Predictive customer experience is the future

The customer experience continues to evolve. As consumers become empowered due to digitization, and their interactions with brands become more trackable and data-driven, companies must understand their customers more completely and intimately than ever before to differentiate themselves from their competition. This level of in-depth understanding of the consumer comes from robust, clean, and accurate customer data — both observed and predicted. Today, a data-driven customer experience is a better CX.

To achieve this type of dynamic customer experience organizations are investing in advanced tools like customer data platforms (CDPs), enhanced with predictive AI software, enabling companies to gather and combine data into unified profiles so they can understand their customers more cohesively. Companies use those AI-driven insights to tailor a superior CX which can help improve the quality of customer interactions and resulting behaviors, like reducing churn. The predictive AI / predictive analytics software market is so integral to the development of a dynamic, data-driven CX that it is estimated to grow to $14.52 billion by 2028, according to Statistica.

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) continue to grow, and in challenging economic times, organizations everywhere are looking to contain costs while maximizing value from their most valuable customers. When one considers that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as five times as to retain one, improving retention strategy should be top of mind for any company that wants to survive and thrive in the modern business world.

By deploying a more AI-driven customer-centric approach to the CX, organizations can meet the rising expectations of today's customers, delivering the right CX at the right time to the right person, according to consulting firm Capgemini.

Companies who deploy an AI-enabled customer experience can deliver a:

• 10% boost in revenue
• 20% increase in customer satisfaction
• 60% reduced effort in audience selection
• 13% decrease in operational costs

Unlike more traditional approaches, AI enables companies to continually tune their understanding of customers and dynamically reshape the CX to provide them, and the business, with true value. All to build long-term value (LTV) with your best customers.

The challenges of observed data

What type of data is shaping today's modern data-driven CX? A few years ago, that would have been mostly from data mined from traditional survey-based methodology, what is today called zero-party data.

Zero-party data, according to Forrester, is 'data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand.' In other words, it is solicited data. It's also observed data, which is data that was collected by observing and recording events and behaviors as they occur without manipulation. While zero-party is very desirable data, due to its accuracy and direct relationship with the consumer, it's not the bread and butter of today's CX. That would be reserved for observable first-party data.

The customer data shaping today's CX is primarily made up of unsolicited first-party data like pages visited, clicks, adds to cart, time of day, and time spent browsing. This is the real data making up the data-driven CX. However, this data is reactive, and in the past. It needs to be enhanced with more predictive capabilities to deliver the dynamic data needed to meet a modern consumer's customer experience expectations.

The solution to providing the type of forward-looking data needed to create great customer experiences is for companies to begin leveraging predictive AI capabilities, like predictive modeling and predictive analytics derived via machine learning (ML), to enable companies to anticipate customer behaviors and see CX challenges and exploit opportunities in real-time.

Predictive data drives the customer journey

Organizations that are powered by predictive insights can understand their customers as full people, interpret their interactions more completely, and trigger them at the right moments in their path along the customer journey for a desired action.

The use of predictive analytics and predictive modeling establishes a fundamental sea-change in how a dynamic customer experience is delivered to consumers. The reality is predictive customer behaviors will increasingly drive the unified customer experience until all customer interactions are predictively driven. Is your organization prepared to leverage AI-powered consumer insights for both business and customer value?

Leveraging consumer data for value is THE key differentiator for a successful modern business. But having quality, accurate data is only part of the challenge. The rubber meets the road when you determine how you will deploy that data to improve business performance, customer value, and ROI.

But all data is not equal. To do more forward-looking activities with your customer data, like train machine learning algorithms with it to inform AI, you will need to enrich it with third-party data and deploy the right software that enables predictive AI capabilities.

How Faraday can get you there

Faraday provides the data and the predictive AI modeling infrastructure (IaaS) that enables organizations to iterate on their business challenges, instead of their technology infrastructure. With our platform, brands, and the software companies who support them, can now develop end-to-end customer experiences, at scale, driven by predictive insights. Predicting customer behavior enables more effective and efficient customer engagement within the CX. In business terms, this translates to better conversion rates which in turn creates higher revenue and reduces cost.

In the end, a data-driven CX is a better CX. A quality predictively driven CX will mean better retention for your most valuable customers, helping to reduce new customer acquisition costs in favor of a more long-term value retention strategy.

Faraday is the only predictive AI platform, both for software teams and brands, dedicated to predicting customer behavior. Everything you need to make customer experiences predictive is built into our software.

Looking forward

Predictive AI and Predictive Analytics deliver to companies the tools they need to increase customer retention and improve the customer experience. By leveraging customer data and predictive modeling, brands can understand their customer's behavior better than ever before and calculate churn for each customer.

Customer experiences everywhere are becoming more and more predictive, driven by advanced AI. It's only a matter of time until all customer experiences are predictive.

For more information on how to make your customer experience predictively driven by AI, contact Faraday.