Personalisation and real-time engagement are the keys to building lasting customer relationships in today's competitive market. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of this revolution, redefining how companies earn customer loyalty. By analysing customer data, AI creates personalised experiences that make customers feel valued and understood by promptly predicting and meeting customer needs. It's in the execution – the how and why of our efforts to enhance the relevance and impact of our marketing efforts. Our competitors are already using AI to create experiences of continuous, real-time interaction. These techniques, when applied practically, foster relationships with our customers. When we integrate AI into our loyalty marketing tactical handbook, we have to do it prudently. We can't take our hands off the wheel, but we do have to open ourselves up to what machine learning models and analytical tools can do for us. We've got to accept the reality of these tools and that some of our competitors are raising the bar for customer engagement and mass personalisation to drive the goal of increased consumer loyalty.
AI analyses customer data to create personalised rewards and offers, making each customer feel valued and understood.
AI enables real-time interactions, which are impractical through human intervention. Always-on availability for brands with their customers is becoming a must-have factor for customer retention in rapidly shortening lifecycles within the customer journey. AI can be deployed to customer transactional data in real-time and allow businesses to offer personalised experiences. This ability to deploy real-time instant gratification in customer interactions makes customers feel valued. This aspect of real-time interaction is already well-trodden ground in most industries. Third-party service providers provide AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants integrated with apps and websites to create the perception that customer needs are being instantly and aggressively addressed, building trust and satisfaction. No workforce anywhere is profitably able to monitor and adapt to the firehose of customer interactions. Still, we can put these tools in the hands of our employees and deploy these capabilities for our customers in a human-managed framework.
AI examines shopping habits to suggest rewards that customers want.
Machine-learning models allow us to look deeply into customer shopping transactional data. Leading retail companies are leveraging these models to identify patterns in purchase histories, not just tracking what customers buy but uncovering patterns and preferences. Smart marketers don't just offer me more of the same the next time I log in. Take that information and use it to drive incremental growth in sales. There must be something in it for us, so let's offer our coffee lovers a special discount on their favourite blend but make that discount only available when that customer visits the store. Marketing teams should think about how to execute these insights to tailor rewards in a way that delivers value for both the customer and the company. We've got to create 'aha' moments for customers in ways that aren't just discounting sales they would have already given us – or bombarding us with a hundred advertisements on ballpoint pen refills because I bought a package the day before. I already have them, so why are you doing it? I'm looking at you, online retailer that starts with A.
We are not saying AI is better at strategic marketing than a trained and experienced team of marketers with decades of experience in their industries. We must, however, concede that AI can do things with massive sets of data more quickly than we could
AI predicts future needs by learning from past purchases, ensuring offers are always relevant.
In customer service, AI is like a multilingual, always-on concierge. Companies are now deploying AI-driven chatbots that do more than answer queries; they offer personalized advice and solutions. A fitness brand, for instance, uses chatbots to recommend workout routines and nutrition tips based on the user's activity history. This is a call to action for marketing teams: leverage AI to transform customer interactions from transactional to conversational. It's about building a dialogue where the customer feels heard and understood, turning every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen loyalty.
AI identifies critical moments in a customer's journey to provide timely and relevant rewards.
Embracing AI's ability to track and adapt to customer behaviours helps us get our arms around complex spending and interaction transactional data. We want to use AI to allow us to surface non-obvious trends in customer feedback across larger and larger sets of consumer dimensions. We want to use those insights to create offers and communications that respond to this feedback in faster cycles across smaller and smaller cohorts. By continuously updating loyalty programs based on real-time data, we can ensure we're offering more targeted and relevant offers in ways that feel deeply personal. These actions communicate that we understand our customers in ways that convert them to fans.
We are not saying AI is better at strategic marketing than a trained and experienced team of marketers with decades of experience in their industries. We must, however, concede that AI can do things with massive sets of data more quickly than we could, even with sophisticated real-time analytical tools. Successful and growing loyalty marketing teams will be the ones AI doesn't threaten – nor take a hands-off / lights-out approach to deploying it. Teams that adopt AI as part of their workflow, and react appropriately to the good ideas they surface, will be the winners in the competition for the hearts and minds of our customers.
SCCG Research's full research brief on loyalty and AI will be available tomorrow.
