AI is the key to connecting brands with customers in an empathetic way

Brands are beginning to see the need to incorporate emotional intelligence into the customer experience. It is crucial to implement automation in the sales, marketing and customer service industry while also finding ways to personalize an experience for a customer using empathy.

Studies show human empathy is on the decline – a deficit costing the average brand $300 million in lost revenue every year. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) to help brands recognize opportunities to respond in an empathetic way are on the rise. 

Understanding the customer mindset really starts with brands truly connecting with their customers to effectively market, sell, and serve. Empathetic AI solutions are coming into the picture to compliment and empower sales, marketing, and service professionals on the customer front lines; these are helping to identify the customer’s emotional state and intent, enabling organizations to deliver a high-definition customer experience.

Now more than ever, customers are seeking easy, effortless experiences that satisfy their current and future needs. In fact, how customers feel drives their purchasing habits, and some 86 percent will pay more for a great customer experience. This is where brand emotional intelligence plays a critical role. McKinsey recently referenced a study that evaluated 170 publicly traded companies on their empathic abilities and found that businesses with empathy within their culture, and toward the customer, will have a net positive benefit on their bottom line. The top ten leaders in empathy outperformed the bottom ten by two times on the stock market. 

Gartner agrees that companies that deploy empathy significantly outperform those that don’t, in terms of sales and profit. Designing an emotionally aware organisation is increasingly becoming a topic at the top of the board room agendas. 

Empathy is critical in the route to offering customers great experiences; however, empathy can be difficult to achieve without the right plan in place. According to Forrester, consumers are gravitating toward brands that emphasize people over profits. While nearly all businesses know the importance of showing customer empathy, most struggle to deliver it on a consistent basis.

Many organisations are prioritising humans and bots working together to bring out each other’s best capabilities by using AI to identify how customers feel, so customer-facing professionals can understand and respond in real-time. Today, AI-driven sentiment analysis capabilities are supercharging CRM functions such as sales, marketing, and service interactions with the power of knowing each customer and prospect’s emotional state and intent.