4 min read
So how do you predict and re-engage customers who are about to leave?
This is where you can take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) for customer insights. AI can not only identify which customers are inactive and predict which are most likely to take their business elsewhere (known as the ‘churn rate’), it can also provide insight on their interests that will help you personalize your messaging and content to re-engage them. Here is how.
Churning Through Data: Meeting the Challenge of Customer Retention
Customer retention is a key profit driver across all industries. The traditional approach provides marketers with plenty of data, but the challenge is interpreting that data and translating it into actionable insights. This needs to be done quickly, too – when it comes to customers who are considering leaving, time is of the essence.
An AI system is much more efficient than manual data gathering, as it is automated to your exact requirements. Once you have a goal, you can calibrate the system accordingly, and it will perform quickly and accurately, with much less risks of human error. If you find the data irrelevant, or not specific enough, you can refine your parameters and the system will recalibrate itself accordingly.
Take a look at how AI can help with customer retention.
Unifying Internal and External Data to Create a Holistic Customer View
AI platforms such as Appier’s AIXON can not only consolidate your internal data from all kinds of sources under one roof, they can also merge your internal and external data to provide a holistic view of your customers, creating a more accurate path of their past behaviors, and – crucially – it is able to predict their future behaviors with a greater degree of certainty.
Internal data is information gathered from a brand’s own channels, such as the brand website, app, content management system and offline sales data, etc.. External data is everything else: third-party databases and customer behavior elsewhere on the internet. An AI system can bring all this data together, consolidating it into one invaluable resource, and building up a complete picture of how your customers interact, both with your brand and others as well. AI can then use this to identify which customers are most at risk of leaving your company.
Keeping Your Customers by Appealing to Their Interests
What if you had a window into how your customers behave, not only when on your company’s website, but also when on the larger internet as well? AI tools provide just that – by analyzing the keywords they enter on both your site and others, you can see what your customers are interested in, whether it be fitness, travel, fashion or movies.
These interests can be incredibly specific – kettlebell training rather than just fitness, for example, or romantic comedies with a strong female lead, rather than just movies.
AI systems can parse all this information in the blink of an eye, while it would take many man hours to achieve the same insights manually.
By coupling these insights with the holistic view of the customer you have already built based on their online behavior, you can surface the right content at the right time in order to re-engage them before they decide to leave.
For example, users who do not open your marketing email for more than a month are likely to take their money somewhere else, and so you can incentivize them to stay by offering them a voucher. And by customizing this voucher to appeal to their interests, you increase the likelihood of keeping them as customers and decreasing your churn rate.
An AI-centered approach to customer retention makes for a more personal customer experience, making them feel more engaged with your brand throughout the whole customer journey, and hence less likely to leave. By defining the correct target audiences and appealing to their specific interests, you will be able to take a proactive approach to customer retention, and engage them before they even know they are thinking about leaving.
