After many years working in marketing and customer experience, I´ve always believed that the best way to support a sustainable business growth is to develop and implement the right customer experience. For many years, many different companies and industries have been trying to design the perfect customer experience and organizations jumped into the race of accumulating historical customer data. The problem many companies faced is that most of the time no one knew exactly what to do with that data.

I´ve had this conversation many times: if you can´t measure something, it means it doesn´t exist, at least in the business world, when you talk about your customer journey and customer experience. Throughout my career, I´ve designed many processes and journeys, but always focusing on what we can or could measure and what we would like to measure in the near future. On more than few occasions, data has shown that many of these believed “facts” about customers behaviour were completely wrong.

The main objective we all pursuit is to use all this information to help support and accelerate growth. We all try to deliver the best customer experience by personalizing our messages, touch points and any other interactions we may have with our customers. But this is easier said than done.

Personalizing the end-to-end customer experience is not easy task. It requires all channels to work together and exchange information. But one of the biggest problems is that most companies still focus on the product, and not customer focus, so they ended up working in silos without the right tools to experiment and learn from experience. In addition, decisions are often made not based on available data, but on preconceived ideas and beliefs about customer behaviour that come from the past. Think about how many times you have gone through the exercise of create different “user-personas” to define or analyse your customer journey and experience.

Here´s how artificial intelligence (AI) can help organizations improve their customer experience and customer journeys. AI could offer a competitive advantage based on improved ability to capture data, analyse and personalize customer experience. Incorporating AI into future websites could offer automatic personalization of the content and experience offered to customers. Some websites have already been using bots to response and support their web visitors on the website, so they can lead them to the right and most relevant content on the web. But AI can also learn from the user behaviour in order to improve website navigation and content.

Typically, a digital team can run a few A/B test a day, or even a week. They need to launch the test, get the results and analyse the data before deciding what changes should be made. Using AI this A/B test can increase to thousands a day, allowing organization to personalize each customer touch point and increase your DTC revenue.

Of course, in order to achieve this level of personalisation, you first need to build a 360-degree view of the customer and define as many ways as possible to capture data to keep that knowledge of your customer up to date. To start, you have to ask yourself: what data am I able to capture? Are we able to measure our different customer experiences? Is our customer experience seamless across all channels? What are our goals when we talk about improving customer experience? What kind of marketing automatization do we have in place that can help to get/update customer data? Once you have answered all this questions, you can start thinking about how to build an intelligent experience engine, using AI, to improve the personalization of your customer experience.

Once you have answered all this questions, you can start thinking about how to build an intelligent experience engine, using AI, to improve the personalization of your customer experience.

Recommended lectures: if you liked this post, I recommend you to read the Harvard article «Customer Experience in the Age of AI«