What is Customer Intent & How to Predict it: A Complete Guide

How do you feel when your favourite coffee shop prepares your go-to latte, even without asking?

Warm? Valued? Important?

Now imagine if businesses worldwide could do the same thing on a much larger scale — understand what customers want even before they say it. 

This is where understanding customer intent matters. It’s like reading your customers’ minds— not through magic, but by analyzing their actions, preferences, and interactions.

In this article, we’ll explore customer intent, why it’s crucial for businesses and how you can correctly predict it.

What is Customer Intent?

Customer intent is the purpose or reason for which the customer starts interacting with a business. It plays an important role in understanding the customer’s journey towards a main goal.

For example, if a user searches “best smartphones under $500” on your website, they’re likely in the consideration phase. By analyzing this intent, businesses can display recommended products or provide promotional discounts to motivate customers toward a goal.

Why Understanding Customer Intent Matters?

By accurately predicting customer intent, businesses can prioritize high-value leads and increase the conversion rate. Here are a few examples how customer intent can help a business:

» Prioritize Support

A frustrated customer contacts a company about a malfunctioning home appliance. AI instantly recognizes their intent and determines they are using a premium product that is still under warranty. It routes their query to the appropriate technical support team and prioritizes the ticket based on the customer’s loyalty status and the urgency of the issue, ensuring they receive swift assistance.

» Ensure Seamless Interactions

A customer needs help renewing their car insurance. Through an AI-powered chat on the insurer’s website, the system quickly identifies their intent, verifies their policy status, and processes the renewal automatically. Without human intervention, the customer completes the task in minutes, avoiding delays or confusion.

» Deliver Tailored Solutions

A customer contacts a health and wellness brand for personalized supplement recommendations. AI interprets their intent and gathers data on their lifestyle, diet, and health goals. It then generates customized suggestions, which a human consultant can review and refine before sharing, ensuring the advice is accurate and relevant.

How Does Customer Intent Prediction Work?

It involves a few steps, which include:

» Data Collection: The voice/text data of customer interaction is collected and processed by the system

» Data Cleaning: The collected data is processed to remove any noise or inconsistencies, making it ready for analysis

» Intent Analysis: The data is analyzed through NLP to determine the customer’s intent based on words, phrases, and other entities in the data

How to Understand & Analyze Customer Intent?

It’s not always about analyzing one interaction but rather viewing the bigger picture of customer interactions. Here are some ways to better understand customer intent for your business:

1. Understand What Your Customers Want

The easiest way is to simply ask them. It’s the most straightforward yet powerful method to know customer intent. For instance, after interacting with a customer, agents can ask customers quick questions like:

• What features are most important to you when choosing this product? 
• What are you hoping to achieve with our product/service?

This can be done by sending surveys that can be triggered automatically through email, SMS or chatbots. Ensure to craft the questions in a way that helps understand the customer’s intent behind purchase decisions, what could be better and whether their needs are met.

However, customers don’t always say what they want. This is when you have to analyze their behavior and understand hidden patterns of customer intent.

Here are some ways you can easily understand customer needs:

• Sentiment analysis: AI-powered software like Exotel can detect conversation sentiments, which can help you understand whether customers are frustrated, satisfied, confused, or happy. This helps agents to know how well they are predicting customer needs and adjust their responses accordingly. 

• Behavioral data analytics: This can help you predict customer intent by tracking customer behavior through their journey. For example, if a customer repeatedly visits a product specifications page, they might intend to make a purchase or require technical support.

• Interactive voice response (IVR) feedback: When a customer presses a number for specific queries, you can assess customer intent right from the start and direct them to the appropriate department.

2. Perform Cross-channel Intent Analysis

Many customers interact through multiple channels like chat, email, phone, and social media. This makes it difficult to have a unified context of customer interactions.

Having an omnichannel platform can help you seamlessly track a customer’s historical behaviors across channels and use journey maps to pinpoint exactly where they are in their journey.

For example, if a customer interacts with a live chat and then switches to a call to ask about a product’s features, the platform will aggregate this data and show the customer’s journey. This helps agents predict the customer’s purchase intent and provide relevant information.

3. Use Predictive Analytics

You can use historical data and analyze patterns to predict customer needs. This can help your service team to be ready with the most relevant information and resources to help the customer,  offer tailored promotions, and suggest upsell opportunities.

Predictive analytics can be used to:

• Analyze historical data to understand patterns in customer behavior, preferences, and common pain points.
• Track real-time customer behavior across channels like websites, mobile apps, social media, and email
• Segment customers based on behavioral patterns and demographics, allowing you to anticipate the needs of specific customer segments and offer personalized services

4. Monitor Customer Journeys

Visualizing the complete experience a customer has with your brand, can help businesses understand every step of a customer journey. You can then identify opportunities for improvement and areas to predict future needs. 

For example, if an existing customer inquires about a product upgrade, you can send them targeted recommendations or loyalty rewards to encourage them to do so. 

This can be done by:

⇒ Creating a detailed customer journey map to visualize each touch point

⇒ Segmenting customers by journey stage to understand how customers move through the stages

⇒ Deploying AI to predict and detect patterns and use them to predict future customer actions, for e.g., the likelihood of customers abandoning the cart

Understand Your Customers Better with Exotel

Exotel is an AI-powered communication platform that offers advanced features to track and understand customer intent at every step. Its omnichannel capabilities enable businesses to integrate all customer interactions seamlessly to ensure every touchpoint is personalized and impactful.

It offers features like:

⇒ AI-powered sentiment analysis and intent detection

⇒ Conversation transcription and summarization to spot patterns in customer interactions

⇒ Predictive analytics to forecast future customer actions

⇒ Sentiment analysis to analyze conversations and tailor services according to the customer’s mood and intent

You can book a demo now to exceed customer expectations with Exotel.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What Role Does AI Play in Predicting Customer Intent?

AI processes large volumes of customer data, identifying patterns and predicting future behavior. It can also analyze customer interactions in real time, enabling businesses to understand customer needs instantly and respond proactively.

2. How Accurate is Customer Intent Prediction?

The accuracy of intent prediction depends on the data quality and the sophistication of the analytics tools used. 

3. How Do Businesses Gather Data to Predict Customer Intent?

Businesses collect data from various touchpoints, such as website interactions, customer service inquiries, social media engagement, purchase history, and user-generated content.