There’s been a lot of talk about how leaders can start bringing AI into their businesses to improve effectiveness and efficiencies, but what about those specifically working within marketing remits? If you’re in marketing, brand, product / service design or customer services, how can you use harness AI and GenAI to truly reimagine customer experience?
In this article, we share how GenAI has supercharged the capabilities of marketers and brought back the joy of the profession, our 5D experience, engagement and relationship framework (each stage now powered by AI, of course!), plus three tips on powering up your customer experience now with AI and GenAI.
The explosion of GenAI
The explosion of GenAI and MarTech solutions, combined with heightened consumers expectations, has created a juncture for organisations to completely reimagine their customer experience (CX) and engagement.
Organisations now have an opportunity to reimagine how they can best meet the needs of their customers. How can you take advantage of the tech available, combined with the human need to deliver meaningful and delightful experiences?
We look at CX holistically – it’s not just about journey maps or service design – data, creative consulting, media and technology are brought together.
Driving meaningful experiences, engagement and customer management
Our CX framework, the 5D Infinity Loop, has been tried and tested on many brands we work with.
The 5D’s drive meaningful experiences, engagement and relationship management, designed for success, speed and ongoing optimisation of customer relationship management (CRM). And now, each stage of our framework – discover, define, design, develop and diagnose – can be powered by AI and GenAI.
Discover
This stage is all about learning to gain a deep understanding of the user journey, business goals and competitive inputs needed to define success. One example is sentiment analysis. Traditionally AI would have been able to indicate whether the sentiment was positive or negative and attribute proportions e.g. 80% positive, 20% negative. Now GenAI can synthesise data from previous survey data, explaining why customers feel a certain way and suggesting actionable steps for a marketer to take.
Define
Once we have a clear sense of the business challenges and needs, we begin concepting, sketching and prototyping to define the right CX solution. For example, there may be particularly low engagement with high drop off rates for a hair product on a brand’s ecommerce website. After initial analysis to establish the issue, alternative design concepts and prototypes could be generated and tested to improve the customer experience and reduce the drop off rate.
Design
With our working solution defined, we develop detailed UX, visual design, and copywriting that has the potential to execute user testing and validation along the way. Taking the example above, the most successful design would then be brought to life using AI enhanced product descriptions and automated image generation and upload.
Develop and deploy
At these stages, we create, test and deploy new experiences. We can take the refreshed hair product web page and apply analytics, automated tag management, CRM goals and MarTech integrations to identify which strategies have the most potential for future ongoing optimisation. It’s during this phase that we focus most closely on customer retention by employing our loyalty programmes, activations and engagement strategies.
Diagnose
Using what we’ve built, we recommend keeping a close eye on the competition and learning from new features in the personal care market to identify opportunities to continuously improve and iterate.
The ability to integrate AI into the CX process is revolutionizing how we understand and interact with customers. Before GenAI was on the scene, tools such as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Einstein, and IBM’s Watson, were already giving us an element of personalised customer experiences through recommendation engines for cross selling and marketing automation. Now, the focus is on how GenAI can enhance these aspects of our 5D cycle, turbocharging the creative process and enabling marketers and CX teams to focus more on crafting meaningful customer interactions.
Craft versus graft
This brings us to the poignant topic of craft versus graft. GenAI has supercharged the capabilities of marketers and brought back the joy of the profession.
Creative studio Uncommon says that ‘the biggest growth driver in sales for any organisation is fame. Getting your message famous. Being memorable in the eyes of the consumer’.
What if GenAI could remove friction from your customer’s experience of your brand, so that every interaction they have with you is pain free and memorable for all the right reasons? By having a fulfilled experience that aligns to a brands promise, customers will be encouraged and motivated to come back again and again, tell their friends, shout about you online, which in turn will boost sales, their emotional connection with you and deliver greater value over their lifetime.
Whatever role you play in CX – whether it’s a CX designer, service designer, app designer, marketer, salesperson or media buyer – part of that role will be crafting the solutions you create, for example visuals, verbal, copy or an app interface. Another part will be graft, so research, insight, data and analytics, which involves really scrutinising and summarising the data, having a deep understanding and knowledge of audience and customers (which can be very time consuming).
GenAI offers marketing professionals the potential to really focus on the ‘craft’, by providing the headspace to reignite imaginations, be curious and experiment – all essential components needed to foster creativity and make memorable experiences. This creativity is critical in building human connections with audiences through both visual and verbal communication, aiming to evoke an emotional reaction.
GenAI can then automate the ‘graft’ in your role, and supercharge your possibilities. Not only can AI structure and analyse large quantities of customer data, it will also make timely, personalised recommendations and anticipate what your customer will want or need in the future.
For example, if we consider the customer experience when buying gardening equipment, according to Adobe, 68% of customers find the speed of chatbot responses appealing, so AI can be then be used to answer any customer queries in a consistent way. With this in mind, instead of customers taking a leap of faith and guessing what they need, an AI chatbot will be able to collect specific information and preferences about their garden based on online behaviour and create a customised list of tools, seeds, plants and supplies that will be needed along with instructions and explanations tailored to the user’s unique gardening conditions. The next step could involve their garden being virtually designed, then post purchase, tailored gardening advice provided with connections made with a like-minded gardening community for tips and support.
Powering up AI for CX
GenAI has the opportunity to truly enhance memorable experiences and keep your customers coming back for more. When considering how to integrate GenAI and AI into CX, here are some tips to get started.
1. Customer touchpoints: Map out the end-to-end customer journey to identify key touchpoints where GenAI can enhance the CX from customer awareness of your product, through to purchase and post purchase
2. AI technologies: Identify and implement AI tools that could enhance CX such as chatbots for instant customer service, personalised recommendations engines, predictive analytics for better customer understanding, and automated quality control to ensure consistent customer experiences.
3. Monitor and optimise: Continuously gather data on customer interactions to evaluate performance. Then use this data to optimise the AI tools for better accuracy, efficiency, and personalisation, ensuring that the integration of AI into CX is an ongoing process of improvement.
If you would like any help with making your customer experiences memorable and how you can integrate AI into your CX process, please get in touch.
