Turn Every Web Session into a Dialogue
Can Generative AI give brands hope by engaging users with Q&A?
Let’s face it: when it comes to customer service, people want to talk with human representatives who can communicate pleasantly and sophisticatedly as native speakers. Based on my personal experiences over the years, I’d rank Nespresso and Apple at the top and AT&T and Symphony Bank at the bottom. When I wrote this article, with curiosity, I Googled the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for these four brands, and here are the results:
From physical robots to digital chatbots, service bots are revolutionizing the workplace. To understand how consumers perceive firms that employ service bots, researchers conducted six experiments in which customers interacted with either a bot or a human service provider. Their field and laboratory experiments found that consumers believe the use of bots is motivated by cost-cutting and profit maximization at the expense of the customer experience. This belief, in turn, leads customers to be less satisfied with the service provided by bots than by humans. — Creating Customer Service Bots That People Don’t Hate by Harvard Business Review
The HBR authors identified four strategies for companies to use service bots in a way that consumers embrace:
1. Leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to offer faster and better service. Bots powered by LLMs like GPT-4 can understand a wide range of customer queries and provide personalized solutions that meet customer needs faster and better than human employees.
We’ll delve into this later in this article by connecting the dots from the chatbots to user engagement and customer acquisition.
2. Focus on tasks in which bots outperform humans. It is vital for managers to carefully consider which customer-facing tasks to automate. Companies should analyze each service task’s potential for improvement through automation and focus on tasks where bots can significantly outperform human employees, delivering faster and more accurate service.
AnyQuest provides an enterprise AI automation platform and no-code tools that enable knowledge management, customer experience innovation, and intelligent process automation. I’ll explore this later in this article as well.
3. Use conversational styles and language that make the bot more human-like. Bots that engage in more colloquial language and signal mutual understanding can enhance the consumer experience, create positive brand associations, and improve the user experience that shapes how consumers view the brand.
This is where UI/UX design comes in with nuances driven by marketing strategy and insights.
4. Share part of the economic benefits from service automation with customers. Companies can increase customer satisfaction with bot service by offering discounts, loyalty points, early access to sales promotions, or preferential in-store treatment. Sharing the economic benefits of service automation with customers helps protect against the risk of undermining customer satisfaction.
By integrating the AI human superpower in the workflow from customer acquisition to the lifetime value of customers, D2C brands will lead an ecosystem evolution. Read more: How AI Elevates the Customer-Centric Ecosystem Economy.
What is the fundamental problem to solve (PTS) for all brands in digital marketing?
Everyone is talking about the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and uses it as a marketing metric. Most of the time, many are naive enough to wish for a silver bullet as if they can create a campaign, and all of a sudden, it’ll go viral. This is true for lots of non-marketing team members. This is a whole different series of articles that I’ve put together.
Let’s focus on the CAC here. The bad news is the exponential data explosion since the birth of the internet, followed by the mobile boom, has inevitably driven up the cost of mass marketing.
At an average of $53.52 CPL, any business owner, brand, and organization is challenged to make the dollar’s worth by engaging the users when they visit the website, turning them into customers, and building up the customer lifetime value (CLV). But how?
What if we start that experience with a dialogue? A user comes to the website for a reason via an ad/email/SMS/social click, search, or direct (meaning typing in the URL) instead of letting them browse and bounce off, get them started with a question. Remember how Google launched its search engine with a simple box?
What it does is to let the user demonstrate what they are looking for. What if the LLMs-driven agent can answer any questions and guide the user to the most relevant information, offer, or solution?
What can AI do better than humans in this end-to-end customer journey scenario?
As I said earlier, people always prefer human interactions as long as they are informative, pleasant, and effective. In a nutshell, what LLMs are capable of, and humans cannot, is to master and process excessive data and be accessible 24/7.
When I launched the world’s first AI Tutor for toddlers at DMAI, Inc., my previous AI venture, I zoomed into this problem to solve that parents, with all the best intents, cannot master all the songs, stories, and activities, and furthermore deliver them repetitively, tirelessly following scopes and sequences while keeping track of their children’s progress across all subjects.
Here we go; with the recent development by OpenAI and others, we can train our own AI assistants and agents who can adequately represent our brands and deliver hyper-personalized content to each user. And here are tangible solutions step by step:
- Integrate AI into the marketing strategy and execution with an excellent AI center of cross-functional teams.
- Establish or reorganize marketing documentation as the knowledge base to train and fine-tune AI assistants continuously.
- Design UI/UX and web content to optimize the customer journey with AI assistance and data insights.
- Establish an organizational structure to support the ongoing knowledge management and marketing communications so that team members can contribute to the AI engine while benefiting from content synthesis and virtual interactions between AI and users around the clock.
- Connect thedots among all data analytics with continuous workflow evolution with AI capabilities.
- Elevate AI human superpower beyond customer journey and marketing strategy to impact the whole business.
As an update, we launched an AnyQuest-powered chatbot on our website: https://www.anyquest.ai
See the red button in the lower right corner. Try it with:
- What can you tell me about AnyQuest?
- We are an asset management firm. How can AnyQuest help us?
- How do you compare to the competition?
- Etc.
You can ask it in English and 50 other languages.
Here is how it works for any brand that has a website:
- Create an assistant on AnyQuest
- Use it to index a website
- Upload a few pieces of marketing collateral and FAQs
- Activate the assistant with just a few lines of code on the website
The whole process can be completed in minutes.
Eager to hear everyone’s thoughts! Also, I am hosting the AI panel at an APEC event on November 14.
The Convergence of AI-powered D2C Businesses and Ecosystem Evolution
