How AI is shaping Customer Experience (CX) in the Auto Industry

AI is a super important technical discontinuity. As big as anything since the Internet and mobile phones - two of the biggest advances in our lifetimes. AI allows companies and brands to understand their customers in a much more profound basis. The bigger the brand, the more products and models, the more interactions on the Internet, the more digitally recorded touch-points with customers.

All that data, from transaction data to marketing communications to social media, even macroeconomic data, can all be used by AI technology (especially machine learning) to help businesses understand their customers.

AI models work on the following basis: you decide the outcome you would like to see – for dealers and car brands – let’s say that is wanting to measure a customer’s commitment to their brand and products. So, they start loading their customer data into a model, the models may not know much about an individual customer to start with, but never mind, once it has the data, the model can predict what an individual will buy, looks for when that individual buys, compares and says, geez, I got it wrong, you bought a minivan for $40,000, instead of what I predicted, which was a convertible at $45,000. So, the model goes and changes the weights it assigns to events, so it predicts what that individual bought, a $40,000 minivan.

AI at Scale

Now that may not sound that much of a game-changer but imagine if your business sells millions of cars a year. That is, thousands of times a day, customers are buying and making decisions. AI models love this number of customers because they can compare all the customers versus each other. When they look at one customer, they are also comparing that customer to millions of other customers. So, when the AI assigns weights to events in that individual’s customer journey, it is keeping in mind all the other customers, who look like that individual (digitally speaking).

The model, in other words, learns. They see billions of patterns and in this auto example, it takes trillions of calculations to train a model.

Why does all this matter? It means that brands and dealers can understand their customers better, and they can then tailor their approach in a much more systematic way. They can stop spamming customers with useless emails because they know better what an individual is actually likely to buy. They can time their approach. They can send their database marketing content when they are more inclined to buy. They can also send customers useful information, or have someone call a customer when they have had a bad service event.

The Customer Journey

AI also enables businesses to understand how the impact of negative events are on an individual’s propensity for buying another vehicle from them in the future. For example, one thing that drives people crazy is when they bring their minivan to the dealer for a $250 service check, and next thing they know their bill is $1,000. Yikes! This really makes people mad. Nobody wants to receive an email about the latest model, 6 months after they have just bought a car, or have had an expensive service. With AI, businesses can immediately do something about it. Their models will tell them to act.

The magic of AI? It takes all this customer data and makes better sense of it. How important is this? Super important. Brilliant customer insights. Insight that helps companies serve their customers better.

At Cerebri AI, we are laser-focused on bringing the very best AI technology to the market. Our Cerebri Values CX v2 platform is a leap forward in applying artificial intelligence methods to derive insights from customer journeys and making recommendations that drive engagement and results in real-time and at scale.

Our insights, Next Best Action{set}s, are driven by patent-pending object-oriented AI & reinforcement learning modelling methods that time and value up to 4 events in a sequence, rendering both ‘rules-based’ and ‘AI-lite’ technology obsolete for driving maximum results.

Get access to our white paper for more insights here.