On August 25th, 2020, Grazitti Interactive, the parent company of SearchUnify, hosted a virtual summit where community leaders from across the industries and verticals joined in to discuss and share their expertise about adopting AI for communities and community engagement.
During the event, a panel discussion featuring Dave Evans, VP – Social Strategy, Khoros, Venessa Paech, Online Community Strategist & Founder – PeerSense, Mikhial Opletaye, VP, Applied Research – Higher Logic and Vishal Sharma, CTO, SearchUnify was held. In the course of discussion, they broadly discussed the various key drivers that encourage online communities to adopt artificial intelligence and how adopters can measure and improve ROI of community AI investments to justify the cost to management. They also shed light on the ways to scale AI implementation across communities. Here’s a sneak peek of the discussion.
Key Drivers of AI Deployment in Online Communities
Online communities play a significant role in your customer experience. From helping customers self‑serve to encouraging brand loyalty and engagement, these communities ensure better outcomes like CSAT, NPS, customer retention rates, and the list goes on. However, delivering relevant and seamless experience in your community is resource‑intensive, and the problem only aggravates as your customer base grows.
American Express states that angry American customers will share their negative experience with about 15 people.
This is where artificial intelligence kicks in. By personalizing content at scale, AI and ML algorithms keep pace with the demands of growing customer base. When it comes to investing in AI, the leading narratives are often about the potential cost‑cutting. However, the scope of AI extends beyond these hard benefits. From powering hyper‑personalized search experiences, fueling contextual conversations with chatbots to alleviating the burden of community champions with automated processes, AI takes care of everything. Therefore, the prediction as per the new IDC Spending Guide will come as no surprise to you:
The worldwide spending on Artificial Intelligence Systems will be nearly $98 Billion by 2023.
Scaling AI Implementation Across the Community
If you are an early adopter of AI, then we highly recommend you to start small. Just because your end goal is to have enterprise‑wide adoption of AI doesn’t mean you have to aim for that enormous of an outcome right off the bat. For starters, implement chatbots because the scope of an AI bot goes way beyond carrying conversations with humans.
Along with answering transactional questions, AI bots like Community Helper put your community engagement on autopilot. When a community is built on a big social network where you cannot create boundaries, your agents are bombarded with spam posts which can have a huge impact on their mental health. A well‑trained AI chatbot removes these spam posts automatically, taking care of both your community engagement and mental health of the moderator.
Measuring & Improving ROI of Online Communities with Sentiment Analysis
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
Despite gathering a great deal of qualitative feedback, is your organization lagging behind in gauging how customers feel about your brand? If yes, then you surely need to revise your CX strategy and include an ingenious technology like sentiment analysis in it or else be prepared to bear the brunt of unhappy and unsatisfied customers.
Sentiment analysis is contextual mining of text which helps you establish your customers’ attitudes towards your company, products, and services by scoring community interaction and engagement. Emotion is one of the most powerful drivers of purchase decisions and by ascertaining how customers perceive your brand, you can continuously work towards improving your brand image.
As per a research by McKinsey, a positive experience increased the purchasing for more than 85 percent of customers. On the other hand, a negative experience led to over 70 percent of customers purchasing less than before.
If you intend to belong to the former strata, then here’s a full recording of the panel discussion. Tune in to learn more about how AI adoption is a scalable and affordable solution for online communities struggling with personalization, alleviating agent burden, keeping moderators’ mental health in check, and establishing customer attitude towards your brand.