We live in a world where personalized consumer experiences are increasingly the norm. To think, a couple of decades ago, the only options at the coffee shop were cream and sugar or black. Nowadays, you assume you’ll be able to order your half-caff, no-foam, almond milk cappuccino with two pumps of sugar-free vanilla—anything less would seem outdated.
Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store or a fully digital SaaS company, the customer expectation of personalization is keeping pace with coffee orders. Research from McKinsey found that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. 76 percent reported getting frustrated when this doesn’t happen. AI tools can help companies understand their customers’ expectations from the very first interaction. With this insight, companies can improve experiences in order to drive engagement, retention, and ultimately, growth.
At Jotform, our teams across every function are constantly researching new ways to incorporate AI-driven personalization into our processes to make every part of the customer journey just a bit more personalized. If you’re wondering how to get started, here are some simple strategies that have proven effective for us.
Refining marketing and sales campaigns
If you’ve ever received a gift and thought, “This person doesn’t know my taste at all,” then you can relate to the frustration of impersonal offerings. Personalization means making customers feel special. According to McKinsey, it’s linked to a more positive customer experience overall. In your sales and marketing campaigns. AI tools can play an essential role in making your consumers feel unique and understood— “seen” in the Gen Z parlance. Take the Zia app: it uses AI to analyze customer data and understand their preferences and behaviors. With this insight, it customizes interactions, recommendations, and communications to match each customer’s specific wants and needs. For example, Zia can determine the optimal time to reach out to a client based on their activity, ensuring your message is received at the best moment. Zia can even identify trends in your own workflows and suggest ways to automate routine tasks, making your processes more efficient and freeing up time for more meaningful customer engagement.
By leveraging AI-driven tools, you can create more personalized experiences that resonate with each customer, building stronger connections, boosting loyalty, and driving the bottom line. When crafts retailer Michaels Stores, for example, increased email campaign personalization from 20 to 95 percent, they saw increases in click-through rates: 41 percent for SMS campaigns and 25 percent for emails. At Jotform, we’ve seen similar results—the more personalized the campaign, the greater the engagement.
Enhancing customer support
The capabilities of AI-driven chatbots are more astounding each day—well beyond automating replies to frequently asked questions (although that is a valuable function). They can also create and continually enhance customer support ticket responses. They can learn from past tickets to automatically suggest fields for new tickets, providing more consistent responses and decreasing manual workloads for employees. AI-powered chatbots can handle appointment bookings, soliciting the required logistical information so that customers know their concerns are being tended to. For their part, employees can organize their schedules with less personal input (and energy). AI chatbots can help customers make purchase decisions and locate the products and services they need. They can also collect customer feedback and insights, helping companies to continually tailor and improve the experience.
AI-powered chatbots have proven to be highly effective. For example, ING’s Netherlands subsidiary replaced its rules-based customer chatbot with an AI-driven chatbot. Seven weeks later, they found the AI chatbot was providing a remarkably better experience, helping 20 percent more customers avoid long waits and receive instant assistance. Advancements like this can make customer support processes both more efficient and personalized.
Empowering data-driven personalization
In Tokyo, the regular McDonald’s menu features a teriyaki chicken filet sandwich. In Paris, you’ll find macarons on the “MacDo” menu. In Texas, there’s a sausage burrito. The fast food chain’s practice of diversifying its offerings based on the tastes and expectations of different customer bases is a basic example of market segmentation—dividing consumers into sub-groups based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria. Then, a company can tweak its “menu” to better serve each segment.
AI-powered tools can help companies gather comprehensive customer data and perform tasks like market segmentation. They can generate insights and reports based on that information, enabling companies to set data-driven objectives and KPIs that speak to each customer’s preferences.
As McKinsey notes, these data-driven decisions drive repeat engagement, which creates more data. Companies can design even more targeted experiences for customers, creating a flywheel—a loop of data and personalization that enhances customer satisfaction and fuels sustainable growth.
Boosting efficiency and enhancing human-centered service
At Jotform, integrating AI tools into our customer support processes enables employees to focus on higher-impact tasks, like novel customer issues that require personal attention and creative problem-solving. By delegating routine inquiries to AI, our team members have more time to focus on understanding our users’ unique pain points and developing tailored solutions. This shift improves operational efficiency and empowers our team to deliver more thoughtful, human-centered services. Customers are happier—and employees are more satisfied, too. One of the key advantages of leveraging AI tools to automate manual tasks that don’t require personal input—be it taking meeting notes, scanning for security issues, or generating standard replies—is that it frees professionals to focus their time and energy on more meaningful tasks, like listening to users and figuring out how to serve their unique needs. In a sense, automation is the key to unlocking greater freedom, creativity, and strategic thinking.
Despite widespread fears, AI tools aren’t necessarily stealing human jobs. Instead, they’re liberating professionals to excel at the parts of their jobs that are most human—for example, tasks that require listening, empathy, and innovation. For companies, automation is an investment that pays dividends over time. This approach not only enhances employee satisfaction by eliminating repetitive tasks but also ensures that the most important stakeholders—customers—receive the highest level of personalized attention and care.
