Have you all recently visited any branch of City Union Bank? I happened to visit one and it was a brilliant, refreshing experience interacting with “Lakshmi”! No, Lakshmi is not a girl, she’s India’s first banking Robot. She did everything that a person sitting on the other side would normally do – told my account balance, told me the loan interest rates and wished me a “good day” too. She is a humanoid!
A humanoid is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered robot who learns with every interaction he has with the end customer. The larger objective is over a period of time, it can support other banking roles with insightful data and analytics.
We as Marketers have 3 big lessons to learn from what City Union Bank has leveraged:
- Improve Efficiency and Save Intelligent, Precious Man Hours: It is important for us as marketers to understand the need for “Automating” repetitive tasks and save intelligent man hours for more productive work. Lot of brands have already adopted such technologies to improve their marketing efficiencies – HDFC Life has done it for their Cross-Sell campaigns, Hellotravel.com has done it for their recommendation emails, Lovevivah.com has automated their customer journey based campaigns. Many other brands are doing it too. Are you?
- Customers Love and Demand a Personalised Treatment: Personalising customer experience is getting tougher with the ever increasing number of businesses. Artificial Intelligence makes this simple as it has the ability to analyse vast data sets way more efficiently than a human being and thus builds personalised conversations with respective clusters.Look at a situation where we have millions of users coming to your website each of them with a fairly heavy wallet, as a business you cannot have 1000+ people sitting to interact with each of these users are. A good combination of AI & Chatbots makes a strong impact to offer a personalised experience to the user and make him complete the transaction.
- Risk taking to get the first movers advantage: While I have seen a lot of marketers talk about Automation and Artificial Intelligence, lot of them tend to take the back seat when it comes to implementing these technologies. Being a new and advanced technology the time taken to implement is bound to be higher and you expect to face a few ups and downs, but if the brands are ready to take this risk now, they can definitely make the most out of it in a few months (if done right).
All in all I think, Automation and Artificial Intelligence will define brands’ success in the next 1-2 years. So it’s important that brands start ingraining the seeds of these technologies from today in their Marketing Mix.
If you’re planning to implement Marketing Automation immediately, then do get in touch with us!