As an organization, you always have the best interests of your target group at heart. With the right services or products, businesses strive to win loyal customers, and governments the trust of citizens. But how do you make moments of contact meaningful enough that customers become enthusiastic enough to stay? A smart combination of AI and the right digital experience platform (DXP) makes it possible.
To serve customers well, you need to know what they expect and how you can make a relevant contribution. Relevance, trust and transparency are important ingredients for binding and engaging a specific target group. This applies to customers of a store or online shop, but also for citizens who need to take care of something with a government office.
Most customer journeys are pretty grueling. Customers drop out, make unexpected decisions or turn out to be looking for something completely different than they originally appeared to be. The right tools for understanding the customer journey, responding to it and even making it predictable are indispensable – tools that keep customers enthusiastic (customer engagement) and make this possible for your team (employee empowerment), in digital as well as in-person settings.
Navigating the customer journey
Deploying the right digital experience platform increases customer engagement and helps you truly understand their wishes and expectations. With the support of such a platform, you can navigate through the customer journey, gain insights into groupings and build up an understanding of your target group – and perhaps most importantly, you can translate this into a personalized, tailored customer journey. Such hyper-personalization also increases the chances of successful service, returns and strong references.
The intelligence of a DXP is formed by data – as much data as possible. The system uses the many contact points with the customer and combines them with data from other internal and external sources, such as social media and POS systems. This creates a reliable customer view. By applying this customer view integrally in one platform, you can serve the customer at any moment in their customer journey using relevant personalized information.
Composable DXP
Not all platforms are created equally. Good platforms have an open nature and can handle new developments – because in the world of DXP, new developments are constant. They pop up in rapid succession – such as live commerce and TikTok – and the question of what will come next is always hanging in the air. For this reason, we opt for a so-called composable DXP. An important aspect of this is the flexible integration layer of microservices and APIs in a cloud environment, where we set up endpoints to customers mostly based on headless concepts. This also allows us to easily connect to other sources, such as data platforms, ERP systems and other back-end applications.
Macaw works on the basis of Sitecore’s DXP products, a top vendor that shares our vision. As a specialized partner, we are thrilled about the various acquisitions that Sitecore has made recently on the basis of this vision, which strengthens our conviction that the open approach of composable DXP is the right way to go.
Real-time AI
With data as an integral part of the DXP, the use of real-time AI will soon become a serious consideration as a monitoring component. This technology, which is still in its infancy, enables real-time influencing of the customer. Using mathematical models, you can analyze the customer and estimate how they will respond to certain information you provide during the customer journey. You can already use the current AI models in real-time to steer, but you cannot yet feed them new information in real-time.
Real-time AI is most certainly going to deliver new digital experiences. One example in which this demands an application is live commerce, which some foreign marketplaces are experimenting with and is already resulting in interesting experiences. The technology will also blow over to Europe. It is smart to prepare for what is to come – if you work from a composable DXP setup, integrating this new form of experiences in your DXP and in an integral customer journey experience for your customer will be a lot easier than in the classic concept of a single platform.
Hyper-personalization and real-time influencing are developments that many parties are looking forward to. Young people especially are open to its advantages, as long as it leads to relevant offers that really help them. For others, the technology raises privacy concerns, so it’s vital that the technology is applied in a way that offers a level of personalization that the customer is comfortable with.
The strength of Macaw
Macaw is originally strong in data and AI solutions and in the integration of relevant systems and information. These are our sweet spots. We are happy to explain how we connect data, AI and systems to create the basis for unique customer experiences. This is not only interesting for marketers, but touches all parts of an organization.
With the right platform, the right connections and the right market knowledge, you are on your way to effective customer engagement. Because who wouldn’t want enthusiastic customers who feel so comfortable with the way they are approached that they want to remain fully involved with your company?
