How A Customer Engagement Hub (CEH) Can Build Two-Way Relationships via Predictive, Multi-Channel Marketing
Enterprise-customer relationships are no longer a one-way street in which brands blindly attempt to influence consumer behavior via one-to-many communications. As technology has progressed, consumers have gained their own voice and are now shouting back—and enterprise brands are listening.
Today, a customer’s “voice” takes the form of data: what they buy from a brand, when they buy it, and how they behave throughout the process are all part of how brands come to know their individual customers. Enterprise brands are increasingly leveraging Customer Engagement Hubs (CEH) in order to intelligently interpret this data and effectively converse with their customers, taking their cues from customer behavior, interests, and needs instead of the other way around.
Consumers themselves, particularly those of younger generations, appreciate the new ebb and flow of the enterprise-customer conversation. In fact, over a quarter of millennial shoppers say that stores should be able to rapidly look up their profile information, including past purchases, in order to optimize their current experience. This demonstrates a shift in the way consumers prefer to converse with brands, opening a new two-way street that’s powered by predictive, multi-channel CEH tools.
Predictive CEH Tools for Productive Conversations
Today, 63% of shoppers do not feel like retailers know them. A lack of intelligent customer data on the retailers’ side is likely fueling this misunderstanding. Luckily, an optimized Customer Engagement Hub empowers brands to proactively meet the needs of their customers in 1:1 “conversations” that delight even the most demanding shoppers.
A CEH that utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be able to accurately predict a customer’s intent before that need is explicitly voiced. By intelligently combining customers’ historic data—essentially, everything that customer has ever “said” to the brand via transactions and browsing behavior—then applying it to in-the-moment insights gained from information about their current actions and environment, next-gen CEH solutions are proactively responding to customers’ ever-evolving mindsets. For example, if a customer has been viewing a winter coat on a retailer’s app and then enters the store the following day, they might receive a push notification: “Redeem your loyalty points for 10% off our Classic Down Parka, currently in stock in your size.”
This predictive and personalized capability allows enterprises to engage customers around the offers in which they have expressed interest – not just the products the brand wants to promote – making each customer feel as if they are that enterprise’s only customer. A Customer Engagement Hub with predictive AI/ML tools is the key to powering these real-time, two-way customer conversations.
Taking Conversations to Every Channel for Every Customer
Some 55% of shoppers say retail experiences are disconnected across channels. This fundamental flaw of outdated CEH solutions can rapidly shatter the continuity of an otherwise fluid interaction between enterprises and their customers. In order to mirror the flow of a real conversation, today’s brands need solutions that enable seamless multi-channel marketing and engagement.
As customers increasingly do their shopping on-the-go, brands are forced to keep up, taking their customer conversations to the channels their customers prefer – from web to mobile to POS, in-store alerts, emails, chatbots, and even smart watches. Enterprises must be able to encourage interaction no matter where customers are, crafting a conversation that does not have clear starting- or stopping-points. Say that a customer puts an item in their online cart, but does not complete the transaction; the next time they access the store’s website or mobile app, a chatbot may engage them around their incomplete purchase and alert them of recent price drops to encourage completion.
By flexibly adapting to customers’ actions across channels, a multi-channel CEH deepens customer relationships by ensuring seamless conversations throughout the entire customer journey, intelligently determining which engagement channels may yield the best results in-the-moment.
CEH: Enabling Customer-Driven Conversation
An intelligent Customer Engagement Hub is the key to effectively building two-way customer relationships. With predictive tools that cater to customers’ changing needs as they evolve in real-time and multi-channel engagement to seamlessly carry customer conversations to any preferred channel, smart CEH solutions are giving today’s customers a voice – and allowing enterprises to flexibly respond to it.
Discover how ZineOne’s AI-powered Customer Engagement Hub leverages continuous customer intelligence to power informed, engaging two-way conversations optimized to resonate with each and every customer.
