingly, they can perform tasks for customers, like canceling an order or changing the address on a delivery. Enabling bots to do tasks is a very powerful efficiency tool, and one that will become increasingly important.
Another benefit of adding AI to the customer service team is that it allows often overworked human customer service agents to outsource routine tasks to bots and virtual assistants. For example, a human agent having a conversation with a customer can task a bot with sending that customer the documents they need to sign. In this way, customer service agents become more like managers, overseeing automated processes and with the help of AI-powered virtual assistants. This will increase job satisfaction and retention, a growing challenge for call and customer service centers.
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Perfecting Marketing to Be Both Automated and Personalized
Effectively delivering the right information at the right time to customers is more important than ever as consumers are on tighter budgets due to inflation, and are increasingly comparing prices and offers. AI can help brands reach customers with the most appropriate and appealing promotional offers, allowing them to capture more business in a competitive market.
Like customer enquiries and tasks, marketing messages should also arrive to consumers on whatever communication channel they are using. Consumers should not have to visit a brand’s app or website to know that a specific product they are interested in is currently on sale. That information should arrive via SMS or the messaging platform of their choice, which they are already constantly using to keep in touch with family and friends.
It is clear that in today’s world, where people expect tasks to be easy and instant and information to be at the ready, good customer service is a key way to rise above the competition and drive growth. Brands will increasingly rely on AI to meet this challenge. But those that do it best will be those that take a holistic approach, creating a team of people and AI tools that work together via a centralized platform that allows them to implement automated communication across any and all channels, from SMS to social media. This will ensure that brands can quickly and effectively communicate naturally and efficiently with customers.
Are you using AI offering to improve how you communicate with your customers? Tell us all about it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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