Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
Transforming customer experiences has been a top priority for marketers for some time, however, a large percentage of marketers seem to be struggling to do so in a scalable way.
We sat down with Vishal Anand, Chief Product Officer at CleverTap, to discuss:
Q1: With the advent of AI/ML-based technologies, how can modern marketers provide exceptional customer experience across the user journey?
Vishal: Today, customers interact with a brand on multiple channels including email, mobile, web, social, retail stores, and customer support. All customers expect a personalized experience with the brand — no matter which channel they connect from.
Moreover, they expect personalization beyond including their first name in an email or changing the language of the message. Customers expect you to send offers and recommendations relevant to them, specifically. They are even willing to share their personal data for this level of personalization, according to a recent survey by Salesforce.
Mobile apps with millions of monthly active users need to leverage emerging technologies like AI and ML to deliver personalization at scale. Typically, modern marketers are leveraging AI and ML to deliver relevant and contextual user experiences across the 3 W’s of a campaign:
We are seeing our customers do some amazing things across the 3 Ws. Let’s start with Who should receive your campaign. Our client, Fandango Latin America, region’s leading online movie ticketing service, uses artificial intelligence, based upon past user behavior, to predict future outcomes. They then use that data to further segment their audience.
Using CleverTap’s Intent-Based Segmentation feature, Fandango Latin America proactively micro-segments its install base of almost 1 million users based on the likelihood of uninstalling the app. They then send targeted campaigns to these micro-segments of 2,000 to 3,000 users to reduce uninstalls and lower campaign costs significantly.
For the ‘what’, we are seeing customers leverage CleverTap’s recommendation feature that uses complex machine learning algorithms like neural networks to understand user behavior over time. They can use these recommendations to send dynamic, personalized content recommendations across channels based upon their preferences.
With CleverTap, marketers don’t have to go to the trouble of asking their data scientists or product teams to help identify their audiences and write models to find the right content recommendation for each user. With AI, it is quite literally automated and 1-1 which makes it very exciting.
Lastly, the ‘when’. Our customers use CleverTap’s best time to deliver feature that allows marketers to send campaigns when the user is most active on the app, thereby increasing the chances of user engagement.
For all of this to happen, a brand needs to have unified view of the customer, that should have user data like demographics, age, gender etc. accumulated over time as well as real-time behavior collected from all touchpoints and sources. An infographic showing a unified view of the customer is below.
Q2: How can brands have a holistic view of a user across multiple online and offline channels?
Vishal: Operating in an omnichannel world, user data comes from multiple sources: both online and offline. Because of this, it’s important to consolidate data coming from various channels.
Typically, a marketer uses multiple technology platforms to engage and analyze an audience across multiple channels.
All these platforms add to the cost and require extensive training for various platforms. As the tech stack grows, the accuracy of data also becomes questionable as how do you merge data of one user from various platform, especially if an app has 100 million monthly active users (MAU).
In this scenario, technology platforms accessing data for insights need to integrate to provide a 360 degree view of the customer.
Top-performing organizations consolidate their marketing stack by using platforms like CleverTap which allow you to:
This allows marketers to have a holistic view of the customer, enabling them to use technologies like AI and ML to enhance customer experience.
Q3: Let’s say a mobile app company has 100 Million active users monthly. What should a marketer look for in a technology platform for delivering scalable customer experiences?
Vishal: The right platform to support scalability needs to have the architecture to handle and analyze billions of data points in a matter of a few seconds.
One of our clients, Hotstar, Disney’s India streaming service, had 300 million monthly active users and 19 million concurrent users at a recent world cup match between India and New Zealand. For this situation, the right platform should operate at scale, both in terms of velocity and volume.
When sending a push notification to all users who have launched their app at least once in the last year, the platform should qualify the entire user base, which can be as high as 200 MN for many mobile app companies.
The velocity of delivery campaigns becomes crucial here. When sending an in-app notification to users who launch an application, the message should be delivered within seconds, otherwise, context is lost.
CleverTap processes more than 150 trillion user-profiles and 70 billion events a month. CleverTap has the capability to send 26 MN push notifications per minute. With 99% availability, CleverTap handles 7 billion data points a day, enabling marketers to boost their omnichannel customer engagement strategy across 12 channels.
Q4: Implementing AI/ML technology solutions require a lot of resources. How do marketers measure the ROI of a customer experience program?
Vishal: Users leave trails of data across their journey. Through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can implement a scalable user experience strategy.
Impeccable user experience across touch-points leads to happy customers — resulting in repeat purchases and eventually brand evangelism.
In a nutshell, increased user retention allows you to increase the lifetime value of the customer (LTV), uplifts the monthly retention rates and also increases the conversion rate of your customers.
Today, marketers primarily focus on customer acquisition, without realizing that the cost of acquiring new customers is much greater than retaining them. According to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Having a solid customer experience strategy backed by data and insights boosts overall user retention.
Marketers can use new-age technologies to uncover great insights about the user and use it to deliver a priceless customer experience. It’s necessary organizations have an integrated data strategy by consolidating their marketing stack with technology platforms like CleverTap that can operate at scale. While customer experience program is cost intensive, it leads to more happy customers and therefore rapid growth.
Use CleverTap to transform your customer experiences at scale. Contact us to see the solution live.
