Finding it hard to keep your brand in good shape? Is your current marketing regime failing to deliver the gains you anticipated? Perhaps a bit of AI is just what you need…

It has long been considered that customer churn is a painful reality of doing business. That used to be true, but nowadays it can be avoided.

A lot of brands out there are obsessed with measuring their performance by way of customer surveys.

Quick question: do you suffer from ‘survey fatigue’? If your answer is ‘yes’, you can guarantee your consumers do too.

It’s just plain lazy to ask the customer about their experience when the brand already has that information buried deep within its own systems – and frankly, a little insulting. Is the customer’s time somehow less valuable?

Customer feedback definitely has a role to play, but it should be part of a bigger picture.

Wouldn’t it be better to combine it with actual operational and behavioural signals to get an objective reading on customer health, and know when customers are going to churn before they do?

Artificial intelligence is capable of doing just that – and so much more.

Brands have the information and data needed to be able to tell how they are treating individual customers, to measure customer health and predict whether they are about to leave.

However, to date it has been difficult for large brands in particular to break the data out of the departmental silos and use it at the individual customer level.

Modern AI platforms address this. They combine data and action frameworks to accurately predict if customers are on the verge of leaving (or are thinking about leaving) and then automatically act before an irritation becomes a full-blown problem.

At the other end of the spectrum, these platforms provide valuable insights into which customers are happiest and most likely to respond to campaigns.

These platforms are built from the ground up to acknowledge a few basic truths: every brand’s data is incomplete, a little dirty and scattered. The goal is not to achieve perfect data, but rather to gain practical insights from what data is available.

It’s important to note, however, that an AI that only provides predictions isn’t going to realise the benefits – it doesn’t help the brand determine when to act or not act on the prediction.

There will always be a business goal to be achieved like maximising campaign ROI or minimising the cost to save customers. Look for a platform that includes an action framework that feeds the results back into the AI to optimise the outcome.

One example is SmartMeasures. It’s worth your time to check out the article B&T wrote about this platform back in March, as well as its website.

At the end of the day, the key to a healthy brand is healthy customers, so if you want to stop putting them through survey fatigue and work out what really makes them happy, put AI to work on the data you already have to achieve the gains you’ve always wanted.