Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been at the forefront of business-to-business sales and digital marketing for some time. That’s because these tools offer automation and efficiency potential like little else. Now, however, marketing professionals are pushing the envelope of AI to create “empathetic” systems. These emotive intelligence systems revolutionize what’s possible in client retention, redefining the meaning of success from customer-focused communications.
But what is exactly is empathetic AI, and how can it help marketing and retention teams improve their outcomes?
AI already helps marketers better understand their target audiences. With the ability to interact and empathize with clients directly, customer service tools can go even further. As AI advances to relate to human needs and interests, sales teams should be implementing this tool to enhance their client retention, loyalty, and revenues.
Before you can implement empathetic AI, you must first understand what it is and how it can be used in B2B marketing.
What is Empathetic AI?
AI isn’t a person, so how can it even come close to demonstrating empathy? This is a quality often understood to be exclusive to human beings, because it means sharing feelings with another. An AI algorithm cannot share feelings, perhaps, but it can model social etiquette and relate to people based on certain variables.
When you boil it down, human empathy isn’t much different. We identify common variables we share with another or in a story. This could be a data point as simple as sharing a physical body. From here, we connect to others by modeling this data in terms of our own identities, putting ourselves in their place. Empathy plays a vital role in all kinds of marketing, and AI is capable of simulating it through complex data analysis.
Empathetic AI offers context for human behavior and recommendations to improve interactions. Don’t you wish you had the perfect way to frame a pitch to get a past client interested again? AI could be your answer, with its benefits to sales intelligence and marketing potential. Let’s look at Humana’s Cogito system as an example.
In 2019, Humana launched Cogito as a means of helping call center agents understand their caller’s emotions. The AI-powered tool analyzes speech patterns like pauses, quickened speech, and raised voices between the caller and the client agent. Then, Cogito offers data-driven recommendations for improving client satisfaction. This might include asking the agent to speak slower or acknowledge their feelings.
As AI implementation grows, empathetic AI solutions like Cogito are spreading into all aspects of business. Already, this is disrupting workflows from recruitment to risk management, allowing sales teams to focus on the bigger picture and the client interactions that need more nuance. The result is greater client retention.
How Empathetic AI Improves Client Retention
There are a number of ways empathetic AI can boost your ability to retain customers and clients. They all revolve around the ability of smart algorithms to model patterns from data and make logical conclusions from there. For example, a chatbot analyzes a user’s social data to offer automated, personalized help based on similar interactions. Optimizing customer service for the modern age requires implementing this level of convenience and personalization.
To do so, however, you’ll need a deeper look into the reasons why sales teams should be making use of empathetic AI tools. Here’s what AI offers client retention:
Automating Opportunity
The power of AI to automatically connect sales teams with client interests means a big win for implementers. Opportunities can be cultivated with existing clients with the help of artificial intelligence that is designed to understand them. This entails attracting and qualifying leads, assessing pain points, and updating client information. From here, sales professionals need only turn to their smart tools for greater insight on improving the client experience.
Personalizing Support
The data application potential of AI allows for more personalized automated support, with the ability to serve clients at all hours, bridging gaps in your staffing resources, and garnering greater customer satisfaction. Conversational AI is one of these empathetic support tools, and it utilizes the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to elevate a client experience.
NLP is the computational process involved in an AI understanding language the way a human does. It’s improving all the time, giving us examples like LUCI. This conversational AI by Worthix interacts with customers, using the power of AI to identify value perceptions and decision-making factors for the client. From here, a sales team can work with the data to craft solutions that directly fit client needs.
Through automated opportunities and personal support available at all hours of the day, any B2B business can boost its client retention rate. These features of empathetic AI make it one of the most desirable tools of 2022.
But AI isn’t a replacement for a personalized human touch.
Streamlining Client Retention Success
Streamlining your client retention rate means supplementing customer service and support with empathetic AI. These systems are improving all the time, offering more human-like levels of engagement and understanding between the bot and the customer. Of course, this functionality comes with automation potential. However, AI won’t replace sales teams entirely. Rather, it can serve as a way to cut costs and labor associated with client communication without sacrificing the quality of your service.
Sales teams should implement these empathetic AI systems to reap these benefits. Through empathy, you share feelings with your client. This gives you more opportunities to leave them with positive ones. Let AI be your aid in streamlining this process.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
