Smashing the Artificial Separation Between Customer Service and

Customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), user interface (UI), customer relationship management (CRM), customer journeys (CJ) and customer journey analytics (CJA). Will it ever end? What is going on in marketing?

All hell is breaking loose, that is what’s happening. The good old days are gone, buried, cremated. So, what do we do now?  Enter the forces of evil driving change – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Next Best Actions (NBAs).

AI has rendered the world of ‘too much data, what the heck do I do with it’ dead, buried and cremated. AI enables us to track, measure and evaluate a single customer journey, including all the digitally recorded events and experiences, and analyze their ultimate effect on a customer’s propensity to spend more cash, and store it in one place.

So, get the boxing gloves out, who is going to own that knowledge and data? Marketing? IT? CRM? Every business will have to decide. Why is this important? Because your marketing solutions love data. More and more data. Traditional departmental silos are becoming obsolete. Access to data and the means to organise, curate and share it within an organisation, has become key.

We call it data science for a reason. Data comes before science. Without data nothing can happen in AI. The better news is that AI forces massive change. Tear the silos down. All of your business’s data MUST be organised.

Why is it so hard to get this done and why is this massive shift only taking place now? From my experience marketing data is often the most poorly curated. It is not uncommon to get details of past marketing events via thousands of PDFs. Well, knock yourself out trying to operate at scale like that.

Marketing data not being in the best shape is far from uncommon, and the reason for that is rooted in past computing issues. Once upon a time when the legacy systems that we use today were put in place – 10-20-30 years ago, in many cases – computing and memory systems were mind-bogglingly expensive, compared to the vast cloud infrastructure that we see being deployed today.

This meant that once the ERP system got its ‘stuff’ done, the accountants always came first. They pay us, after all. Every two weeks, there was not a lot of budget left for everyone else, including marketing, data teams, creatives, etc.

Also, both structured and unstructured data take up vast computing resources when they are digitalised.  So digitalising marketing data is only now gathering the required support across many organisations.

AI marks a profound change in information gathering, storage and insights. Giving marketers the opportunity to map one customer journey per customer, utilising all the data that we have stored over the years – including ERP, transactions, telemetry, marketing, surveys, blogs and macroeconomic. The list is endless. Imagination rules. AI can make sense of all of this. Providing deep insights into which customers wants to buy what; what inventory should be sold to which customers.

However, the toughest part of the marketing problem is that we need individual customer journeys mapped to specific marketing events. We need to know the impact of our actions. Yes, we sent an email to Mr. Smith, but what did it contain? Was there a cash offer? What product was on offer? Was there a time limit? How did we follow up? With a call centre interaction, SMS or via WhatsApp?

Without the details for every customer journey, we cannot possibly determine the best possible Next Best Actions (NBAs) to undertake. NBAs are the future – recommended actions to boost engagement or financial success – up-selling, cross-selling, reducing churn, etc.

The bottom line is that if we all want to have super engaged customers, like Apple. Where products are designed, people line up to buy them at high prices, driving super, Apple-esque margins – we are going to have to put in place a one customer journey per customer strategy. That includes the oft-times tough stuff to process – older marketing campaigns, so we can better understand what might work for each of our customers.

Sorry, but that is the ‘easy’ bottom line. Let’s get to the tough stuff. Can you switch from top down demographic-intensive segmentation driving the design of marketing campaigns? AI gives you the power to finally reach nirvana – bottom up analysis customer by customer. At scale. If you have an action, a series of actions that drive engagement or any of the financial success KPIs you must track and improve, can you then instantly ascertain who else in your customer base can possibly have a similar positive outcome.

Have your marketing tools kept up? If your competitors don’t get you, if you fail to embrace these trends, then GDPR likely will. Endless spamming, even if customers opt in, does not respect the spirit of the privacy laws that are getting more and more difficult to adhere to. Gartner calls this customer journey analytics, CJA, we know it as making marketing, sales, support better. More profitable, while increasing engagement, the future is now.

Guest Blog by Jean Belanger, co-founder and CEO of Cerebri AI
Cerebri AI develops and sells the most sophisticated customer experience platform in the world. Measuring customer engagement and using those values and scores to drive customer success and financial results. Our Cerebri Values CX v2 platform is a leap forward in applying AI to draw insights from customer journeys and making recommendations that drive engagement and results. Our insights, ‘Next Best Action{set}s’, are driven by patent-pending object-oriented AI & reinforcement learning modelling methods that time and value up to 4 events in a sequence, rendering both ‘rules-based’ and ‘AI-lite’ technology obsolete for driving maximum results.