As customers, we all want to be treated in a special and unique way. We want companies to offer us personalised, integrated and consistent experiences. And so, the customer must be at the centre of the company’s concerns and strategy.

More and more, the leading brands also compete on the experience they offer the customer. Today, this is one of the main factors they can differentiate themselves from the competition. Nowadays, there are new sales channels, new relationships and much more accessible information, which contributes to creating new challenges for companies when it comes to winning and keeping their customers.

The truth is that today customers have a hybrid approach between the online and the physical shop; sometimes, they research the digital and buy in the physical shop, and sometimes they have an in-store experience and buy in the digital shop, which requires a new approach by brands.

Customer Experience is defined as valuing the experience customers have of a brand throughout the journey. That is why investing in excellent, personalised and efficient customer service is so important.

Knowing your purchasing habits in detail, including trends or frequency, makes it possible to create more attractive products and services and communicate more assertively. More than buying a product or service, the consumer is looking for an experience of excellence and a personalised service that makes him feel unique and with a feeling for the brand.

This experience starts long before the purchase and covers all customer contact points, from brand communications to after-sales service. Customers today want impactful and meaningful experiences.

Gartner has estimated that by 2024, organisations that deliver a total experience will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX).

Thus, to distinguish itself from the competition, the company needs to provide its customers and potential customers with a differentiating experience in the various moments of interaction with the brand.

Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence solutions are fundamental to understanding the customer journey, identifying market trends or even improving after-sales service.

This information is especially vital when considering that the entire customer journey can be mapped, assessed and qualified. That, in any interaction with the customer (from, for example, a session on the website to commercial negotiation or interaction with a call centre), all the information about the customer journey (acquisition, negotiation, operation, post-sale, upselling and cross-selling) is available so that the entire marketing strategy is significantly more assertive, as well as what next-best-action the commercial can leverage with their customers.

Adding technology offers numerous benefits to the business, and I share here two excellent examples where technology has been a natural ally to customer satisfaction.

While having a single queue for payment at the supermarket helps the process to be more streamlined, on the other hand, this system is dependent on the following customer calling in manually.

But if we automate the process through an Artificial Intelligence solution?

It was a success, and it was possible to increase the capacity to serve customers by more than 20% within the same interval, which brought clear satisfaction to customers by having faster service.

Another good example that I share here happened in a large clothing chain where through the analysis of the pattern of habits of the customers that abandoned the company, it was possible to identify the causes and react in time, thus reducing the abandonment rate.

With the increase in available data and the speed at which everything happens, it is imperative to implement data-driven strategies, know the audience, identify the interactions with the highest return and optimise investments. The customer is now at the centre of any marketing strategy and to generate better results, it is essential to make a difference at the different touch points along the customer journey.

From automating customer service to more accurate analysis of consumer behaviour in real-time, Data, Analytics and AI solutions bring numerous benefits to organisations. Using these solutions, marketers now have a deep knowledge of consumers. They can develop an effective and profitable marketing strategy and customer journey and increase loyalty rates by creating more personalised relationships.