The Role of Digital AI Transformation For Your Business

Of the trends in digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) remains top of mind. While AI may sound futuristic, the reality is that we’re using it more frequently than most people realize. Most of us use digital assistants like Alexa and Siri in our personal or professional lives. Other examples of digital AI include autocorrect, predictive text, and the face recognition software many of us use to unlock our phones.

But how is AI aiding digital transformation in business? Before we can explore that, we must first find a definition. Business News Daily describes AI as “a broad term that refers to any type of computer software that engages in humanlike activities–including learning, planning and problem-solving.”

While that definition leaves much room for interpretation and innovation, Gartner predicts “AI will ultimately reshape how work is done.” The simple truth is that anytime there’s any kind of data or feedback, digital AI presents an opportunity to analyze the information, develop deep insights, and make decisions based on predicted outcomes.

Benefits of Digital AI Transformation

While digital AI transformation has a wide variety of potential impacts on your business, perhaps the most significant fall under the categories of marketing and customer service. Although it may feel like these two areas represent vastly different areas of the customer journey, there is common ground. Artificial intelligence helps companies deliver relevant content.

Statista’s revelation that 90% of consumers prefer relevant content should come as no surprise. We value anything that helps us cut through the noise and find answers. This is true whether we’re at the top of the funnel (TOFU) in the early stages of the customer journey or are already customers.

With that in mind, let’s dive into some of the most significant benefits of AI in digital transformation.

Greater Personalization

Personalization goes beyond email personalization, although that is an essential component you can’t get wrong. It goes beyond ensuring that each email is addressed to the correct first name. However, that’s essential to get right because email addressed to “First_Name” shows a lack of quality control and beyond.

Digital AI innovations allow you to personalize every aspect of the customer experience, something that significantly increases the likelihood people will purchase from you. Some of the most popular opportunities for personalization include:

Social proof or social motivation

You’ve probably seen it in action. You’re looking at a product online, and a little window appears to tell you that someone nearby just purchased the same product. That’s digital AI in action, pulling recent purchase data to tip the needle for prospective customers.

Tailored recommendations based on similar customers

Using digital AI technology, you can also push offers and ads to customers who have searched for similar products, purchased complementary products, or have similar interests or profiles to your target audience.

Abandoned cart sequences

If someone leaves your digital product in their cart without purchasing, you can trigger follow-up email sequences to remind them to purchase. Doing so can help you recover 4-5% of your abandoned carts. While that number may seem low, with a 70% average cart abandonment rate, it can increase your sales by up to 10%.

Geotagging

Geotagging is particularly relevant for eCommerce and brick-and-mortar businesses. However, there are plenty of other applications, including events and trade shows. When people are in a particular area or region—and you can get hyper-specific—you can send them tailored offers based on proximity.

Streamlined Customer Journey Through User/UX Research

Digital AI supports a streamlined customer journey from the first time leads interact with your company all the way through their lifecycle as a customer. Before optimizing the customer experience, you must create a map of every touchpoint, digital and non-digital.

By layering your customer journey map with User/UX research in the form of data and customer feedback, you can determine which areas to prioritize for improvement. Armed with this information and historical buying patterns, you can use digital AI to identify and push out specific content that will move your lead down the funnel to become a customer.

Whether this is a digital-only interaction or a personal email or phone call, AI may be able to make that decision and either perform or assign the task.

Improved Customer Support

Because exceptional customer experience (CX) gives you a competitive advantage, the value of AI to improve CX and make it consistent cannot be overstated. It’s one thing to win a customer in the first place. It takes an entirely different set of efforts to delight them regularly and earn their approval and recommendations.

While there are many ways that digital AI can aid and strengthen your reputation for customer support, the following are some of the most valuable today.

By now, it would be surprising to find someone who hasn’t encountered a chatbot. What started as an often clunky way for customers to get information has transformed into an elegant solution to reducing call center response times by using User/UX research data to:

• Pre-program responses based on specific keywords and phrases
• Utilize intuitive responses to help customers get the information they need
• Deliver help by using chatbots to offer suggested search terms to get the results people want

Using the above, digital AI can draw on User/UX research to create exceptional self-service options for customers. They can get the information they want, when they need it, without having to wait hours for a support response or until the call center is open.

What about when your customers do need to speak to a human? While self-service is valuable most of the time, it can’t solve everything. As part of your digital transformation, AI can learn how to recognize specific trigger words and escalate queries to a human representative. And since self-service eliminates many questions, human representatives are more quickly able to respond.

Challenges of Digital AI Transformation

Using AI in digital transformation requires a moderate approach instead of big-bang development. As with most organizational change and modernization initiatives, sweeping changes increase the likelihood of failure.

While resistance to change is one of the most significant roadblocks, it’s far from the only one. Digital AI can impact every aspect of your business and the customer experience. And as Entrepreneur explains, “The journey to achieving full value from AI will be longer and messier than in most technology transformations.”

To that end, 3Pillar Global recommends implementing AI initiatives using the Product Mindset lens—using iteration to make incremental changes and improvements and minimize time to value.

A Digital AI Focus Increases Your Bottom Line

Using artificial intelligence in your digital transformation can increase your revenue and profitability. However, before you look over this list and choose an item to focus on, it’s wise to take a strategic approach.

3Pillar Global recommends first evaluating all the ways you might use AI in your digital business transformation. From there, you can outline the options that will make the most significant improvement to the customer experience and make a plan to implement while minimizing time to value. If this is new to you, hiring an outside consultant might be the best way to harness the power of AI and minimize any challenges with adopting it.

3Pillar Global’s team of experts specializes in helping organizations create digital transformation strategies, including those using AI. Contact us today to learn how we can help you modernize your business.