How are AI and Customer Retention related

How to Leverage AI To Retain Your Customers 

Artificial intelligence is being hailed as the future of the business world, but what exactly is AI? It’s a wide-ranging branch of computer science centered around the automation of intelligent behavior or human intelligence. It’s all around us already: AI is the foundation for the Smart assistants that you interact with daily like Siri and Alexa, AI software is implemented into your email to help filter spam from your inbox; Spotify even uses it to create those personalized recommendations for which song you should hear next. Notice how the common factor in those three uses of AI is you -  the customer.  

SaaS businesses across all different industries have begun to invest in AI to improve their customer retention. Many businesses are leveraging AI through their machine learning models to improve their customer services and deliver a true white glove experience. Customers want to feel valued and expect a personalized and polished experience without delays. These white glove experiences keep customers coming back to the company for more business. Failure to do so may lead to customer churn, where customers quit a subscription or service after they are left unsatisfied by the business. 

Businesses are combining AI and machine learning for collecting and analyzing historical, social, and behavioral customer data. This allows them to gain a clear understanding of what its customers want. Most importantly, AI is agile. AI ensures computers can react to human instruction and process human behaviour to respond accordingly and immediately. It allows for continuous learning from customer data analyzed, and is able to anticipate customer behavior. Customer Success Teams use information generated through AI to flexibly respond to change by personalizing aspects of the customer journey and reaching out  to customers that are at risk of churning through next best actions that AI recommends.  

Predictive Analytics

This brings into play a key aspect that many businesses are looking to invest into: Predictive analytics. Predictive analytics, which differs from the commonly used Prescriptive analytics, refers to the process of leveraging statistics, data mining, and modelling to make predictions. AI uses predictive analytics to produce real-time, actionable insights to guide Customer Success and Customer Experience teams in designing the how and when of the next interactions between a customer and the brand. 

Together, AI and predictive analytics provide SaaS businesses deeper insights into what has already occurred in the customer journey, and what the team can do to facilitate a sale. This can range from providing suggestions for related services that the customer has already purchased to making the customer experience more relevant to their goals or industry. This personalized attentive care is both more likely to generate a sale and provides a business' customer with a greater sense of satisfaction and connection to the business. Other applications of AI (that we've specialize in) even include account-based recommendations and customer prioritization and segmentation. 

Leveraging AI to improve Customer Retention is not an easy task. It requires a company to make many calculations like determining: what is the customer churn rate? Next, a SaaS Business may have to ask itself if its customers churn at different rates across different segments. It also presents huge challenges commonly associated with big data; data storage, cleaning and management is both expensive and labor intensive. A company may have to further develop its data warehouse or invest in a data lake to store all its customer data. It requires companies to decide on how and what machine learning models to use in its AI software. Despite these challenges, the quantity of work involved and price tag associated with AI, businesses are choosing to plow forward with investing in Artificial Intelligence. And they have good reason to do so: According to a report published by Gartner, the business value created by AI will reach $3.9T in 2022. 

While IDC predicts that global spending on Artificial intelligence and cognitive intelligence systems will reach $77.6B in 2022, leveraging AI may not be feasible for many companies. Fortunately, businesses that specialize predictive and prescriptive analytics like Adaptive Pulse are helping make this possible. Adaptive Pulse leverages AI, Machine Learning models, NLP Models,  and even NLG models to guide CSMs on strategizing and executing through their insights. We provide actionable reports, clear data representation and even offer data management through their Data Hub. Our b2b SaaS clients have reaped significant results: Adaptive Pulse saves 10 hours per customer success manager every day on average. Businesses looking to stay on top of the AI movement can now hire  Adaptive Pulse and get their analytics done by professionals! 

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