Supercharge customer engagement services with AI

Supercharge customer engagement services with AI

Complete with uneven customer spending and elevated inflation, today’s macroeconomic climate presents a volatile challenge for businesses trying to do more with less. Contracted budgets are just the tip of the iceberg; these days, customers with countless options and strained attention spans expect more from every single engagement with the brands they love.

In Twilio’s 2023 State of Customer Engagement Report, we found that the most successful brands use digital customer engagement services to drive growth and increase resilience in this rapidly changing environment. In fact, 60% of brands say that investing in a digital customer engagement service like Twilio has improved their ability to meet changing customer needs—and 90% say it’s increased revenue.

Customer engagement is, of course, unique for every individual, and change is the only constant. So how do you keep up? To ensure customers are always delighted, companies are tapping into one of their greatest resources: first-party data and zero-party data. Relatively common and easy enough to collect, first-party data includes things like full name, date of birth, and address. More valuable and harder to come back, zero-party data comes hand-in-hand with your customers’ trust; think product preferences, lifestyle choices, and habits.

It’s not enough to simply collect this data, however: You need to know how to use it to engage customers in a way that speaks to their needs in real time. One wrong move could easily lead to frustration, and the ability to customize every possible touchpoint is paramount to your success. 

No longer just something you see in Sci-Fi movies, artificial intelligence is paving the way for such individualization. To help help companies predict and generate the best possible customer experience, they can now tap into, access, and utilize real-time communications data (think: digital interactions, customer verifications, emails, voice calls, messages, chat, and so on) and customer data (think: end user profiles, website data sources, mobile app data sources, and so on). 

With this kind of information at their fingertips, brands have the ability to truly leverage technology to their benefit and drive experiences their customers will love—time and time again. 

Unify customer engagement with real-time data

To really hone in on powerful customer engagement, you have to start with the customer. What is their buying history? What kinds of conversations have they already had with your support teams? What are they clicking, when, and why? How have they interacted with your company via text, chat, and email?

With a customer data platform like Twilio Segment, you can aggregate real-time customer data across every single platform and channel to understand each user’s journey, then personalize their experiences at scale. This allows you to: 

• Track every interaction—when users open emails, login, view products, start checkout—to gain a deep understanding of what converts visitors to customers. 

• Weave together a picture of your customer’s lifecycle engagement with deterministic identity resolution, while enabling centralized privacy and governance. 

• Use Profile API to query your user profile in real-time and generate recommendations for every department across your company, from sales and support to marketing. 

Over time, you can use Profiles Sync to access all the data you’ve collected to build machine learning models that can lower customer acquisition costs,increase lifetime value, and entice your customers to engage with a brand that really understands their needs.

Infuse AI into customer touchpoints across marketing, sales, and service

Now that you’ve used customer engagement services to secure this very detailed and informed snapshot into your customer, you can activate that understanding through every possible touchpoint.  

Capture, analyze, and act on customer signals in real time across all marketing channels with Twilio CustomerAI and Twilio Segment. Generative and predictive AI has the ability to simultaneously streamline ideation and execution of campaigns while curating high-quality, bespoke experiences, which leads to smarter campaigns with more engaging content. 

For sales teams, outreach efforts often span multiple channels, which can lead to information silos and disparate experiences. A study by McKinsey found that about 30% of sales tasks can be easily automated within existing sales technology using artificial intelligence. 

With AI, reps can track all their prospects, no matter where the leads come from. By layering in generative AI, models can produce better recommendations for reps to follow during each interaction, giving them the intel they need to quickly adapt to changing buyer needs and journeys. 

When it comes to customer experience, businesses can tap into AI’s ability to provide visibility into the trends impacting the efficiency and effectiveness of their contact center. Generative AI can provide a “TLDR” of a customer’s history, customized AI-generated responses during interactions, and an LLM trained on the knowledgebase. Automation promotes speedier communication between customers and businesses, leading to faster resolution times with less resources. 

Powered by your customer engagement service, every one of those touchpoints become signals for how to more efficiently operate and generate smarter content for each customer, which feeds back into that crucial data understanding.

Build better customer relationships with AI

To stay ahead of the competition, provide increasingly tailored services, maintain a cost-effective structure, and keep up with emerging technology, businesses must increasingly integrate AI in consumer engagement.

With the right data plugged into AI, you can build enduring relationships with a contextual understanding of needs, preferences, and behaviors. The sheer breadth of information creates a unique strength of intelligence, powering customer engagement services. By transforming that data into a better understanding of each individual, you can unlock the full potential of each customer and transform your business. Gain insights, take action, and constantly improve in better ways.

Want to learn more about Twilio's CustomerAI technology?

Interested in combining living customer profiles and real-time engagement data with artificial intelligence to better serve your customers? Rewatch all the great content for free from SIGNAL 2023, our annual customer and developer conference. 

Enjoy various sessions and keynote discussions on how Twilio’s CustomerAI technology can help companies leverage the power of AI with real-time customer data to provide personalized and intelligent customer engagement.