As a society, we’ve changed the way we communicate with each other and with businesses. And in a weird way, we’ve almost come full circle. It used to be businesses would build relationships with customers and focus on providing a quality service that relied on a fantastic relationships. As things became more electronic, those relationships disappeared. It became more about getting the cheapest products instead of developing a relationship with customers. In fact, many businesses now still don’t find the need to develop those relationships. However, social media has made it easier than ever to develop those relationships again giving customers a desire to know and shop with people they care about and trust. It’s why influencer marketing is so powerful and why personalization is becoming more essential.
But how is a business supposed to balance that personalization and relationships with artificial intelligence? It’s so convenient to have artificial intelligence chatbots communicating with customers to answer their questions and be available to them. And machine learning is extremely beneficial in providing your company with the data needed to make big decisions. So, what is the balance between AI and personalization?
There IS a healthy balance
The first thing to remember is that there is a healthy balance of using both AI and human contact. There are things that an artificial intelligence company can do for you that a person cannot, and there is stuff you get from a person that you can never get from a person. Never try relying solely on one or the other, or you won’t find success.
AI provides personalization
Personalization is essential in working with your customers now. You may not have even realized that you can use AI to actually provide a lot of that personalization. It can tell you exactly what type of posts your customers will respond well to on social media. An AI Chatbot can understand, process, and answer questions from customers through texts or chats without a real person ever having to take charge of the conversation, which means a customer can get all the information they need without even realizing they were talking to a robot. AI makes it possible for customers to get personalized emails and texts from your business instead of a generic send-all type marketing message. It really is a powerful tool in developing and maintaining a relationship with your customers.
Humanize through social media
One thing to consider is that most businesses don’t have a way to humanize their company and provide more of a customer relationship. One amazing example of this is Taylor Swift. She has an extremely loyal fan base who love her because of the relationship she has built with them. She buys and delivers Christmas gifts to her fans and posts a video of it on YouTube. She invites fans to party at her house and does a Facebook live event, so those who can’t come can still feel apart of it. When she posts to social media, it is almost always about her music or fans. And while this particular personalization isn’t going to be effective for every company, similar posts will help you develop customer relationships.
A large company might post a picture of a group of employees and some recent challenges they’ve faced. A small company business owner might post the story about their family on social media. Businesses can post stories in their timeline that simply show some of the things happening that day or shout outs to customers who have recently purchased or reviewed their products.
If you don’t want to get too personal with customers on social media, you could try using more influencers. Their whole job is to get personal with their customers, so when they do recommend a product, the customers trust and believe that it really is something worth buying.
The interesting thing about social media is that your artificial intelligence can actually give you reports telling you what type of language and posts your audience will be most receptive to. So while you need to use humanization through your posting, AI actually provides you with the information on how to create those posts.
Balancing AI and human personalization doesn’t have to be difficult. You simply need to remember that they go hand in hand and are both necessary to a thriving, successful company.
