With its conversational capacity and its ability to exploit data and generate content on a large scale, generative AI is on the verge of redefining the standards of customer recognition.
Of course, artificial intelligence has been revolutionizing the way brands engage and retain their customers for years. However, the rapid and massive deployment of GenAI among certain players is changing consumer expectations in terms of customer experience. And it leads to the risk, for companies that do not appropriate these innovations, of being left behind on the main dimensions analyzed in the framework of the Isoskèle Customer Recognition Barometer: personalization, interaction, consideration and recommendation.
FACILITATE INTERACTIONS
For the past year and a half, Generative AI (GenAI) has been shaking up brands’ practices in terms of customer strategy, allowing them to do away with archaic chatbots and voicebots based on simple decision trees. Available at all times and in real time, these new-generation multimodal bots can be deployed on all of a brand’s touchpoints, from an e-commerce site to a call center, including messaging applications. They can easily search for answers to customer questions in FAQs, internal documents, or even a PIM or CRM.
Customer service advisors are already using AI. It helps them respond to their customers in an omnichannel and seamless manner, or to assess their satisfaction based on the analysis of verbatim. They will now appreciate GenAI’s ability to relieve them of requests that can easily be managed by self-care customers: a BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) specialist, the Swedish company Klarna estimates that its profits will increase by $40 million thanks to the use of a new-generation chatbot, capable of replacing 700 human advisors, while displaying better performance in terms of problem solving or subscribing to its offers. Obviously, this raises questions, including on an ethical level. And it illustrates the enormous challenge of employability that many companies will face. Tomorrow, more than ever, it will be a question of finding the right balance between “AI-augmentation” of business processes and preserving the place of humans, to which consumers remain attached
PERSONALIZE MESSAGES AND OFFERS
And chatbot use cases are increasingly being applied to sales themselves. In 2023, for example, Carrefour unveiled Hopla, an AI assistant available on the brand’s e-commerce site, which could help Internet users build their shopping cart based on natural language exchanges: the ingredients needed for a recipe, a list of gluten-free products or even enough to feed a family of 4 for a week with 100 euros.
The opportunity to offer a shopping experience that is both innovative and personalized, like the Hello Casto chatbot deployed at the end of last year by Castorama. The tool allows the brand’s customers to create their development project while receiving advice on the products and techniques to use. Finally, we will mention Rufus, the sales assistant launched by Amazon at the beginning of the year, which helps the e-retailer’s customers choose products thanks to its exhaustive knowledge of their technical specifications or the opinions of other users.
But the ability of artificial intelligence to provide personalized advice to a customer is used beyond the simple framework of conversational agents. Within the L’Oréal group, Paris Beauty Genius is a mobile application offering personalized diagnoses and advice on subjects such as acne or dandruff. Presented at CES 2024, it will be deployed on the American market in September. In the same idea, and already available, the Spotscan tool from La Roche Posay is also capable of carrying out a skin diagnosis from only three selfies, before suggesting a personalized routine to the user, or referring them to a dermatologist.
LA GENAI, A NEW LOYALTY LEVER
Beyond chatbots and diagnostic tools, many companies are also developing their own GPTs. Powered by company data, they allow them to extract information from internal documents and rules more quickly, in order to improve their productivity and imagine new offers.
Such tools are thus being deployed within banks and insurance companies in order to increase the speed of processing customer requests, via the automatic analysis of supporting documents added to a file for example. From there, AI can also suggest the most appropriate response to the advisor.
This type of mechanism is also used within companies and brands seeking to best adapt their generosity, in order to meet the expectations of their customers as closely as possible, or even to exceed them by being proactive, by personalizing the response and by showing, more generally, that customer satisfaction and rewarding loyalty are a priority for the company. Advances in AI also promote access to more detailed and deeper data analysis models. The increase in analysis power promotes the rise of predictive models capable of fueling relational and experiential hyper-targeting.
Facilitated interactions, personalized rewards and customer consideration… Not to mention the ability to surprise by using innovative technologies. Elements that systematically appear as catalysts for improving the quality of the relationship with the brand as perceived by the customer, or increasing the chances of retaining the customer and making them an ambassador. These are areas of work highlighted in the fourth edition of the Customer Recognition Barometer produced by IsoskeleThe brands that will be able to seize generative AI as quickly as possible to make it an accelerator of their customer relations will find there a real lever for differentiation and, consequently, an increase in their customer capital.
Methodology
5,500 adults, representative of the French population, were surveyed in February 2024 as part of this 4th edition. Each person is a customer of the three brands they were surveyed about. In total, 162 brands from 11 economic sectors were assessed, with, for the first time, the establishment of an overall rating of the quality of the perceived relationship, and the evocation of expected improvements, sector by sector.
To learn more about the Isoskele Customer Recognition Barometer, 2024 edition
Source: www.e-marketing.fr
