How 3 Industries Tap into AI and IoT Personalization to Compete on CX
Before global-brand household names, local brands and smaller markets allowed for face-to-face communication on a first-name basis — think Andy Griffith. As brands became regional and even global, luxury personalization was performed via customer-relationship-management software — a hotel personnel remembering a guest’s preferred room, for example. But what was once luxury treatment is now the status-quo and consumers need more to remain loyal.
Digital helped brands stay competitive via data-advised recommendations consumers loved — think Amazon and Netflix. But shifting customer expectations mean no new personalization initiative will be enough for long. Gartner reports that brands that constantly invest in new technologies that offer fully personalized customer experiences (CX) — from brand awareness to purchase and beyond — will enjoy a 30 percent higher selling rate than those that don’t.
Brands turn to full-spectrum personalization to keep consumers loyal.
So, brands must always be prepared to adopt new technologies that improve their personalization abilities. And, if they’re observant, they know that the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to shape how we interact with products and services at all stages of the customer journey. In fact, many brands from varied industries are already tapping into the powerful partnership of AI and IoT for full-spectrum CX personalization.
Healthcare brands create complete-health views for personalized care.
A 58-year-old male is rushed to the emergency room with internal bleeding. After locating and stopping the bleeding, a doctor approaches with a seemingly unbearable diagnosis: growing liver cancer.
Given an underlying liver disease, he could receive a curative liver transplant, but the tumors must be small to qualify for a liver from the overburdened organ pool. Further tests reveal his tumors are unlikely to remain within criteria during a long organ-wait period. Both the patient and his wife wish they had caught the liver cancer earlier. But liver cancer is asymptomatic until it’s often too late for curative treatment.
To prevent similar trauma to more families, IBM Research is developing a nanotechnology device that’s literally a lab on a chip. The handheld device can isolate bioparticles like viruses, exosomes, and even DNA down to twenty nanometers in diameter — a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. In doing so, it detects diseases like cancer in bodily fluids even when patients have no symptoms.
But that’s not all. Gustavo Stolovitzky, program director of translational systems biology and nanobiotechnology at IBM Research says, “Our goal is that, in the next 5 years, we will be able to combine this and other nanotechnology with AI to overcome current challenges and detect diseases like cancer at the earliest possible stages.”
Nanotechnology devices can be used by patients as easily as taking a home pregnancy test. Then, diagnostic data will be sent to the cloud and combined with other IoT-health-device data — such as smart-watch or sleep-monitor data. Together, the data shows a complete patient-health view, enabling a personalized and real-time plan via artificial-intelligence analysis.
Hospitality brands offer moment-by-moment personalization to delight every guest.
When business traveling, you check into a Marriott hotel and go to your room. Inside, each television set greets you by name. It’s late and you have an early meeting, so you decide to go right to bed.
In the night, you wake up needing to use the restroom. As you get up, red floor lights illuminate the path in the dark. As you get back into bed, you take a deep breath, noting the room never feels stuffy as the oxygen levels automatically adjust to the number of people in the room.
In the morning, blue lights sooth you into a waking state. You walk over to the room’s smart mirror, which guides you in a morning yoga routine while monitoring your heart rate in the process. As the day breaks, you look around to personalized art work on the walls.
You have meetings all day and return to your room itching for a stress-relieving workout. Your phone alerts you when your preferred exercise machines are vacant and ready for your usage. After your workout, you enjoy a smart shower in which the faucet automatically adjusts the water to a perfect temperature for a soothing experience.
It’s like a vacation wrapped in a business trip. And Marriott has it covered. Partnering with Samsung and Legrand, the brand created a prototype smart room that can offer this and other personalized experience, including a family-vacation experience.
“The idea is if I’m a Marriott Rewards member, and my profile has my attributes and dislikes/likes, it can be set up to do things based on me and my type of trip, more personally,” explains Ken Freeman, senior vice president of demand generation at Legrand. Guests simply op into the brand’s reward program to create a profile, then step into their personalized AI/IoT-powered experience.
Auto brands partner with autotech firms for real-time personalization on-the-go.
While driving on the freeway in her newly purchased car, Sarah hears a ding from the car dashboard. And, with that, her day becomes stressful. A tiny engine light appears on the dashboard display. With little information pointing to a cause, her imagination runs wild. She pictures herself on the side of the freeway, car steaming. She pulls off the freeway and begins making calls to the dealership. In the meantime, she worries about being late or missing work completely.
The good news is such situations are soon to become a dying breed. This is because, by 2020, there will be 250 million connected cars on the road. And, with connected cars comes big data, offering potential for real-time diagnostics of current and potential problems. Even disconnected IoT cars store data that, once connected, can be used to create a personalized driving experience.
For example, CarForce partnered with AT&T to reconnect disconnected cars to vehicle service centers and, thereby, rescue people from scary dashboard dings. With permission, dealership service centers can install small devices into customer cars, then gather data from all present connected sensors. Using the data, CarForce leans on AI to diagnose and alert dealers to potential vehicle problems.
In turn, dealers help drivers stay ahead of scary freeway scenarios via preventative maintenance alerts and proactive steps drivers can take to solve existing problems. Even better, by pairing IoT and AI, car dealerships have a new way of competing on CX: instead of simply selling the car, they become the trusted source of maintenance as well, offering a full-spectrum personalized car-ownership experience.
Brands can take small steps to prepare for consumers’ futuristic personalization expectations.
Business Insider reports that forty percent of brands will cease to exist in seven years if they don’t compete well on CX. Some brands are clearly working to offer cutting-edge personalization, thus raising the bar for all industries. This means, given 20.4 billion connected devices expected by 2020, brands must know how to tap into them for personalized experiences.
Three steps help brands begin modernizing their personalization technology and so replace the status-quo with cutting-edge customer experiences:
1. Decide what technology will provide industry-specific CX personalization, with few pitfalls. While HIPPA may create obstacles for healthcare companies’ large-scale IoT and AI personalization strategies, IoT and AI it can still help to personalize one-to-one relationships with patients via personal-device data analysis.
2. Prepare for emerging technology via baby steps. Marriott didn’t begin by creating smart rooms. Instead, they first experimented with Alexa’s ability to provide guests with more personalized CXs. Meanwhile, they planned their next advancement.
3. Develop partnerships with tech firms offering industry-specific personalization capabilities. CarForce is one such tech firm. Partnering dealerships and maintenance centers don’t have to create in-house capabilities. Via a strategic partnership, they cater IoT and AI to the personalization needs of their target markets, creating a win for the consumer and the brand.
With three small steps, brands can make big strides toward competing on the all-important personalized experience of the future.
