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Monday’s Marketing Minute: AI’s Impact on Marketing Jobs, Elon’s Product Demo, Video Use in Social

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are ready to have an amazing productive week! So after temps that flirted with 100 for several days last week, we are temps mostly in the 80s this week, as we could be dealing with some rain from Idalia(?) in the gulf. Hopefully, last week was the last truly hot week we will have this year.  Temps here usually peak around the last week of Aug and first week of Sept.  It will still be hot for most of Sept, but humidity should start to fall soon, making the heat a lot more bearable. Fingers crossed!

Back to business, here’s a few news stories that caught my eye…

 

Kelly always shares such interesting content. I thought this survey of how AI will impact marketing and communication jobs was interesting. Note that AI is expected to have a positive impact across the board, until you get to team culture and number of jobs. So basically, we are expecting AI to be a boon for individual productivity, but we also think it will hurt collaboration and team culture. I’m wondering if this could lead to a scenario where AI becomes almost a surrogate for a team member, and is designed to facilitate interaction and engagement between team members. It’s such early days in AI’s development and implementation. What will see in just a year’s time will be miles from where we are now.

 

So this isn’t really ‘news’, but I enjoyed this demo that Elon did for Tesla’s autopilot driving, which if I understood correctly, is powered by AI. As Elon was driving, he explained that AI was used to train the cars on how to drive. In fact, only video of real people driving was used, not code. Basically, Elon just picked points on the car’s map, and let the car drive him to that location.

For the most part, the car did very well, but I did see a couple of hiccups in the 10 mins or so I watched (The video was interesting but not THAT interesting). Early on, Elon went through an area that was under construction, and he remarked that the construction hadn’t been there the last time he drove through the area. The lanes at one point shifted over to accomodate the construction, and Elon remarked that the car had picked the wrong lane, but just as he said that, it corrected and pulled into the correct lane as dictated by the construction. Another instance was where the car came to a red light where the turn lane next to the car was green. Elon yelled ‘Intervention!’ and had to take control as the car started to attempt to cross the intersection, even though it had a red light. Elon explained that they would have to give the car more video of navigating intersections like this so that it knows what to do.

As I was seeing the two hiccups and corrections, I was recalling how Robert Scoble would video programmers working at their computers years ago when he worked at Microsoft. He said sometimes Windows would crash and he would video it. These imperfections actually made the content more credible, as it recorded what would happen in real life. I think the couple of hiccups Elon videoed that I saw work the same way, because we know there will be issues, but only seeing a couple means it performed very well 99% of the time.  Video content is big right now, as we will see in the next news item, and it still pays for you to develop a personal brand on social media, even if you work for a company.  More on this in tomorrow’s post.

 

This really shouldn’t be news to any of you, but people love video content in their social media streams. In fact, by 2025, 60% of our time on social networking sites will be spend consuming video content. While our time spent with video continues to increase, it’s worth noting that the growth rate seems to have plateaued over the last year or so.  Usage will continue to grow, but only marginally, after seeing nearly 20% yearly growth less than 5 years ago.

 

So that’s it for this Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a great week, as I alluded to earlier, I will have a fun announcement tomorrow about a new weekly series I will be running from now on, something I first started waaaaaay back in 2006. See you then, have a great week!

 

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Your Guide to Delivering Consistent Omnichannel Customer Service Experiences in Retail

retail omnichannel customer service

Today’s consumers expect seamless shopping and service engaging with retail brands across devices, channels, and touchpoints. Orchestrating unified omnichannel customer service presents immense challenges for retailers. However, the rewards can be sizeable when done correctly. Research has found that companies who have a strong omnichannel strategy realize a 89% customer retention rate, compared to a lowly 33% for companies with a weak omnichannel strategy.

This article will explore several proven strategies and best practices retail executives should leverage to optimize omnichannel customer service experiences across stores, ecommerce, mobile apps, and new emerging channels. If you have questions about optimizing or improving your retail omnichannel customer service strategy, feel free to leave a comment, or you can email Mack directly for private feedback.

Conduct In-Depth Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing the steps that a potential customer goes through in order to complete a purchase. Here’s some of the ways that customer journey mapping can be helpful:

  • Identifying friction points from the user perspective. By visualizing the purchase process, you can see the flow that the customer goes through on the way to a purchase.  And it SHOULD be a flow, if not, the customer could get ‘stuck’ in one stage, and that could easily lead to frustration and abandoning the purchase.
  • Conducting shadowing research and customer interviews to uncover unmet needs and grievances. This allows you to hear directly from the retail customer and learn how the purchase process worked for them.
  • Auditing support metrics across channels; such as wait times, resolution speed/quality, CSAT, NPS, and sentiment. This will further help identify areas for improvement in the process.
  • Analyzing contact topics and types to identify knowledge gaps to address. This helps suggests information that can be provided to the customer to help them self-diagnosis and possibly even resolve issues themselves.

These insights help inform an omnichannel optimization roadmap tailored to your customers’ needs.

Architect Seamless Cross-Channel Experiences

Today, customers expect unified service across in-store, web, mobile, kiosks, chat, social and more. A consistent experience across all touchpoints is expected. You can deliver this by:

  • Defining optimal channel roles based on their strengths to simplify choice. This helps direct the customer to the channels that are best suited to provide the experience the customer needs at that stage of their purchase journey.
  • Enabling tight integrations between channels, such as store finders, click and collect etc. Also pay attention to how customers will use channels differently. For instance, when on your app, customers are often away from home, and looking to complete or pick up a purchase. When at home, they are more likely to be on a laptop and doing research before deciding on a purchase. Factor customer intent into the integration of your retail omnichannel customer service experience.
  • Allowing pick-up purchases and returns across any channel. This should be a priority for mobile devices and apps in particular.
  • Transferring customer context and histories between channels/agents. There should always be a way to track the history of a support issue so that a handoff improves the experience, instead of resetting it.

Contextual, personalized omnichannel experiences satisfy customers and improve efficiency and increase customer loyalty among retail customers.

Equip Employees with Mobile Technology

Allowing retail employees to have mobile devices while interacting with customers allows them to give a higher level of service and support. Here’s some examples:

  • Retail employees can access customer purchase history and loyalty profiles anywhere to personalize interactions.  This allows employees to immediately get up to speed on the customer’s purchase and support history.
  • Assist customers with inventory lookups, pricing, recommendations on the salesfloor. This allows the employee to stay present and engaged with the customer, while also speeding up the support process.
  • Check in customers remotely via mobile POS to reduce lines.  This gives the customer more control over initiating the support process and it creates more speed and efficiency.
  • Resolve issues, answer questions, and schedule appointments on the go.  By letting employees have mobile access to customers, they can interact with customers in a way that’s convenient for both parties, which speeds up the overall process and increases satisfaction for the customer, and productivity for the retail employee.

Giving retail employees the right technology to deliver mobile support ensures a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Expand and Enhance Self-Service Options

Let’s be honest: Many customers would rather handle a support issue themselves, if they can. So it pays to give customers the resources to self-diagnose problems and potentially solve on their own. In addition, it take stress off your CS team, and also creates a cost-savings. Invest in channels like:

  • Intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants on website, apps and messaging. Chatbots in particular are having a revival of interest due to the rise of easy-to-use AI tools. Look for use to expand over the coming years.
  • Interactive kiosks in stores for product research. These should be placed as close to the actual product as possible. Give customers a way to do last-minute research as a way to make the final determination on which product to purchase.
  • Enhanced help centers with improved search, content, and community forums. These are more frequently used by customers who are still in the consideration phase of the customer journey, so feel free to give them access to more in depth product information.
  • Allow access to customer ratings and reviews. This ties in with the previous point, as customers are doing research, they are narrowing down the list of products they are interested in. Once they have narrowed their consideration pool down to an acceptable number of products, they will want to check customer reviews for each product. This will help them narrow their list down even further, or it could convince the customer which product they should purchase.

You can also drive utilization through promotions, associate referrals and in-journey prompts.

Continuously Improve Through Testing and Innovation

Omnichannel retail customer service must continually adapt and improve. Recommended approaches include:

  • A/B test new features and channel integrations to optimize performance. Test internally, and also offer testing to select customers. This can be offered as a perk to loyalty program or community forum members.
  • Monitor service innovations from leading competitors and brands. Always keep up to date on the latest news and case studies to identify opportunities to improve your own retail customer service.
  • Survey customers directly on desired improvements. Ask customers what is working for them, and where the problems are. Over time, you can identify trends and isolate areas for improvement.
  • Pilot enhancements, measure impact, and iterate. Leverage customer feedback to roll out new features, and make sure customers know they helped contribute to the improvement. This will encourage customers to become even more engaged in the feedback process.

There are always opportunities to optimize and evolve your omnichannel customer service experience.

Achieving Omnichannel Customer Service Excellence

Orchestrating seamless retail customer service across expanding digital and offline touchpoints is challenging yet invaluable. Brands that have achieved successful omnichannel customer engagement have realized a 9.5% growth in annual revenue.  Additionally, a solid retail omnichannel customer service experience can result in a 7.5% decrease in cost per contact.

With the right strategy and planning, the payoff of a focus on retail omnichannel customer service can be immense.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Erratic Behavior, Money Troubles for ChatGPT, Social Media’s Age Divide

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer and ready for another productive week! Temps here in the Heart of Dixie this week are expected to approach 100 on multiple days. I am hoping this will be summer’s last gasp, as temps, or at least the humidity, normally starts to fall after Labor Day. Here’s a few business and marketing stories that caught my eye!

 

Elon Musk is making it super hard to defend him these days, and I reallllly want to see him turn Twitter around. It seems like every decision he makes either seems amazing, or totally insane. His latest, is he wants to remove the Block feature from Twitter/X. He may not even be able to do that, as it seems Community Notes has flagged some of his tweets saying that Apple and the Google Play app store require that the mobile app for Twitter offer a block feature.  But I just don’t understand why he thinks that’s a smart move.  Unless he is simply saying something provocative to get people to engage with him.  If so, that hints at far more problems. But taking away basic features then mocking users for losing those features OR that they will have to pay if they want them back is simply not good business on any level.

 

So this story made the rounds a few days ago, claiming ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI could go bankrupt by the end of 2024. The article contends that it costs the company $700k a day to keep ChatGPT running, thus the financial calculations. Many have since chimed in that this probably wouldn’t happen anyway. The cynic in me wonders if this story wasn’t planted by OpenAI as a way to drive more investor interest in the company. Having said all that, it’s true that the userbase for ChatGPT is indeed leveling out. I suspect that will continue to be the case as other players in the AI space enter the game.

 

This chart forecasting social media usage by age group was a bit interesting. The only age group that’s forecast to see solid growth in social media usage over the next 5 years is Gen Z, the group born between 1997 and 2012.  So they would be age 11-26 today. Millennials will see very slight growth, but Gen X and Baby Boomers will actually continue to leave social media over the coming 5 years. I am playing this out as a Gen Xer myself.  The only social media channels I am active on these days are Twitter and LinkedIn, and I spend maybe 15 mins a day on Twitter and maybe an hour a week on LinkedIn. Actually I probably spend a total of 30 mins a week scanning my Facebook feed for any important announcements from friends, but that’s about it. Ten years ago, I was on social media channels for at least 5 hours a day during the week.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a wonderful week!

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Your Guide to Optimizing Online Customer Service in the Technology Industry

online customer serviceProviding exceptional online customer service is now essential for technology companies (really all companies in all industries) to satisfy and retain users in an increasingly digital world. However, delivering seamless support across websites, mobile apps, social media, webchat, help centers and emerging channels is complex. Yet at the same time, it is demanded by hyper-connected customers.

With customer expectations rising and new technologies advancing rapidly, support organizations are struggling to keep pace. Those that can, are reaping the rewards of higher levels of customer loyalty and profitability, while reducing customer service costs. While companies that aren’t reacting as quickly are being punished. As customers become more accustomed to using digital and online tools, they appreciate the speed and delivery of information and experiences. That expectation will extend to all elements of the online experience, including customer service and support.

This comprehensive guide explores proven strategies and best practices for technology companies to optimize online customer service delivery in today’s omnichannel environment.

Conduct In-Depth Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping involves mapping out the path that a customer takes from first becoming aware of your product, to purchasing it. This link gives you a good breakdown and definition of customer journey mapping. The advantage of mapping the customer journey from a support perspective is it helps you identify potential pain points in the purchase process for the customer. Once the potential problem areas are known, they can be addressed and responses can be proactively created. Considerations include:

  • Creating detailed journey maps for key processes including onboarding, adoption, training, troubleshooting and escalation. This helps you identify friction points at each step from the user perspective. Knowing those potential pain points makes it much easier to address them, leading to higher levels of customer loyalty.
  • Conducting extensive ethnographic research through surveys, interviews and observations to uncover unmet needs and grievances directly from customers. Customer feedback is vital to optimizing and improving support processes.
  • Completing comprehensive audits examining support metrics across platforms – response times, wait times, resolution quality, customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Tracking metrics throughout the customer journey allows your technology company to identify strengths and weaknesses throughout the process.  Once identified, weaknesses can be corrected and strengths magnified.
  • Analyzing support case topics and types to reveal knowledge gaps. Expand help content to address common questions. This is where tracking satisfaction with support as well as time spent with agents can reveal potential problem areas. Consistent problems could point to a need to invest in training and/or the hiring of SMEs.

If leveraged correctly, these insights will inform an omnichannel customer service optimization roadmap tailored to your customers’ needs.

Design Integrated Omnichannel Experiences

Today’s consumers expect unified support experiences across the web, mobile apps, social media, email, chat, and emerging channels. Eliminate friction through thoughtful omnichannel design:

  • Define optimal roles for each channel based on strengths. Chat for convenience, phone for urgent issues, forums for troubleshooting. This also helps you consider the needs of the customer, for instance forums should have access to SMEs who can answer questions that are often involving a more complex issue. One answer from a SME could potentially deflect multiple CS calls, which would be a cost savings that would continue to be realized as long as the answer appeared on the forum.
  • Craft tight channel integration, such as website support forms prefilled with user data for contextual experiences. Make sure to collect only the data that customers have consented for collction, and carefully explain to customers which data will be collected. This helps address privacy concerns and works to establish trust.
  • Enable smooth cross-channel transitions, such as handing off conversations between agents without repetitive explanations. Remember that the customer assumes the entire interaction with CS is being conducted by a team that’s on the same page, not disjointed employees.  The customer doesn’t expect to have to start over with a fresh explanation of the problem every time a new agent is involved.
  • Connect steps into one seamless, consistent and personalized cross-channel customer journey.

Contextual, continuous omnichannel experiences satisfy users and improve efficiency while increasing loyalty.

Evaluate and Adopt New Service Channels

The digital service landscape evolves quickly. Continuously evaluate and pilot new channels and innovations such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots equipped with natural language capabilities, sentiment analysis and escalation for automated conversations.  This post has a detailed breakdown of how technology companies can leverage AI in customer support. AI can be used to deliver customer support directly, and it can also be leveraged to analyze customer data to enhance the support experience.
  • Augmented reality that allows remote visual issue diagnosis through overlays and annotations. This is especially useful in the field service spac, where a remote worker can use AR to diagnose and fix a problem directly, or be connected to a SME (Subject Matter Expert) who can help the technician deliver support on site, saving time for both the customer and service vendor.
  • In-product communications via embedded commentary forms or help widgets. QR are a useful example of this, allowing both the customer and the service technician to get relevant product information at the site.
  • Proactive assistance powered by machine learning models that predict issues. This ties into the first point about AI, machine-learning can also be utilized to predict potential problems, turning costly repairs into preventative maintenance.

Assess new technologies based on your capabilities and customers’ evolving needs. Adopt channels that provide high value.

Incentivize Use of Self-Service Options

Deflecting common inquiries to self-help resources reduces human support costs. Boost adoption by:

  • Identifying key opportunities to augment or replace live service, such as leveraging virtual agents or community forums.  Pro-Tip: Publish some of the most engaging forum answers on your website’s homepage. This is a great way to promote the availability of the forum as a way for the user to self-troubleshoot problems. Remember that one answer from a SME on a forum could help countless users solve the same problem. Every time a user can solve their own problem via a forum, that deflects a call or chat with a CS agent. Which saves you money.
  • Designing stellar help centers, FAQs, chat bots, online communities, and in-product self-service. Make sure every level of service is provided for the user. If the user needs 101-level help, provide FAQs, if they need a bit more instruction, give them easy access to chat bots and forums.
  • Driving awareness through promotions, in-product prompts, and informational content. Users can’t access help if they don’t know it’s available. Providing exceptional online customer service is about giving customers the ability to choose the type of experience that’s most helpful and convenient for them.
  • Continuously optimizing self-service content and functionality based on analytics and user feedback. Constantly monitor for roadblocks and bottlenecks in the process. Survey users post-ticket to identify areas for improvement.

Giving customers self-service options that work leads to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction, as well as reduces costs for your technology company.

Experiment, Iterate and Innovate

Customer service cannot remain stagnant as user expectations rapidly evolve. Continually optimize by:

  • A/B testing new features and support processes to improve key metrics. Leverage community forums and give the most active participants the chance to test new features. You will often find that frequent contributors to forums will jump at such an opportunity.
  • Monitoring emerging innovations in service delivery from competitors. Be aware of what the competition is doing, and what is working for them. This can give you ideas for improvement in your own CS processes.
  • Interviewing users to identify desired improvements and pain points. Lean on feedback from users throughout the customer support process. You will often find that users will be happy to provide feedback and stay in contact with your CS team to help implement their suggestions.
  • Proactively journey mapping to uncover friction opportunities. Find and identify pain points for users along the CS journey, and eliminate them.
  • Piloting enhancements, measuring impact based on data, and iterating. Pro-tip: Rollout changes first to your forum members or loyalty program members. If you will be providing a new features in your customer support efforts, give limited advance access to certain user segments. This will be viewed as a perk by the group, and will result in better feedback and higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

The best brands continually and proactively adapt based on customer needs and feedback.

Achieving Excellent Online Customer Service

Providing superior omnichannel customer service is challenging yet invaluable. Applying the strategies outlined equips technology companies to meet, and even exceed, rising user expectations.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Huge Legal Promise, AI Use Grows For All Age Groups, Meta Betting on AI Chatbots

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone is having a great summer and is ready for another productive week! Here’s a few business stories that caught my eye recently, I hope you enjoy!

 

Elon is totally confounding me right now. Almost every day he makes a move that seems incredibly smart on the surface, then 10 mins later he will make another announcement that seems to undercut what he said in the first one. For instance, multiple users are reporting that accounts that they have held for years, were suddenly taken over by Twitter, with zero compensation. Of course that’s Elon’s right, but it is a terrible look and it makes it much harder to defend his future moves.

Then, he turns around and does this: Announces what he claims will be a bottomless defense fund for anyone who has been treated unfairly by their employer due to activity on Twitter.

 

According to eMarketer, AI usage across all age groups will spike roughly 1,000% in 2023 over 2022 levels. It’s not surprising, and given how immature the AI space is, that growth should continue for the next several years at least. If I’m reading the numbers right, it looks like almost half the population will be using AI in some form within 3 years.  I think that number might be low, if anything.

 

Keeping with the AI trend, Meta is looking for integrate personality-based AI chatbots into Instagram and Facebook. As the technology behind AI matures, I think you will see much more use of AI chatbots, I could see going to your favorite rock stars’ website and being greeted with an AI chatbot that lets you ‘chat’ with them.  At first it would be text-based, then add audio, then eventually video.

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday Marketing Minute, I’ll have a new post up on building customer loyalty in the restaurant industry via digital up tomorrow and….I’m not sure what Thursday’s post will be yet. I want to do a case study post as I haven’t done one in a while, but I will have to find a good one I can share.  Saturday’s Bible study post will feature one of the most amazing stories of faith in the Old Testament, and probably the greatest foreshadowing of the coming of Jesus, hundreds of years before His birth.

So that’s what you can expect this week. As I wrote about last week, I am loving Claude as a tool to boost my writing output, here’s where you can learn how I am using it to write more.

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This is My Favorite AI Tool, and It’s Not ChatGPT or Bard

using claude to create content

So I’ve been using and loving a new AI tool the last few weeks. Before I get into what the tool is and how I use it, I wanted to talk about how I am using artificial intelligence tools to help me with content creation.

First, I am different from most content creators. When you talk to most content creators who blog, they will tell you they have plenty of ideas for blog posts, but no time to write them all.

I am the exact opposite. And I always have been. I have always struggled with coming up with ideas for posts. Once I have the idea, the actual writing of the post typically takes me an hour or so.  But I just cannot come up with enough post ideas to consistently post in anything resembling a consistent posting pattern. It’s one reason why I love writing Monday’s Marketing Minute: The format picks the ‘topic’ for me, and it’s much easier to write a weekly post summarizing a few news stories I have read that I feel will be relevant to share here.

A big part of my problem is I feel like if I have ever written about a topic before, then it would be repetitive to cover it again. Yes, I know how stupid that sounds to say that I can’t blog about the same topic twice on a blog that’s almost 15 years old, but that’s where my mind goes. I feel like covering the same topic twice is doing a disservice to the reader, so I try to find a new angle on each topic, a new case study, example, etc. And those don’t always readily present themselves.

So prior to a few weeks ago, I’d always struggled come up with post ideas. But all that changed when I discovered Claude. Claude is somewhat similar to ChatGPT, but where it excels is analyzing text. This is where it has been immensely helpful for me.

When I first started using Claude, I told it to analyze my website, tell me what it saw.  It would point out my perceived strengths and weaknesses based on the content I was creating.  Then I said go through my content, and tell me which industries I should be focusing on, based on my content, my services and my experience. And it gave me a list of several industries that were a good ‘fit’ for me, I whittled that list down to a few that I thought were the best fit for me, and that was my focus list. If you’ve been reading this blog for the last couple of weeks, you can make a good guess at what industries are on that list.

Once I had my list of industries I would be focusing my content on, I needed to drill down on the type of content I create for those industries. I went back to Claude and asked it to give me the top concerns facing decision-makers in those industries. It gave me 5 or so concerns for each industry. Some of those concerns overlapped with the type of services I offer, and some did not.

So I went back to Claude and told it to give me the top concerns for these industries BUT restrict those concerns to areas that overlap with my services. Then in seconds, Claude gave me a list of dozens of pain points that industry professionals are dealing with, that perfectly overlap with my skillsets and services.

Each pain point was a blog post idea. Prior to working with Claude, I had never planned out my editorial calendar more than a week or two in advance. In fact, if I had anything scheduled ahead of time, I felt accomplished.

Thanks to Claude, I now have my editorial calendar here full for the rest of the year. This would have been all but impossible on my own, but thanks to Claude, my content creation is set for months.

Here’s How I Am Using Claude to Create Content

So here’s where the rubber meets the road. I’ve talked about the potential perils of AI for content creators before. One of my main fears is that content creators simply let an AI tool write content for them.

And it’s insanely easy to do just that. It took Claude just seconds to give me dozens of post ideas.  For each post idea, all I have to do is ask Claude to write me a post on that topic, and it will spit out the post in seconds.

Of course the potential problems with this approach are obvious. You lose any sense of ‘your voice’ in your content. Your content could be inaccurate, believe it or not all AI tools commonly used today are quite prone to sharing false information (called ‘hallucinations’). And it’s simply not very ethical at all to pass off the work of an AI tool as being your content.

My stance has always been that you shouldn’t view AI tools as the content creator for you, but rather the content editor. Here’s an example:

For this post on the technology industry, I asked Claude to give me a 1,000 word post on the topic. Which it did in seconds. I then used the post that Claude gave me as the outline for the post I would eventually write. Instead of publishing the post as Claude gave it to me, I basically stripped all its guts out and rebuilt it from the ground up. I did keep the structure of the post more or less in tact. But almost all of the content ended up being changed.

The post that Claude gave me was around 900 words. The finished post I published was 2,500 words. And I ended up removing at least half of the words that Claude gave me.  And the few sentences I did keep were left alone because I read it and thought “Ok that’s similar to what I would have said here anyway.”

But what Claude gave me was the structure for the post. That was immensely helpful to me. I learn by observing, if you give me an example of how something works, I can quickly understand it. By writing a post for me, Claude helps me easily see the type of post I want to write. If I had started out on my own to write the same post without Claude, and only had the post topic, I could have done it, but it would have taken much longer. And I’m not sure the content itself would have been any better. It might have been worse.

So How Does Claude Compare to Other AI Tools Like ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is the AI tool that most people are familiar with if they have been using any AI tools. I have been using it a lot this year, and while I do still use it and find it useful, I prefer Claude’s ability to analyze text. Especially large amounts of text, I believe Claude’s current version can analyze up to 100,000 words of text at a time.

ChatGPT I use more in a ‘conversational’ way to help me work out ideas in my head. It helps with ideation for me. And I still use it regularly for that purpose.

Bard.  Bless its heart, but Bard is just bad. So I was writing a post on loyalty programs with Claude, but I decided to do some research with Bard for the post. I asked Bard to give me the average ROI for a loyalty program. Bard told me it was 25-30%. That figure sounded impossibly high, so I asked for a source. Which Bard said it couldn’t give me. I kept asking in different ways and Bard finally admitted that it made up that 25-30% figure for the ROI of loyalty programs. Bard said the REAL figure is 10.4%. I said great, what’s the source for that figure, and Bard cited a 2022 study from the Aberdeen Group.  I googled it, and sure enough, that study doesn’t exist.

Bard is from Google, but Google also purchased a 10% stake in the company behind Claude earlier this year. I suspect we will see a massive upgrade to Bard soon, I mean it’s so bad now we almost have to. And since Google is now investing in Anthropic, the company behind Claude, I have to wonder if some of the same technology that powers Claude might find its way to Bard in some form.

So my advice for content creators when it comes to AI remains the same: Learn how to use these tools but use them for ideation and editing of your content, not for content creation.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Becomes X, ChatGPT Usage Falls, Marketers Say Relax About AI

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are having a great and productive week! There is SO much happening in the news right now, in politics, in business, in world news. Here, we will focus on the business stories and let the talking heads argue over the other stuff! Let’s dive in!

 

Elon is making moves to rebrand Twitter into X. I’ve been writing about Elon’s plan to create the X ‘everything’ app for a while now, but it looks like he’s moving forward with his plans. It’s honestly a bizarre move that seemingly throws a ton of branding around Twitter down the toilet. The speculation around Elon’s plans for X mostly centered around would he change Twitter into X and build it out from there, or create more apps with additional functionality, and fold them all together as a suite with Twitter that collectively would become X. I assumed he would move toward the latter, with Twitter remaining a standalone app.  Maybe that’s not what he’s planning.

As I was telling an industry friend earlier, this is the most chaotic I can remember the social media space being in at least 15 years. It’s a lot to digest, with Twitter, Threads, everything. I do wonder how many people are getting tired of trying to keep up, and are simply opting out of social media in general.

 

Did you know this? Traffic to ChatGPT and Bard actually FELL in June. There’s been much speculation as to why, the main reason seems to be a perceived decline in the quality of responses given. There’s also been speculation that ChatGPT in particular has been slammed with server usage issues, and is having to scale back as a result, which has lead to a decline in quality.

Personally, I am hopeful this decline is simply because people are figuring out that getting these AI tools to give you useful information truly does require you to spend a good bit of time with them. You have to invest in having deeper ‘conversations’ with these tools to get meaningful outputs.

 

And marketers are seeing the same things I am, AI will assist with most tasks, but won’t supplant humans. It feels like the initial hysteria over AI taking over the world is dying down a bit as people become more versed in using the tools. As I’ve written here before, AI is capable of being a powerful tool if you use it correctly.  I’m using it in my work as basically a conversational search engine. It’s making it much easier to get more relevant information, however I still have to fact-check info I am given. I’m currently experimenting with ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.  Of the three, Claude is my favorite for now, but I want to start playing with some a few new tools before I pick my fav.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute, I hope you have a wonderfully productive week!

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AI-Powered Customer Support Solutions: Enhancing Customer Experience and Efficiency for Fortune 500 Companies

ai-powered customer support

As today’s business landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, providing exceptional customer support is vital for Fortune 500 companies. Customers want more personalized support, faster. To address the needs of customers, forward-thinking CMOs are turning to AI-powered customer support solutions. Leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), these innovative solutions revolutionize customer interactions, enabling personalized experiences, seamless self-service, and streamlined operations. Let’s explore some of the benefits of AI-powered customer support, and look at some real-world examples of how companies are utilizing these emerging technologies to drive real business growth.

The Benefits of AI-Powered Customer Support

In an increasingly digital world, AI-powered customer support solutions offer many compelling benefits for Fortune 500 companies. First, AI chatbots and virtual assistants enable immediate and round-the-clock support, addressing customer queries and concerns in real-time. This availability boosts customer satisfaction and improves response times. While there can be some concerns over the quality of the support delivered via AI, these concerns should further abate over time as the technology matures and improves.

Secondly, AI enhances personalization by leveraging customer data and historical interactions. AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of information to deliver tailored recommendations and customized support, creating a more personalized experience for customers. This is an area where AI provides a level of support that humans simply cannot replicate. And as noted earlier, AI’s ability to process vast amounts of customer data and extrapolate relevant outcomes should only improve as the technology continues to mature.

Additionally, AI-powered customer support solutions drive efficiency by automating routine tasks and inquiries. Chatbots can handle repetitive questions, provide self-service options, and escalate complex issues to human agents when necessary. This automation optimizes resource allocation, reduces costs, and allows human agents to focus on more complex and value-added tasks. Also, this allows a company’s SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to spend more time addressing support issues that require advanced expertise.

Examples of How Companies Are Currently Leveraging AI to Improve Customer Support

Let’s look at some quick examples of companies that are seeing real results from integrating AI into existing customer support processes:

  • Fintech startup Tomorrow reduced AHT (Average Handling Time) by 50%, dropping AHT from around 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.
  • According to Satu Karaksela, Service Manager (Digital Customer Service) at Finnair, the airliner realized a 30% improvement in response times for CS cases after adding AI to the mix.
  • Payment and transactions company Efecty realized a 48% reduction in calls to customer support in the first year it began utilizing a chatbot in its CS mix. You can take the internal cost your company assigns to each CS call and get a rough estimate of the potential savings that could be seen from a similar decrease at your own company.
  • Launched in 2018, Bank of America’s chatbot Erica has now helped over 32 million BoA customers with over one billion interactions.

The common theme here is utilizing AI to assist with the more basic customer support requests.  Think of AI as being able to handle the 101-level inquiries, and then handing off to a human agent if more detailed and specific assistance is needed. While this may reduce the need for less skilled customer support agents, it should increase the demand for more skilled SMEs.

 

Transforming Customer Experiences

AI-powered customer support solutions have the potential to transform customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies. This can be done by harnessing the power of AI, organizations can offer intuitive and seamless interactions across multiple channels, ensuring consistent support regardless of the customer touchpoint. As research shows, a consistent experience throughout the buying and/or support process is vital to achieving superior CX.

The use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms enables chatbots to understand and respond to customer inquiries in a human-like manner. These AI-powered systems continuously learn from interactions, improving their responses over time and providing a more conversational and engaging customer experience. It’s worth noting that as investment continues to flow into AI and related technologies, the automated experience that AI can provide will only improve. Keep this in mind when considering or analyzing the current landscape and offerings.

Furthermore, AI-driven personalization allows companies to anticipate customer needs and preferences. By analyzing past behaviors, purchase history, and demographic data, AI-powered solutions can deliver relevant product recommendations, promotions, and content tailored to individual customers, fostering a sense of connection and loyalty. Again, relevance will be key to driving customer satisfaction, and AI’s ability to give relevant interactions will only improve over time.

Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Efficiency

CMOs of Fortune 500 companies understand the importance of efficient operations and cost optimization. AI-powered customer support solutions offer significant opportunities in these areas. By automating processes and handling a high volume of inquiries, AI chatbots can significantly reduce response times, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance operational efficiency. The four case studies linked to earlier in the post were provided to illustrate this very point.

Moreover, AI-driven analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior, sentiment, and trends. CMOs can leverage this data to identify pain points, understand customer preferences, and make data-driven decisions to refine products, services, and marketing strategies. This data-driven approach enables organizations to stay agile and responsive in meeting customer demands.

Integration and Implementation Considerations

While the benefits of AI-powered customer support solutions are clear, implementing such solutions requires careful consideration. CMOs should evaluate their organization’s specific needs, customer base, and existing infrastructure to determine the most suitable AI solution. Collaboration between marketing, IT, and customer support teams is essential for seamless integration and deployment. Integration is the key to driving success as well as initial adoption. AI, if used correctly, can integrate into existing business functions and enhance current customer support processes. Companies like yours can more easily justify an investment in AI technology if it can improve existing processes versus an investment that requires costly new processes be created to support its function.

Conclusion

In the competitive landscape of Fortune 500 companies, delivering exceptional customer support is a strategic imperative. AI-powered customer support solutions empower CMOs to quickly deliver assistance at scale to customers. This helps companies realize improved satisfaction scores, customer loyalty and reduced support costs.

Leveraging AI to enhance your company’s existing customer support efforts can not only save you money, it can grow your business as well.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: LinkedIn Testing AI, Mercedes Adds AI, China’s ChatGLM has Passed ChatGPT?

Happy Monday, y’all!  Hope you are having a wonderful Summer, which has finally arrived here in Alabama with temps in the mid to high 90s this week.  Ugh.  Hope it’s cooler where you are, here’s 3 stories I found that I think you will enjoy, as we are going all AI this week!

 

This kinda feels like a ‘toothpaste coming out of the tube and it’s not going back in’ moment.  LinkedIn is now testing allowing members to use AI to write posts for them.  Users will give LinkedIn 30 words concerning what they want the post to be about, then LinkedIn will write a post for them, based on the 30 word provided.  The user can then edit or publish the post as is. So you can expect similar functionality to be standard on all social platforms soon, which means the content glut is about to get astronomically worse.

 

If you own a Mercedes that has the MBUX system, you may see you have a new perk: ChatGPT integration. 900,000 Mercedes with the MBUX system have ChatGPT integration as of June 16th. The idea is to make information that the current voice command system relays more conversational, and robust.  The auto industry could benefit greatly from AI integration into voice command systems, I expect to see a huge push into this space in the coming 12-24 months.

 

So apparently, China’s version of ChatGPT, ChatGLM, is claiming that it has now passed ChatGPT in terms of performance. However it seems the benchmarks aren’t quite the same and neither is the data set. Still, this shows how rapidly the AI space is continuing to evolve and grow.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! Please enjoy the pool and/or beach for me this week!

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Apple’s Vision Pro Reveal Could Signal the Coming Integration of AI Into AR/VR

If there’s one space where the technology hasn’t yet caught the promise, it’s Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).  The promise is there, but the delivery, especially in terms of hardware, is lacking. The main focus has been delivering AR/VR experiences via headsets that are clunky at best, and can easily cause disorientation and headaches at worst.

Nevertheless, Apple announced that it is getting in the AR/VR headset game yesterday at its Worldwide Developers Conference with the introduction of Vision Pro.

The price tag immediately jumps out at you: $3,500.00.  And it won’t be available till early next year. But it’s an Apple product, so it will sell amazingly well, I am sure.  And one limitation of other headsets has been addressed; the weight of the Vision Pro is roughly a pound. That’s lighter than competitors, but even a pound of weight on your head will wear you out after a while.

Still, the introduction of the Vision Pro will encourage competitors to up their game as well. And I think the huge $3,500 price tag could be a boon for the space, as it will give competitors more runway in developing their own headset. Instead of a headset, what about a pair of AR/VR glasses that weighs only 6 ounces and costs $899 instead of $3500? The beefy price tag of the Vision Pro, and early 2024 release date, gives competitors more options. And that should ultimately benefit consumers.

So How Could Artificial Intelligence Fit Into AR/VR?

A few weeks ago on Twitter, I spotted a developer with a very interesting application. If you have used ChatGPT before, you may have noticed that you can tell it to give you an answer ‘in the style of’ a particular person or character. You can ask ChatGPT to answer a question for you, and it will.  Then you could ask ChatGPT to answer that same question, but ‘answer as a drunken pirate’ and it will.

The developer I saw on Twitter had taken this idea and incorporated it to have ChatGPT output its answers as if it were Steve Jobs. Someone left a comment saying they could see the potential of this, perhaps you could add other people to this, so you could have a virtual conversation with maybe family members. The developer remarked that this idea was exactly what he had in mind, he explained that his father had died at a young age, and he was incorporating his father’s persona into ChatGPT in order to have a ‘virtual conversation’ with his father now that he is an adult. This type of implementation could be seen as very cool or very scary, depending on your point of view.

Nevertheless, this idea of incorporating a real person’s persona via AI and outputting their responses is interesting to explore. If you add in the delivery of the persona via an AR/VR headset, the possibilities are endless:

  • A field service worker could have his boss ‘on site’ with him via AI in his AR/VR headset so he can assist the worker in diagnosing a problem with a field unit and walk the worker through how to fix it.
  • A teenager could watch a Taylor Swift concert on her birthday, and in between songs, Taylor stops to sing her Happy Birthday!
  • A marketer could join a workshop on AI where the presenter can stop the presentation to answer questions from the marketer as the material is being covered.
  • A family could watch a movie where the actor can explain more info about how a scene was shot or the director can talk about the plot as the movie is happening, and answer questions that the viewer may have.

The idea would be to take the customized interaction you have in ChatGPT, and move them to the AR/VR world via a visual component such as a persona, similar to a hologram. The benefits of AI would be that the persona of an actor or performer or subject matter expert would be able to respond to the viewer individually, giving them a customized response, if not have an actual ‘conversation’ with them.

The possibilities are endless. think back to this scene from Minority Report:

Here, the ‘ads’ are basically holograms that have scanned the shoppers’ retina to identify who they are, and access their purchase history. Then they could offer customized ads based on what they had already bought. This is pretty limited, a seamless integration of AI with AR/VR could lead to the ads engaging with the shopper in a back and forth in order to provide a truly customized experience.

Long-term, I think AI will have a massive impact on AR and VR, both at the consumer and brand level. I do think the technology needs to mature a bit more before the true potential of this collaboration can be realized. But in another 5-10 years, the AI/AR/VR experience could be truly immersive and truly transformational.