Amplify and create new peaks along your customer journey

In last week’s blog, we explored how AI can contribute to a customer-driven culture by creating a continuous improvement cycle where your employees apply AI-driven insights to the right use cases. We also wrote about how you can spark greater “clue consciousness” among your employees and encourage conversations among them as you reinforce a more customer-driven culture.

This week, we’ll take a look at ChatGPT’s answer to the next question in our AI & CX series: “How can I identify and prioritize CX initiatives that will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty?” As usual, we’ll outline our own thoughts after first providing our opinion on how ChatGPT did itself answering the question.

Chat GPT’s Answer (repeated here, verbatim from ChatGPT): 

To identify and prioritize CX initiatives that will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, you can take a more general approach by focusing on these three key areas:

1. Pain points: Look for pain points in the customer journey where customers are experiencing frustration, confusion, or dissatisfaction. By addressing these pain points, you can significantly improve the overall customer experience and increase customer loyalty.

2. Opportunities for improvement: Identify areas where the customer experience can be improved, such as through personalization, faster response times, or more intuitive interfaces. By improving the overall customer experience, you can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Innovation: Look for opportunities to innovate and differentiate your customer experience from your competitors. By offering unique and valuable experiences, you can create a loyal customer base that values your brand and is more likely to recommend you to others.

Once you have identified opportunities in these three areas, prioritize them based on their potential impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Consider which initiatives will have the greatest impact, and which are most feasible to implement given your resources and timelines. By focusing on these key areas and prioritizing initiatives based on impact and feasibility, you can create a more customer-centric culture and drive business success.

How Did ChatGPT Do?

This answer gets points for brevity, while still making a case for a balanced approach across a variety of your highest potential CX use cases. We especially appreciate that ChatGPT calls out the distinction between reducing pain points, improving your CX for key moments that matter, and driving true innovation in your CX. ChatGPT also recognizes the need to balance value and ease of execution in developing your roadmap. But its answer lacks detail regarding how you can develop deeper insights into the emotions your customers feel along the journey using AI and how this can help in building a more effective CX vision to guide your efforts over time. 

We agree that “pain points” and “opportunities for improvement,” are distinct areas to focus on when determining your CX priorities. ChatGPT falls flat on a key point, however. While ChatGPT does recognize the need for prioritizing where to focus, it doesn’t call out the importance of focusing on the emotions customers feel during larger peaks and valleys, rather than smaller “meh moments” on the journey. Research into customer psychology has shown that customers remember the peaks and valleys and final moments of a journey, not other pain points along the way that are smaller. If the goal of journey orchestration is to both celebrate and amplify the journey’s peaks and reduce its valleys, it’s not enough just to focus on these moments that matter. You need to build deeper insights into the emotions that make them such positive or negative experiences. Without those insights you won’t get the same return on investment and your efforts will be more ad hoc than reinforce a truly engaging and memorable experience that drives the greatest brand advocacy. 

Leverage AI and unstructured data to better understand the emotions your customer are feeling at peaks and valleys along the customer journey

For a more effective approach to designing experiences that evoke a more powerful emotional response that aligns with your brand strategy, it's critical to ensure that your CX vision goes deep enough into how you want customers to feel about themselves along the customer journey. Consider the CX metrics your organization collects that help shed light on customer sentiment. Odds are, you’re using metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES). While these metrics are quite useful, they are not enough on their own to help you prioritize the specific peaks and valleys to focus on and they don’t get into the specific emotions you’d like to reinforce at these moments. 

But going beyond these metrics shouldn’t just be about creating more KPIs. Rather, you should focus on going deeper into the key drivers of how your customers feel along the journey and distill these insights down into just a few emotions you’d like to reinforce consistently along the journey. My friend and mentor Lou Carbone calls this an “emotional motif.” Moreover, you can apply AI to develop insights about the right emotions to focus on, and also use AI to track the congruence of your experience with your emotional motif. See this blog series on Reimagining Insights that I’ve been co-authoring with Lou for more on these topics.

Thanks for accompanying us over the past ten weeks for this AI & CX series. We started out by asking ChatGPT what questions we should ask it. Then we gave ChatGPT a chance to answer our top ten questions. Then we’ve been going through each of the ten questions in turn and critiquing ChatGPT’s answers and providing some additional thoughts on what ChatGPT could have done better. If you’d like to see the full set of blogs in this AI & CX series, click here. 

We hope these blogs have sparked some great ideas for you! We’ll be sure to continue to address the role of AI to drive value for your CX in the future as part of other blogs, given how central it is to accelerating value from your investments.