The progression of customer experience in Indonesia has undergone rapid acceleration, primarily driven by the integration of AI-powered technology to make interactions more personalised. Beyond mere personalisation, AI’s role has expanded and now encompassing pivotal functions in predictive analysis and forecasting consumer behaviour, thereby revolutionising the landscape of customer engagement and business strategies.
Evolution from Traditional Personalisation to Hyper-personalisation
Personalization is a huge keyword that has been around for the past decades. However, without AI, our past approaches were not advanced enough to achieve hyper-personalisation; they were merely preset. For instance, when a user visits a website, it is necessary to manually configure settings to display relevant content. This process involves human intervention to tailor content individually for each visitor, which, although personalised, is done manually. Therefore, the initial step in integrating AI should focus on automating, refining, and scaling this process. AI has the potential to enhance personalisation by making it sharper, faster, and eliminating a substantial amount of manual effort.
Another crucial aspect of AI is the generative component. Generative AI helps determine what should be communicated to customers. AI can curate content in various formats such as images, videos, text or messages. By utilising the precision and rapid content creation capabilities of generative AI, brands could effectively enhance customer experiences across digital platforms.
Ensuring Secure and Ethical Deployment of AI
While AI enables hyper-personalisation to enhance customer experience, it is crucial for AI to be employed in a secure, unbiased, transparent, and permission-based manner. The intervention of humans and how they interact with technology highly matters in this regard, including data input and scrutiny of the outcomes. There needs to be an ethical AI education, awareness to ensure users grasp risks and proper usage of AI.
The Indonesian government has taken a step towards enhancing data privacy protection by issuing personal data protection law. While this marks a significant stride forward, it is imperative for all stakeholders to actively engage in raising awareness about the ethical utilisation of personal data and AI.
Getting Started with AI for Brands in Indonesia
For brands embarking on their AI journey in Indonesia, there exists a concept known as zero-party data, a term coined by Forrester Research. Zero-party data refers to data that customers intentionally and proactively share with a brand. This can include preference centre data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how individuals want the brand to recognise them. Zero-party data can be a valuable method for enhancing personalisation and customer experience.
With brands’ urgent need for personalisation and enhancing the customer experience, brands can utilise zero-party data to cater to their business objectives. This approach stems from the abundance of individual data collected, causing AI and machine learning to effectively process and recommend suitable product offerings.
AI has the potential to assist brands in improving personalisation, predictive analytics, and forecasting consumer behaviour. By leveraging historical data sets, brands can predict and recommend products based on customer behaviour, thereby exploring limitless possibilities and increasing the likelihood of product purchase. Given the complexity of deploying AI, partnering with experienced professionals or agencies, like Merkle, becomes essential to ensure maximum effectiveness and success.
Through Merkle’s annual flagship report CX Imperatives 2024, we learned a lot about today’s buyers, from their preferences in communication to their attitudes about emerging technology. Merkle offers insight into today’s consumer expectations for brand experiences and encourages brands to focus on responding to consumer preferences – to maintain customer loyalty and build long-term relationships. The report also reveals how to use AI ethically to create comfort and build trust. The report can be accessed here.
