Your journey to a more customer-driven culture begins with your employees

In last week’s blog, we explored how using AI to get beyond survey-based approaches can help you achieve higher ROI on your experience management investments. We also shared our thoughts on how survey-based approaches will evolve, too, as companies integrate AI more into their customer listening strategies. 

This week, we’ll take a look at ChatGPT’s answer to the next question in our series: “How can I use AI to help create a more customer-centric culture?” As usual, we’ll outline our own thoughts after providing our opinion on how ChatGPT did itself answering the question.

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

Here are some ways that you can use AI to make your company more customer-centric:

1. Personalization: Use AI-powered recommendation engines and chatbots to provide personalized experiences for your customers. By analyzing customer data, you can tailor interactions and suggest relevant products or services, creating a culture that values individualized experiences and customer satisfaction.

2. Predictive analytics: Use AI-powered predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and preferences. By analyzing data on customer behavior and purchase history, you can make proactive adjustments to your products or services, creating a culture that values innovation and continuous improvement.

3. Voice assistants: Use AI-powered voice assistants to provide more natural and intuitive interactions with your customers. By implementing voice assistants, you can create a culture that values customer convenience and ease of use.

4. Sentiment analysis: Use AI-powered sentiment analysis to better understand customer feedback and emotions. By analyzing customer sentiment, you can make adjustments that align with customer needs, creating a culture that values customer feedback and satisfaction.

5. Customer service automation: Use AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to provide faster response times to customer inquiries. This will free up your customer service team to focus on more complex issues and create a culture that values efficiency and responsiveness.

6. Data analytics: Use AI-powered data analytics to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. By using this data to inform business decisions, you can create a culture that values customer data and insights.

Overall, AI can help you create a more customer-centric culture by providing more personalized, responsive, and intuitive experiences for your customers. By leveraging AI-powered tools and solutions, you can prioritize customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased business success.

How Did ChatGPT Do?

ChatGPT’s answer to this question is not as good as some of its answers for prior questions in our series. While all of the specific recommendations made by ChatGPT are good on their own, it doesn’t weave them together and make a strong connection directly to culture.  Like in past blogs in this series, ChatGPT does call out how pursuing these opportunities to integrate AI into your CX will catalyze a shift in your employees mindset and behaviors, but it is fairly high level and not that actionable.

Create a continuous improvement cycle for your employees to apply AI-driven insights to the highest value CX use cases

I’ve always believed that focusing on culture is key to organizational effectiveness and getting the highest ROI on your investments in customer experience.  See my articles The Inside-Out Approach to Customer-Centricity and Activating Culture is Key to Making Customer-Centricity Stick for more on the importance of culture to boosting the ROI for your investments in CX.

Culture is often defined as “how things are done around here.” Your change management efforts should focus on driving desired behaviors, not just shifting mindsets.  Whether you are looking to evolve your culture to foster more collaboration, experimentation, openness to outside ideas, or data-driven decision making, to name a few common focus areas for behavior adoption, you can apply these behaviors to create more value from the insights your investment in AI helps deliver.  You should be intentional about what specific behaviors you’d like to nurture in the organization, and how to activate and reinforce these behaviors over time.  Just like exercise requires many reps to build muscle or learning a musical instrument or sport requires practice, you need to identify ways to reinforce the right behaviors in the organization if you aim to drive adoption of new ways of working that embed AI and the insights it enables into a sustained cycle of continuous improvement.  

While adopting the use cases ChatGPT focuses on will lead to a shift in how your employees digest insights and take action to improve the customer experience, ChatGPT fails to address head-on a key risk to realizing a higher ROI from your efforts to apply AI for your CX. This risk, the need to overcome the “complexity gap”, is one we also address in an earlier blog in this series with ChatGPT, here. It’s easy to get enamored with the power of analytics, so much so that you lose sight of the need to focus on change management and ensuring sustained adoption of your use cases. To close the complexity gap and empower your employees to engage with AI, start with a “proof of concept” and make sure there is a broad based motivation and commitment to change, which will be needed to drive your desired business outcomes. Building employee trust and familiarity with AI is key to creating an ongoing continuous improvement cycle that unlocks the maximum value from your investments in an AI-driven CX.  For more on creating continuous improvement cycles and their impact on customer service, check out our videos with our strategic partner, Farlinium.

Spark interactions among your employees

Following the approach outlined above can help reinforce a more customer-centric culture that promotes non-siloed thinking and iterative progress towards your CX vision. This approach will spark dialogue among your employees, who can be an exceptional source of further insights above and beyond your tech-enabled CX listening posts.  You can proactively engage your employees to build a cultural movement, where you combine behavior activation with the right training to amplify this continuous improvement cycle.  You can also encourage conversations among your employees and treat this as another source of unstructured data to mine for insights on how to improve your CX.  For more on the five key lessons on how to build a movement, click here.

Up Next Week

In next week’s blog, the tenth and final one in this AI & CX series with ChatGPT, I’ll be asking ChatGPT about how to identify and prioritize CX initiatives that will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

If you’d like to see the full set of blogs in this AI & CX series so far, click here. 

We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation!