Using AI to Create Customer-Centric Business Strategies

28 Mar 2024

Artificial intelligence is transforming the ways in which businesses can understand their customers. Today, AI allows businesses to collect and analyse vast quantities of qualitative and quantitative data, distilling critical insights on consumer behaviour. However, it is the businesses that effectively act upon those insights that can unlock competitive advantage.

“Just making data and insight available doesn’t make you data-driven,” Sona Abaryan, partner and global real and luxury sector lead at tech-enabled data science consultancy Ekimetrics, said on stage last week at the BoF Professional Summit: New Frontiers: AI, Digital Culture and Virtual Worlds.

“Companies need to think about how they need to evolve their decision-making processes, the incentives that they provide, their organisational structure, to make a real impact and go from using data to improving the status quo to being really transformative with it.”

Founded in 2006, Ekimetrics has pioneered the use of AI and advanced data science, helping brands optimise their marketing dollars and leverage knowledge of their customers’ preferences and behaviours to put the customer at the centre of business strategy. Ekimetrics works with the likes of Estée Lauder Companies, Nestlé and over 50 luxury houses and brands, and gathers insights from partnering platforms like Amazon, Meta, TikTok and Google.

For one, consumer expectations are increasingly focused on a personalised experience. However, in trying to achieve this, many businesses have lost sight of the strategy and have become solely focused on software as a service (SaaS), which has flattened the efficacy of the services’ approaches to personalisation in a competitive environment.

“Everyone leverages the same platforms and methods, so you end up evening out the impact and need to look elsewhere to drive a competitive edge,” Abaryan added.

Brands that examine customer centricity from all aspects of business operations — from brand marketing and communications through to product design, merchandising and planning, even in their financial operations and forecasting — are extracting great success with reaching their target consumer. This approach is enabled through access to and analysis of more primary data on customers, allowing executives to better identify which areas of business to optimise to meet and grow long-term business health KPIs such as lifetime value (LTV), which is addressed in Ekimetrics’ white paper, The Role of Customer Analytics Throughout the Value Chain.

Now, BoF shares key insights from the talk at the BoF Professional Summit with Ekimetrics’ partner and global retail and luxury sector lead, Sona Abaryan, on how business can place customer data at the heart of decision-making and leverage insights for increased short and long-term return on investment (ROI).