The Role of Marketing AI in (Continually) Understanding Customer Sentiment During a Shaky Economy

The uncertain economic environment, likely to continue well into the coming year, requires CMOs and marketing leaders to be tuned in and attentive to customers’ needs like never before. Brands simply can’t afford to miss out on real-time shifts in customer behavior and trending preferences. As innovative customer experience improvements arrive and prevailing market practices evolve, always-on monitoring capabilities that capture customer sentiment data as it becomes available—and then quickly identify insights—are essential for continuously correcting course in a tough market. For comprehensive visibility, monitoring must cover not just a brand’s own customers, but also uncover opportunities revealed within the sentiments of competitors’ customers.

Unfortunately, marketing leaders leveraging traditional means of collecting customer sentiment— such as market research projects, social listening, and CX platforms—require heavy manual analysis and costly investments. And even when that investment is made, these strategies often deliver an incomplete picture of the opportunities available. However, emerging AI-based approaches that bring automation to collecting and processing customer data can now enable continuous marketing insights, allowing brands to come to objective conclusions and rapidly implement customer-facing improvements.

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Marketing AI makes data insights not just actionable, but understandable and trustworthy

Even brands informed by cost-intensive data analyst teams often need help to preserve an accurate interpretation of customer data throughout the process of building new customer experiences. Human fallibility and unconscious biases become obstacles to harnessing insights and shepherding them through to a final product. In many cases, managers will champion the use of data when it supports their predetermined position or hypothesis…but will then question data if it fails to comport with the story they’ve already told themselves. Too many marketing teams have a dashboard displaying data activities simply to “tick the box” and say they leverage data, using data for data’s sake without understanding the insights it actually reveals.

That yawning gap between raw data and the objective engagement and interpretation that makes data valuable is always matched by an identical gap in a brand’s responsiveness to customer needs. Those shortcomings demonstrate that it’s far from enough for brands to just go through the motions when harnessing data: they must commit to data-driven customer experience improvements, even if insights don’t match their preconceived notions. 

At the heart of this issue is that customer sentiment data is full of noise and can lend itself to inaccurate subjective interpretations; AI promises to bridge this gap in understanding. Executed smartly, AI tools deployed in the context of customer sentiment will deliver data-driven insights supported by unprecedented clarity. Human decision-makers need a clear and practical understanding of the data patterns that AI identifies when gleaning insights. Backed by this trust, marketers can present key human-oriented insights to brand leaders and explain the impetus for new customer experience initiatives without getting bogged down in data interpretation.

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Marketing AI sees what humans don’t

AI analysis of customer sentiment data can provide continuous revelations and suggest beneficial new business practices based on patterns that human eyes would never discover. Buried within the noise of social media customer mentions, reviews, customer service interactions, surveys, and more, AI can recognize emerging trends in a far more objective, confident and responsive manner than human teams. 

AI can also rapidly and thoroughly analyze available data on competing brands to reveal opportunities for emulation or differentiation. Take, for example, a restaurant business that embraces an AI-based marketing analysis strategy. Say that automated AI analysis of a competitor’s customer sentiment finds that many customers are praising that business’s lunch menu portions and breadth of high-quality entrée options. AI-generated key insights suggest that matching that competitor’s lunch tactics should result in a better customer experience, increased customer sentiment, and, at the end of the day, more revenue.

A sure guide across uncertain economic terrain

Marketers that present objective AI insights to brand decision-makers have a fully data-supported plan of action ready to implement, one that those leaders should have an easy time signing off on. With economic upheaval continuing and brands needing assured courses of action, turning to trusted AI may provide the certainty brands are looking for.