The customer success/account management industry is constantly evolving, but one main thing that has not changed is the need for personalized recommendations for clients. While traditional approaches like surveys and customer data can give your clients general information about their accounts, these methods do not provide any value beyond basic statistics or averages. With an augmented intelligence framework (AIF), you can give each client a personalized set of recommendations based on their unique needs and goals within your product or service.
Essential Aspects of Augmented Intelligence?
Augmented Intelligence can be described as a system that allows you to create a personal-assistant-like experience for your customers. It consists of three main aspects:
1. Proactive Identification: the capability to identify new opportunities and alert users of them in real-time
2. Consistent Engagement: the capability to nudge users towards engaging with platforms or products based on their interests or behaviors
3. Optimizing Operations: the ability to predict what users want or need and get it for them before they even ask
What is an Augmented Intelligence Framework?
The Augmented Intelligence(AI) Framework is a framework that helps you identify and understand what is essential to your customers. You can use it for customer success, account management, and sales. The framework maps out the most key factors influencing your customer’s decision-making process and provides personalized insights into their needs, expectations, and preferences.
The framework consists of three main stages:
The first stage of the AI framework is to collect Data
To begin, you need to collect data. This is the first step in the Augmented Intelligence Framework, which is important! The best way to do this is by using a dedicated tool, such as our AI solution, Rethink.
By collecting data from a variety of sources (such as email conversations, website interactions, and surveys), you can easily organize it all into one place so that your teams can access information whenever they need it – without having to manually search through multiple spreadsheets or file folders each time they want something from their accounts.
The next thing we recommend doing is making sure that all this information is collected in a structured format – i.e., tagged with metadata about what type of customer behavior was observed (e.g., “High churn risk” or “Increase potential revenue”) and how much value each piece of data has for account managers (i.e., how many customers responded positively after receiving this message). This will help ensure everyone sees what is needed instead of having too much content at them all at once—and avoid drowning out any exciting details because there are too many other things around them!
The next step of the framework is to have AI tools transform the data into actionable insights. For example, you may want your team to use AI tools to communicate and share insights with your clients. This can help them consume personalized recommendations more efficiently.
In this stage, you will use an AI-powered recommendation engine that provides personalized content recommendations based on metadata fields or user preferences like their favorite products or brands.
The third step in the framework is a tool to help your team communicate and share insights with clients. It should be easy for clients to use but also have features that will facilitate communication between them and their account managers (as well as between the account manager and other teams within the company).
You want your customers to feel comfortable using this tool so they can easily send you feedback, ask questions, or make requests. The tool should also make it easy for your team to access customer data, share insights across departments, and even talk directly with customers through chatbot technology.
The final step of the framework is to find a way for your clients to be able to consume those personalized recommendations
The decisive step of the framework is to find a way for your clients to be able to consume those personalized recommendations. This is where you need to think about making it easy for your customers to use and implement your suggestions. The best way to do this is with an intuitive user interface that makes sense for the client, such as a dashboard or report, where they can see what has been recommended and what steps they should take next. If there are recommendations specific to their account (e.g., “You should add X new product”), it would also be helpful if they had access directly from their account page, so they do not have to search around in different places.
Examples of Augmented Intelligence Framework in Customer Management
Regarding customer management, augmented Intelligence can help you understand your customers’ needs, predict their behavior and preferences, and even automate tasks that humans usually handle.
Augmented Intelligence is changing the way we interact with brands. From understanding customer needs to predicting and preventing churn, AI can help brands create personalized experiences for their customers. Augmented Intelligence Framework in Customer Management.
Collection of Data
Every business needs to collect data. It is a critical part of the AI process. And more importantly, you can do it in many ways:
- Collecting data through traditional customer service channels like phone calls and emails
- Collecting data from social media interactions (e.g., Facebook messages)
- Collecting data through live chat sessions
Customer support management
Customer support is an area where AI has been making a lot of strides. Using the data collected from customer interactions, AI can automate some of the tasks required to respond to customers.
For example, when a new ticket comes in, AI can analyze it and recommend specific responses based on past tickets and other historical information about that customer. This helps save time and increases efficiency as human agents do not have to do all this work.
AI also makes it more personal by identifying patterns in behavior so that agents can respond more appropriately than they would if they were just memorizing scripts for answers or standard procedures for handling common issues across all customers (e.g., What’s your name? How many members are there in your family?).
They will be able to give a better experience by customizing their responses depending on the information they have about each consumer, such as information from previous interactions or their browsing history.
Customer sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is a way of understanding the customer’s perspective on products and services. You can use it to understand customer satisfaction and loyalty and identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Using sentiment analysis, you can get insight into what customers say about your company online. This allows you to gain insight into how your brand is perceived by customers, which will help you identify opportunities for improvement in key areas such as product quality or service delivery.
Automated trigger-based customer interactions
For example, a customer who has not purchased in the past six months is automatically sent a coupon. The trigger for this intuitive interaction might be based on the customer’s purchase history or feedback from customer service interactions.
Omni-channel engagement intelligence
- Omni-channel engagement intelligence: The automated trigger-based customer interactions such as text messages, emails, and phone calls prompted by the AI system. For example, if you ask Siri to play a song on your iPhone and it plays the right one right away, that is an example of an automated trigger-based interaction. This type of Augmented Intelligence makes it possible for companies to respond faster and in more personalized ways than ever before.
- Customer sentiment analysis: This refers to the ability of AI systems to understand what customers are saying about products or services through their words or actions to predict their behavior in future transactions or experiences with brands (e.g., whether they will likely buy again). For example, some companies use this technology today to identify when a customer’s experience was positive or negative so they can reach out immediately with either positive reinforcement or compensation for any inconvenience caused by delays/errors, etc.
Advanced analytics and pattern detection
When you use AI, it is not just the analysis of your data done by a machine. Most AI systems today involve humans and machines working together in a well-defined process. The system will analyze the vast amount of data available to you, but then humans step in to interpret what that means for your business. This is especially true in customer management because you may want deeper insights than simply basic metrics like the number of orders per month or average spend per order; instead, you might need help identifying patterns in the way your customers behave over time so that you can understand their behavior more fully and work more effectively with them to improve their experience with your brand or service offerings.
Customer churn prediction and trend analysis
A critical aspect of customer management is predicting customer churn and analyzing its reasons. You can do this by analyzing enormous amounts of historical Data, including transactional information, client support tickets, and email communications. You can use AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze this Data.
The system will then learn from this information and start predicting future behavior. For example, it might find that clients who call in frequently are more likely to churn out at a later date than those who contact support only once or twice (and vice versa). The system’s predictions can be used in marketing campaigns designed to retain customers by offering them incentives or discounts based on their predicted behavior/churn risk level.
Benefits of Augmented Intelligence In Customer Success
The days of a customer success rep using excuses to push back on support requests, delaying resolution, or worse – doing nothing at all – may end. AI applications are becoming increasingly popular, and their use in customer success will only increase as time goes on. Here are some of the benefits AI brings to the table:
Time
In the business world, time is money. You know this and so do your customers—which means you are always looking for ways to save time and improve productivity. Augmented Intelligence can help by allowing you to spend less time on mundane tasks and more time on the critical ones that make a difference in your business.
Augmented Intelligence allows customer success teams to spend less time on repetitive customer interactions and more time doing what only humans can do: think creatively, resolve conflict, and solve problems. For example:
AI can help tackle common customer support queries like How do I find my account number? or What are my login credentials? by offering personalized suggestions based on historical data from past interactions between team members and clients.*
AI can automate tasks such as scheduling meetings with clients based on their availability preferences as communicated through previous conversations.*
AI could automatically include additional information when sending out emails (such as attachments) based upon what was previously shared between parties during previous interactions.*
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Accuracy
The biggest benefit of Augmented Intelligence is that it helps you to be more accurate. You will find that your customer data becomes more accurate because you are able to gather more information in a shorter amount of time, and what is even better is that you do not have to do any manual data entry. That means less time spent on basic administrative tasks like data entry and customer support queries. You can spend more time building relationships with customers while also improving their overall satisfaction with their product or service.
Accountability
Accountability is a great benefit of augmented Intelligence. If you can tie the right customer success team members to the right issues, it can prevent false positives from popping up that are not problems. It also helps ensure that the right people are taking action on the right issues rather than wasting time on things that do not need their attention. This will help ensure that your team is focused on high-value activities and not wasting time on low-value ones.
Accessibility
AI is accessible 24/7, 365 days (about 12 months) a year. You can access it from anywhere and on any device with an internet connection, so you do not need to worry about geographical constraints or hardware limitations.
Continuity
Now, you can ensure that your customers have a consistent experience, no matter where they interact with you.
You have probably been there: You’re on the phone with your customer success team to resolve an issue and then get transferred over to engineering because they need to walk through how to fix it. Or perhaps you’re on Twitter trying to solve a problem and find yourself in email conversations repeatedly as one person takes over from another in solving the same issue. Maybe even worse—perhaps the customer support rep helping you were unavailable when an engineer came back with a solution?
This happens all too often because of silos within companies that prevent teams from collaborating effectively across various departments and channels. But by using Augmented Intelligence platforms like Drift’s Intelligent Chatbot, Salesforce Einstein AI solutions, or IBM Watson solutions for Customer Engagement Platforms (CXP), you will be able to deliver personalized support experiences without gaps in continuity between interactions across different channels or departments.
AI is changing the relationship between brands and customers
The customer experience is more important than ever. This is because the digital world has made it easier for brands to reach customers directly and deliver personalized experiences. However, there has been no change in how businesses interact with their customers daily. They have been using traditional marketing strategies like mass advertising and social media promotions, which are no longer effective in today’s digital age.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the answer to this issue. It helps brands understand their target customers better to provide them with an engaging and personalized experience at every step of their journey with your brand.
Stanley Deepak is an accomplished sales and marketing professional with 15+ years of experience. He loves tech products and book reading. He writes on philosophy and culture on LinkedIn.
Published October 31, 2022, Updated May 14, 2024