AI Beyond Buzzwords: Three Impacts That Will Last

It's clear that AI is already transforming the way brand marketers engage with their customers. It allows for deeper insights that can be used to improve customer interactions at scale — something that's especially important for multi-location brands with a diverse customer base.

But discussions of how marketers should use AI often feel like a collection of buzzwords. AI is set to change so much of the user experience, but as a marketer, it can be hard to know exactly how AI tools can help you truly deliver a better customer experience.

Below, we'll dive into three impacts of AI that should outlast the trend cycles — and how your brand can take advantage.

Underlying any AI copilot, search, or chat experience you might hear about is the data and knowledge base powering it. AI can't "read" your information to generate the right engagement or answer for a customer if your data isn't stored correctly.

Thus, in the "age of AI," the most important key to success will be having a strong strategy for storing essential business data in an organized, structured manner.

With well-structured data, you can successfully use AI to:

• Surface accurate information from your data to answer your customers' questions (through search, chat, etc)

• Accurately understand when there is no answer — and say "I don't know" instead of hallucinating an answer

• Quickly identify when there are gaps in your knowledge base that should be filled with new content

• Understand trends in customer behavior on your digital properties— and improve how your digital touchpoints respond to those trends

But it's not just about how your data is stored: it's about the quality and quantity of data you feed to your knowledge graph. You need to make sure you're accounting for every want, need, or search a customer has along their discovery journey — and the data you provide should aim to answer these questions. This is important not only for the customer on your site, but for the way they engage with search engine results in our AI-driven world.

As a marketer, the first way you should be using AI is to collect insights from your customer interactions across all of your various digital touchpoints.

When customers search on your website, interact with your chat function, or click on your pages, they're telling you meaningful information about what they want. AI tools can save you meaningful time processing and making sense of these wants (versus doing so manually).

To start collecting valuable data points on customer intent, you'll need to look at your touchpoints that see high customer engagement: again, search on your website, chat, and/or an AI copilot. Then, AI clustering algorithms can "read" this dataset to find common trends in what your customers want or need. (For example, if your pizza shop website shows that your customers are searching for "pepperoni pizzas" in NYC but "hawaiian pizzas" in Philadelphia, you can use that information to curate and customize your localized content accordingly.)

By understanding the needs and intents of your customer base on the local level, you can build better content and deliver a better customer experience. Expect to see AI tools in action more and more often to surface trends in customer intent — and then used to build out targeted content and offers.

With the advent of generative AI, copilots are not only viable — they're an incredibly valuable way to collect data on customer intent (as described above).

These aren't the "copilots" of the early aughts. Assistive digital tools used to lead to a stilted customer experience (remember MS Word Clippy, anyone?) where users often got answers that didn't make sense. Now, a copilot doesn't have to be in the little chat pop-up screen that we're all used to; instead, you can get innovative with the UI based on your brand's needs.

When setting up a copilot with Yext, for example, you can set up prompts for the copilot to use your brand voice, varying the prompt and recommended answers based on customer location. You can answer customer questions quickly and directly from your knowledge base.

If you have live support agents, this will save them valuable time. And if a question can't be answered by your copilot from your knowledge base? That's a valuable signal that you need to add content to your knowledge base so that these types of questions can be answered in the future.

By bearing these impacts in mind — and embracing a strong data management strategy today — you can set your brand up to succeed over the long term, no matter what new types of AI experiences emerge. While every day seems to bring a new "AI for X industry" announcement, your ability to deliver great customer experiences depends on your data foundation.

Ready to take the next step to embrace these lasting impacts of AI? Click here to learn more about AI copilots.