Have you wondered how possible it is to understand the complexity of customer behaviors and predict what brings about their satisfaction on a large scale?
This appears to be an impossible task for many businesses and a hurdle they are always trying to overcome. The market is growing larger and more dynamic; therefore, more sophistication is introduced daily. Customer demands are on the rise, and this rise in demands is not easily predictable by the human mind.
Customers, due to their humanity and complex nature, are difficult to understand using the traditional method of market research. Those methods, though good, are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and less efficient at producing accurate results. If businesses continue to use these methods, they are bound to remain at the bottom of the global competition.
However, the development of AI and machine learning has brought an undeniable revolution to the field of market research. Businesses are now gaining greater insights into consumer behaviour that enable them to make data-driven decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
One of the most significant contributions of AI to market research is in the aspect of sentiment analysis, which is described as a natural language processing (NLP) approach used to identify the sentiment or emotional tone portrayed in a text or speech. It is often referred to as opinion mining, and its main objective is to find out if a text’s sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. Deep-seated in this analysis are golden ideas that could transform the customer experience of any business.
Customers are likely to express their opinions about a particular brand, product, or service on the internet through social media posts and product reviews. Therefore, data is mined and collected from these platforms in real-time. The opinions house several emotions and deep feelings, expressed in different languages. However, by using deep learning and natural language processing, modern AI tools can analyze these opinions and extract meaningful insights from them. It is from these insights that customer behavior is learned and understood.
When customers are understood, the insights gained from their behavioral patterns can be leveraged to improve products and services that they would like to engage with.
Understanding how your customers act in response to your products and services could give you leverage to boost their satisfaction and the overall success of your brand. The following gives a more detailed explanation of how AI can influence customer behavior.
1. Increases customer spending
Identifying your target market and their interests are important factors that can help you influence their buying choices. It’s no longer alien that AI can accumulate several unstructured data sets and narrow the information into insights that enable you to see what your target customers want and the trends they look forward to identifying with. With this information, you can create the experience they want.
With a detailed understanding of the target market, businesses know how and when to email their target customers and what product recommendations to give them. Customers are more likely to spend more when this information is accurate. And your business is set for sporadic upscaling when the strategies you choose are always in alignment with customer needs.
2. Customer Loyalty
The goal of every brand is not to do one-off business with their potential customers but to have a life-long relationship with them. But how is this possible when competitors are growing their strategies and operations to amass customers for themselves? It all lies in how far a brand is willing to go in nurturing its leads and customers.
After successful market research, brands must use the insights gleaned to create personalized experiences for their customers. From the data obtained through research, customer interests can be learned and used to recommend products and services to them at the right time. When this persists with accuracy, customers are more likely to believe you care about them and will be willing to continue doing business with you.
3. Brand advocacy:
Customers, when they are satisfied with any product or service, are quick to recommend it to people around them. And this automatically increases the brand’s influence and success. This is how far AI can influence positive customer behavior.
The future of market research lies in the seamless integration of AI technology into understanding customer behavior at a granular level and using the insights gleaned to further influence their behavior to promote brand success. While embracing AI leads to incredible business results, it is also important to learn how to optimize this innovation and use it to create a more customer-centric business approach. AI is undoubtedly indispensable in the market research sector, and it is set to continue advancing.
