Enhancing Channel Marketing Program Outcomes with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Consumer technology has been a driving force in recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) investment and advancement. Think Amazon, Netflix, and Apple, among others. Yet, it’s not just consumer technology that’s driving the advancement of AI and ML. Brands are also employing several use cases of AI and ML to automate and optimize their marketing channel programs, enhancing the desired outcomes for brands and channel partners alike.
The two most common use cases are driving exceptional customer support experiences and optimizing digital marketing.
Exceptional Customer Support
Gartner predicts that by 2025, customer service organizations who embed AI in their customer engagement center platforms will increase operational efficiencies by 25 percent, revolutionizing customer care in the process. Customer support is often where omnichannel strategies fail due to lack of real-time contextual data and insight. There’s an abundance of use cases in customer service where AI and ML can improve overall omnichannel performance.
AI and ML are also enabling brands, retailers and manufacturers to define customer personas and journeys more precisely. In addition, brands are using AI and ML to personalize partner experiences at the persona level. By combining brand engagement, past participation, content viewed, transaction histories and, most of all, channel and communication preferences, brands are creating precise personas for each of their key customer segments.
Similarly, marketing channel program support powered by ML allows customer support leaders to:
• Produce faster and more satisfying solutions the first time
• Prevent calls before they happen
• Redirect issues to digital self-service channels
• Equip human agents to deliver high-quality support
Digital Marketing Optimization
While AI and ML is helping enhance customer support functions within channel marketing programs, they are also supporting the optimization of digital marketing effectiveness and efficiency. AI and ML are improving marketing and selling effectiveness by enabling brands to track purchase decisions back to campaigns executed by channel partners and understand why specific personas purchased while others didn’t.  In addition, marketers are using ML to find patterns in user activities on a website. This helps them predict the further behavior of users and quickly optimize advertising offers. Key benefits of machine learning in marketing include:
• Enabling analysis of more data in less time
• Rapidly adapt to changes and new data
• Allowing automation marketing processes and helping eliminate routine tasks
Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Life
Whether brands are trying to improve their customer support and experience capabilities or optimize their digital marketing, there are a number of applications that bring AI and ML to life. These include predictive chat, chatbots/virtual agents, predictive routing, historical customer interactions and purchases, personalizing content and responses, triggering automated communications based on customer responses, understanding the context of customer inquiries, automated sequencing of messaging based on customer responses, providing real-time insights to agents to optimize issue resolution, and providing information that enhances the interaction with customers, such as providing support specialists with a customer’s name.
With AI and ML technology firmly entrenched in channel marketing technologies and solutions, the number of use cases will only increase moving forward, helping brands and their channel partners achieve their desired outcomes.
About Channel Fusion
For nearly 20 years, Channel Fusion has provided brands and their channel partners with a wide variety of solutions and industry expertise. We continue to invest in the overall ecosystem of our channel marketing offering to ensure our clients provide their partners with an optimal customer experience. Our core technologies and configurable platforms are supported by a team of customer-centric “Fusers.” Let us know if you’d like to learn more about how we deliver desired outcomes for brands and their channel partners.