Happiness is a good indicator of great customer experience. That’s why we’re attracted to brands that understand us, provide value and help us find what we are looking for. In the same way, our tolerance for the opposite is rapidly diminishing.

It seems we are not alone.

Although a staggering 80 percent of companies claim they have a holistic view of their customers, only 8 percent of customers feel they are getting a tailored, valuable experience from the brands they interact with.

So why is there such a gap? The short answer is, crafting the perfect CX is not easy! To really succeed in CX means a personalized approach, seamless delivery across every channel and real-time response to customer’s wants and needs.

This requires vision, strategy, creativity, data, technology, manpower and coordination to name a few, as well as visibility across all your channels and touch-points.

Clearly, this can’t all be achieved at once but needs to be approached as a combination of longer term plans, intersected by quick wins. It’s why so many organizations are on the pathway to improving CX but not there yet.

The current focus areas for many marketers seeking to improve CX is through personalization. The reasons for this are clear.

Not only does it increase engagement and loyalty, it also delivers substantial business results.

In a recent report, McKinsey found that personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as 50 percent, lifts revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increases the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent. So, of course, we’d all like that!

The question is, how do organizations deliver on the personalization challenge?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making the personalization dream a reality. AI excels in doing things that humans can’t. Reviewing vast amounts of data, surfacing patterns, spotting anomalies, collating and acting on insights in real-time. It’s this power that marketers can leverage to speed up delivery of seamless CX and personalization at scale.

Although it’s not possible to list all the ways that AI will revolutionize here are a few quick wins that can deliver substantial results and ROI:

• Create unique customer profiles so that you can deliver true a truly personalized experience. Marketers currently create and rely on static personas that represent a “bucket” of customers based on basic attributes – age, gender, economic situation – and assumed characteristics. These personas are neither accurate nor updated on an ongoing basis. With AI, each customer can be given a unique profile which is continually updated based upon their behavior, interactions, locations, buying behavior and more. This changes the game – allowing marketers to move away from assumption and instead deliver experience based on individual wants, needs and interests.

• Making content marketing personal and valuable: Content marketing is at the foundation of any customer engagement strategy and yet many companies distribute content on a generic basis. This is partly due to poor content tagging making it hard to surface the right content to the customer, and partly as we don’t have the ability to micro segment our customer databases.AI solves both of these issues.

  Firstly, cognitive tagging now allows AI to quickly and accurately tag content down to a deeper level that we’d be able to achieve through our marketing teams.

  Secondly, AI can drive customer insights direct to marketers’ fingertips, creating automatic micro-segments for marketers to target. Putting cogitative content and AI-assisted targeting together is a very powerful combination.

• Make each online experience personal and seamless. AI can now monitor web and mobile interactions for each individual customer and send the marketing team an alert if something is affecting a customer’s journey. Better still, it’s possible to hone in on each customers’ journey individually to see what has happened and if something has gone wrong. Imagine having the ability to solve customers’ website challenges in real-time and making your future customer journeys faultless.

• Although these may seem futuristic, they’re not. They are here and now and easily accessible.

  The important thing to remember with AI is that it is constantly learning and honing its intelligence to deliver better results. Therefore, the quicker you adopt AI the better, as you will always have the first mover’s advantage.