Frank Vella, CEO of Constant Contact, a digital marketing and CRM platform that has helped millions of small businesses and nonprofits.
Forrester is calling 2023 “a year of reckoning” for customer experience, as many companies have abandoned a customer-first approach in an increasingly challenging economy. However, I believe that the rapid evolution of AI technology in recent months presents businesses with an opportunity to recommit to customer experience.
As investment into AI accelerates, it’s critical for business leaders to apply it correctly. It may be tempting to deploy ChatGPT and assume that will boost customer satisfaction, but that is not the most strategic approach. Instead, you must work to understand the specific challenges your customers face and leverage the power of AI to develop a solution that is practical, intuitive and effective for their needs.
Elevating the experience customers have with your products can build a greater connection to your brand and, over time, that loyalty can deliver tremendous value to your business. Here’s how leaders can start using AI to create a winning experience for customers and drive growth.
Be purposeful with the technology.
ChatGPT has made AI relatable to the average consumer, and as its popularity grows so does our excitement about harnessing its power to find new business efficiencies and develop new products. But, that excitement can sometimes distract organizations from the true purpose of the technology, which is to simplify complex and manual tasks. That is what the customer experience is all about.
AI’s potential is limitless, but it needs to be channeled properly to truly make a business impact. Before investing resources into developing and bringing a new AI application to market, I recommend identifying areas of friction within your product. Let the gaps in that experience inform your strategy for where to implement AI instead of hypothesizing about what you think your customers might want. Trust their behavior, and allow their feedback to guide your investment.
For example, you might find that your customers struggle to write engaging marketing copy or that they need to better understand what consumers are shopping for. AI can elevate both of those experiences and make them almost automatic for customers. Whatever the case, auditing your customer experience thoroughly is a key first step in the goal-setting process for AI.
Simplify everything and make it personal.
A complicated product can confuse and frustrate customers and prevent them from seeing the full value of their investment. If left unchecked, those pain points can ultimately impact your organization’s revenue, customer retention and brand reputation. AI can help improve these experience gaps by exposing a more intuitive and efficient environment that saves time and draws the customer deeper into the product.
One of the best and most widely-applicable use cases for AI is content creation —particularly if your customers are in the SMB space where marketing is often a significant challenge. They likely have trouble determining what messages to write and where/when to send them. AI can analyze consumer behaviors and preferences and deliver recommendations that map to better outcomes. Deploying that technology to create a more intuitive writing workflow can eliminate friction from the marketing process and help make it easy for businesses to create personalized content quickly.
A simplified user experience can also be a powerful tool to increase sales. When customers have a positive experience using a product or service, they are much more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend it to others.
Be willing to adjust.
As we’ve seen with ChatGPT and other recent AI-centric launches recently, innovation into this technology is happening at a breakneck pace. There is also an inevitable learning curve with regard to how it is implemented and received. As a leader, it’s important to understand that you might not see a 100% success rate with your initial rollout, and your customers could require more education to recognize the value that AI can provide. That’s OK, as long as you continue to adapt and iterate.
When you are at the forefront of innovation, it’s important to continue testing and learning, and that starts by soliciting feedback from customers about their experience. Every engagement with them adds to your dataset and can be leveraged to adjust interfaces and make further improvements to your product.
Let the customer experience dictate your roadmap and continue to tailor the technology to their needs over time. You might find that they recommend changes you never would have noticed or considered that could result in a better experience for all your customers.
Create a winning experience.
Now more than ever, customer experience is critical to success. In fact, PwC reports that “73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.” Regardless of your product or industry, AI can help elevate that experience even further, and that can dramatically influence customer acquisition, satisfaction and loyalty.
Like other transformative technologies that came before AI, there is a palpable sense of excitement about its capabilities. But, instead of sprinting to deploy AI as fast as possible, I recommend examining it from your customer’s POV. Identify key areas where they get stuck or need extra support, and leverage AI’s learning capabilities to strengthen those areas and make them more intuitive. You’ll likely make your product more attractive to prospective customers while delivering cutting-edge technology to current users.
The AI revolution is here. Being purposeful about your investment will help ensure that you deliver a winning experience to customers.
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