Generative AI has captured the attention of senior management across industries. But rather than rushing into the unknown, it’s prudent to consider a variety of use cases and prioritize those that will have the biggest impact on your key performance indicators (KPIs). Assess the potential impacts and outcomes from a big-picture view, rather than one process at a time, considering which metrics are sub-par, or which parts of the business are underperforming. Are your offers converting at an optimal rate? Or is your churn rate the biggest concern? Taking this approach enables you to choose the use cases most likely to deliver quick wins and improved customer experience.
Generative AI can analyze large volumes of data very quickly to identify patterns and trends that can help businesses develop products, create subscriptions, and bundle offers in demand by subscribers. It can also identify opportunities to improve existing products and services.
There’s so much potential with generative AI that it’s tempting to go all-in once you’ve mitigated the security and data privacy risks (see our recent blog post on trusting the outputs of generative AI). Choosing a future-proof foundation is smart. It’s also worth taking your time with an incremental approach to learn while doing. This ensures you identify and address dependencies to avoid negative impacts on the customer experience.
Three use cases that boost concept-to-care KPIs
Generative AI implemented with purpose across concept-to-care processes can improve your KPIs. Below are three use cases that employ the data from your CRM and billing systems to help you decide where to start:
1. Optimize your offer conversions
Customer acquisition is a priority for most subscription businesses, as is customer retention and loyalty. But historically, the front end of the customer lifecycle has received more attention than the part after the original sale. This must shift in step with changing customer expectations, needs, and preferences.
Go-to-market strategies are often determined as a long-term plan, without the dynamic ability to accommodate individual customers. Generative AI helps companies keep pace by providing data-driven insights to help you present the right offer to the right customer at the right time. Essentially, the holy grail of sales and marketing.
Consider the potential impact on a customer’s lifetime value if you can proactively create an offer that relates to their behavior and subscription status, as well as trends evidenced by similar customers who have acted on similar offers.
As mentioned earlier, AI can analyze huge volumes of data very quickly. When incorporated into a platform built to enable complex offer and billing scenarios, you can now capitalize on new opportunities when the time is right.
2. Increase customer retention
Excessive customer effort is a big contributor to churn. Offering upgrades, discounts, and freebies to retain unsatisfied customers is an expensive way to reduce churn. Customer expectations have increased since the pandemic, along with a low tolerance for poor experiences. Subscription fatigue is also a factor playing out in more customer defections. Generative AI offers a competitive advantage to companies that choose to use it preemptively.
Companies need to get proactive by addressing high customer effort areas before frustration sets in. Use generative AI to mine your CRM and billing system for patterns of behavior that suggest potential churn. Given this data the AI then provides proactive recommendations to avert defection. This means taking a concept-to-care approach across the customer lifecycle to identify changes in sentiment, subscription levels, product adoption and usage, and more. This way you can act before customers reach the no-return point of churn.
Yet, even if faced with a customer wanting to defect, generative AI can help you save an account. It can analyze a customer’s history in real time and make recommendations or structure compelling offers to assist agents with better service. This often results in customers deciding to stay. As a result, the outputs from generative AI help you maintain current annual revenue per user (ARPU), or even increase it.
3. Capitalize on upsell opportunities
Generative AI is a pattern-recognition machine. Connecting your CRM, billing, and product usage data enables AI to identify commonalities across customers. With this data-driven insight it can highlight customers with similar traits for upsell offers.
Consider a scenario where generative AI assesses your billing data to identify the characteristics of customers who choose to subscribe to a bundle of the same three services. It then assesses product usage data and learns that customers who use the services three days per week tend to stay subscribed longer. The data also reveals that most of those customers live in the same region.
The AI then searches your entire subscriber database to identify a new segment of customers who are most likely to consider upgrading to that bundle of services. The resulting campaign grows revenue, increases CLV, and makes renewal more likely.
Get an assist from generative AI for better CX
Generative AI can provide actionable insights that enhance the customer experience across the entirety of your subscribers’ experience with your brand. Considering that 40% of customer inquiries relate to billing and payments, enriching your billing system and CRM data with generative AI enables you to provide precise and relevant responses to customer inquiries, which will improve the customer experience and optimize business performance.
Read our eBook on Transforming the End-to-End Customer Experience with Generative AI to learn more
