Almost every digital leader is talking about customer experience optimization as a key driver for delivering on growth targets. There’s the understanding that improved customer experience (CX) can deliver increased revenues, but actually finding what that is, is like trying to capture a Leprechaun with his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. (Happy St Patrick’s Day, by the way.) As soon as you identify key elements that make an impact on the customer experience, everything changes. The pot of gold you thought you’d found has disappeared. Instead, the reality you find yourself in, is that despite increasing resources, time and effort to drive more traffic and conversions, the returns are diminishing.
You’re paying more per click to drive traffic, you’re creating more funnels and more landing pages to try to personalize the customer experience for different target segments. And in an effort to reach and engage with customers, it’s becoming more about figuring out the ever changing algorithms of Google, Facebook and Amazon rather than being able to serve up relevant experiences that connect with your customers. Maintaining so many touch points in the customer journey, and across multiple channels, is becoming increasingly complex and unmanageable. Engaging with customers shouldn’t be this hard, but it is.
How AI-driven optimizations capture the elusive Leprechaun
When looking for a CX optimization solution, it shouldn’t be about feeding the beast, targeting everything towards more ad spend on SEO and PPC to just drive more traffic. While sometimes the increase in traffic results in increased revenue, often those gains are offset against the increased ad spend. With no net gains, growth targets aren’t met and this is a huge frustration. Optimization should be about finding a solution that is best for your business and best for your customers without having to continually spend more. AI-driven optimizations offer a different approach to achieving revenue gains while working to find the best customer experiences for digital customers.
It starts with using real traffic from live visitors and taking a strategic look at the website and mobile applications in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs) that a company needs to achieve. As new ideas get added to the mix and ideation starts, this is where AI really starts to make an impact and quickly finds the low hanging fruit in terms of winning experiences. It’s rarely one idea on it’s own that creates a winning customer experience. Rather it is usually a combination of different variables. But experimenting with all of these variables using traditional A/B or multivariate testing tools is often not feasible as it requires too much time and traffic. However, with ideation at AI-scale it becomes possible to experiment with not just one or two ideas, but thousands of ideas and combinations, and get results quickly and efficiently.
AI gives brands the power to optimize CX more effectively
As the best performing ideas start to emerge—based on responses from real customers—ideas can be added, removed, or changed, mid-optimization to deliver even better results. And the results we are talking about is actual lift that aligns with KPIs which happens within just a few weeks.
A key benefit of using AI to improve customer experience is its ability to enable companies to keep the big picture in focus, while zooming in on the small details that can make an impact in the customer journey.
It provides brands with a way to test many variables simultaneously and let the optimization process evolve based on live customer responses, to find the best performing experiences.
What is unique to Evolv’s optimization solution is its ability to put the power back in the hands of the brand. You’re not pitting your efforts against elusive algorithms. You’re tracking live results from actual customers with the ability to pause low performing ideas, add to high performing ideas, and change ideas without having to restart the optimization or lose any of the gains realized so far.
No matter how many variables there are, AI doesn’t get confused or lose track of what you are trying to achieve. And it doesn’t take months to come to conclusions either. Even if customer responses seem scattered, it is able to process the data and determine the contribution, if any, to delivering better customer experiences.
Real answers that are relevant
Most importantly, the optimization is able to show which ideas resulted in the best performing experiences, how they improved conversions and generated lift across other metrics such as average order value and shopping cart abandonment. It provides meaningful insights that show digital leaders what they should be focussing on and how those ideas are achieving company KPIs.
Doing business online is highly competitive and brands need to be able to target audiences with relevant offers. With high customer expectations for frictionless digital experiences and user behavior changing so rapidly, companies can’t afford to wait months testing ideas to find out what customers like.
AI-driven optimization can provide relevant insights as to what’s impacting the customer experience, and deliver actionable answers quickly. It helps to simplify customer experience optimization since the AI manages all the complicated variables. The benefit to brands is that it enables them to be more agile and quickly respond to customer needs and competitive forces—locking onto that Leprechaun and not letting him, or his pot of gold, out of sight.
