With businesses actively pursuing customers outside their local area, nationwide and globally, there’s never been more competition. Even if you are the best at what you do or have a distinct niche, you need to connect and engage with your target audience at a high level. This includes strategies geared toward current customers and strategies that improve the customer experience for leads and new customers.

Recent HubSpot research shows that increasing customer retention by 5% can increase revenues by between 25% - 95% . Combine this with the fact that it costs more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, the focus on maintaining good customer relationships must be a priority.

Below are 5 powerful strategies that leverage data, technology, and AI chatbots to improve the consumer experience and, in turn, retention rates and sales:There’s a difference between adding your clients to hyper-targeted email marketing lists and adding value. Whether you email weekly, bi-monthly, or only send out a monthly newsletter — your approach must be strategic.

Do more than share updates regarding your products and services and utilize your outreach to gain a better consumer perspective. You can send out surveys, request feedback, link to review sites, and create a system to track the data you gather.

Encouraging your consumers to engage is a powerful way to identify areas of opportunity before they become too great of a concern. Most importantly, it improves the customer experience by ensuring your customers feel valued and heard — whether their experience was excellent or lacking.

Don’t just gather data from your surveys, feedback, and reviews, but to provide timely response to feedback. If it’s positive or neutral, enthusiastically thank them for taking the time to share their experience. If the feedback is negative or constructive, thank them, but also take a positive action. Adopt the mindset that taking the time to provide constructive feedback is an opportunity to regain their confidence in your brand.

If you have their contact information, reach out directly with an apology and resolution. If it’s a Google, Facebook, or other online review, respond to the review and ask them to reach out directly for a personalized resolution. Your apology must be sincere, let them know they’ve been heard, and must not be taken personally. Sometimes a discount on a future purchase, new product, revised service, or a refund can help, but often the customer simply wants to know they’ve been heard.

If it’s the occasional but unavoidable troll, post a short and sweet apology, and reach out to the review site to request that the review be removed.

Customers appreciate rewards, so identify which incentive programs are most common in your industry. This includes incentive programs for both your external and internal customers.

Your internal customers (employees) are some of your most valuable brand ambassadors. So, regardless of their position in the company, offer them a reward for referring new customers. And periodically gift your team fun company swag so they’ll promote you after hours.

For your external customers, consider a referral bonus, as well as a points program, and other programs that encourage long-term customers. Maybe a free t-shirt if they try all 25 of your bespoke ice cream flavors.

Most of the workflow and processes can be automated to offload your customer service team to focus on more critical tasks. For example:

• Yes, you will need to write the monthly emails, but you can automate the “next” sequence of actions.

• After a customer makes a digital purchase, automate workflow to email out invoice, tracking number, shipping status, and request for a review.

• Schedule automated alerts to let you know when a negative or constructive review comes in so that you can respond rapidly with a resolution.

These are just a few examples, but the ways that we can leverage A.

I technology to improve customer experience are constantly evolving.

A chatbot solution can also help your brand in automating and enhancing your customer experience by providing the convenience, no-waiting-on-hold customer service solution that they can engage with them 24 hours a day.

The technology does more than just answer FAQs, but it naturally identifies trends and gets “smarter” as it gathers more data. Most of your clients won’t know they aren’t chatting with a live agent. Not to worry, as your chatbot will know when to transfer to a live agent.

While your chatbot lightens your customer service department’s load, the data gathered is compiled so that it can be mined for powerful new insights, which can be used to create a more personalized experience for your customers.

You may have any combination of brick-and-mortar customer service agents, on and offline sales representatives, call center customer service, AI chatbot, and a marketing department. While service data is collected from each of these service channels, there is often a gap between how the data is collected and who the data is shared with.

If your objective is to transform or improve service, it’s time to eliminate these communication gaps. Your team can’t provide superior service if they don’t know what their individual or company-wide areas of opportunity are. Be transparent with your service agents at every level to empower them to be proactive and reactive, and deliver the highest quality of service. Many of the gaps that you identified can be used to improve both initial and recurring training.

Once you identify a winning service strategy and boost retention by 5% or more, continue to explore new methods. Consumer behavior and expectations changes, it’s unlikely that the strategies that work today will work without at least a tweak or two for more than a year or so. This means that every service solution you create must be evolving and that you must keep an eye on new technologies, explore additional solutions, and constantly search for more effective methods of mining consumer data.

Customer service and A.

I technology can help you maintain and enhance your approach to customer experience. AiChat’s Conversational Service Suite empowers your service team to deliver an exceptional and personalized brand experience driven by unified data and customer insights. If you’re ready to add a chatbot to your customer service department, we invite you to reach out to AiChat today!