Leveraging AI to Understand Customer Trends

Author: Brittany Thomas

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing customer experience across industries and is increasingly top of mind for executive leaders. According to a Reuters analysis of Q3 2023 earnings calls transcripts, the terms “AI” or “artificial intelligence” were mentioned 827 times on 76 calls, more than double the mentions the same time the previous quarter. With a rapidly growing list of available AI applications, RevGen’s Customer Experience practice has found several ways AI can be leveraged to understand ever-evolving customer needs, wants, and expectations.  

Customer behaviors change at a rapid pace and directly impact the bottom line. For decades, companies have used costly market research to predict customer trends and better understand customer sentiment. In addition to being costly, the traditional methods of surveys and focus groups are time intensive. Generative AI tools create an accessible way to learn from vast amounts of data in a shorter timeframe.  

So, how can Generative AI practically be applied to deepen customer understanding today?

Use Cases for Using Generative AI to Analyze Customer Trends  

Market Trends and Insights

Generative AI’s ability to process vast amounts of diverse and unstructured data can be used to recognize emerging trends from industry reports, articles, online forums, customer reviews and social media. A study conducted by Harvard Business School explored using AI for market research and conducted four studies where they provided GPT with a series of prompts and compared the results with existing research and found the results to be consistent.  

The researchers noted, “Our results suggest that GPT potentially provides an alternative means for marketers to learn about consumer preferences in a fast, low-cost, and iterative manner. Whereas a survey of real customers may cost many thousands of dollars and take weeks or months to implement, each of our studies ran in a matter of minutes or hours, and the total cost to generate all the data in the paper was under $100.” 

Customer Review Analysis

Generative AI allows teams to identify patterns and summarize large amounts of customer reviews and feedback to understand customer opinions. Review summaries provide organizations with visibility into which features the customers like the most and which areas are failing to meet customer expectations.  

Retailors are also leveraging Open AI’s ChatGPT to summarize reviews for prospective customers. In August 2023, Amazon launched AI-generated customer review highlights that summarize the product features and customer sentiment to help customers easily understand common themes and make an informed purchase decision. 

Social Media and News Analysis

Generative AI can be used to analyze social media and news articles to understand customer sentiment, deepen customer understanding, and identify emerging trends. With a global customer base and large volume of conversations around their products, IKEA used AI powered Sprinklr Insights to gain real-time insight into customer’s feedback on their products and identify unmet customer needs. 

Getting Started with Customer Trend Insights 

When it comes to leveraging AI to help inform customer experience and innovation, where can an organization get started? Fortunately, there are a variety of tools available that do not require building a platform from scratch to enjoy the practical benefits of AI. 

AI Bots like ChatGPT and Bard collect data from the internet and other sources to reply to prompts. These tools are valuable for ideation and brainstorming that complement existing research, however the information provided should always be validated by a human and should not be a replacement for traditional customer research. It is not recommended to submit any proprietary information to AI Bots.  

For organizations that are interested in deepening their customer understanding using proprietary data, RevGen’s Customer Experience practice can help you navigate the growing list of AI vendors and find a tool that will best meet your needs. RevGen helped a national telecom company gain immediate value from Sprinklr by leveraging the platform to learn critical feedback for a new product launch. Ultimately, the customer feedback allowed the client to improve their end-to-end customer experience. 

To learn more about how RevGen can help your organization, visit our Customer Experience site or contact us today to chat with one of our experts. 

 Brittany Thomas is a Manager at RevGen Partners specializing in customer experience. She helps organizations build customer-centric teams and data-driven solutions that create positive experiences for both customers and employees.