Customer engagement in the 21st century is rapidly evolving, and A.I. is greasing the wheels of change more than anything else.
What Is Customer Engagement?
When we say “customer engagement”, we are not simply referring to getting your business’ name in front of a customer.
Engagement is inclusive of much more than the initial engagement of the customers’ attention through a video, blog, or other piece of marketing content.
Going beyond this, you engage your customers through efforts specifically designed to forge a deeper connection than the presenter-spectator relationship that usually defines customers encountering visual or written marketing content.
Customer Engagement Is Becoming More Involved
The remarkable thing about modern life for a business owner is that there are more ways to reach your customers nowadays than any time previously in history.
This is both exciting and daunting. Exciting because there is plenty of opportunity to reach potential leads.
It’s daunting because you now need to maintain multiple lines of communication between you and your customer base. It would almost be enough to make you wish we could all go back to the good old days of just paying an exorbitant sum to buy a TV or radio ad, then hope the gods of the free market bless you with leads.
We say “almost be enough”, because the reality is that the potential for making more money than in the “good old days” is too high to pass up taking advantage of newfangled customer engagement methods.
There Are Many Ways to Engage Customers
Examples would include posting on social media platforms, creating a website so that you are more than just a physical store, posting blogs, creating a Google My Business Page, and more.
Oh, and that’s just what you ought to be doing online. Let’s not discount the usual radio and TV ads, if you care to spend any money there in this increasingly streaming-happy age.
The Importance of Online Marketing for Engaging Customers
If you are doing just the traditional routes instead of online marketing, let us try to change your mind (and life).
Online marketing is where engaging customers can best be nurtured.
Artificial Intelligence Is Improving Customer Engagement
When it comes to your own online efforts, artificial intelligence can play many roles in ensuring that customers connect with your company.
Below, we will go into a couple of ways in which A.I. can help foster these connections.
1. Chatbots for Your Website
Getting a visitor to your business’ site involved in a conversation about what they are looking for can be a major step toward sales conversions and customer retention.
Here is how it works: You implement a conversational computing platform, or a “chatbot”, on your website.
This chatbot can competently hold automated and unsupervised conversations with your customer base.
Whether it is helping customers find a certain product or resolve a problem, there is quite a bit that a chatbot can do.
Think of chatbots as 24/7 customer service representatives that work continuously, without sleeping, getting tired, taking breaks, and managing multiple conversations simultaneously.
Nevertheless, remember that you will still need human customer service representatives who can address any questions that a chatbot might not handle effectively, like handling product returns or addressing significant complaints.
Another draw for chatbots is that they can be trained on your specific business’ data, so that it will be specially equipped to answer questions specific to your business.
2. Personalized Recommendation Algorithms
This is a familiar technology that has recently been seeing major strides toward a significant upgrade.
You probably have experience with recommendation algorithms just as a consumer. Whether it is YouTube videos or items on Amazon, you doubtless have seen similar videos/items pop up in the “recommended for you” bar.
3. Content Generation
Let’s take a look at social media, which is one of the best avenues for creating engagement.
Even if you are a business owner who does not even know how to log into LinkedIn, you should have an interest in leveraging social media to your business’ advantage.
One of the ways that you can stay on top of the social media marketing game, which involves consistent posting, is to use content-generating A.I. platforms.
Just one example is HeyOrca’s caption-generating platform.
HeyOrca, for the uninitiated, is a social media scheduling platform that allows you to pre-make social media posts that are then posted on a schedule.
The caption-creator is an example of generative A.I., which creates things such as text.
In HeyOrca, you can automatically generate a caption based on what you give the chatbot, which can include metrics like what tone to go for.
This way, you can quickly get drafts of social media content to work from, saving you time so that you can produce more content for your efforts.
GO AI Articles
Guardian Owl Digital is dedicated to helping businesses everywhere learn about and implement A.I.
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