WASHINGTON – C-suite conversations about using AI in customer experience often center on return on investment in the form of efficiency. But that’s misguided if that’s the singular focus, leaders said during a Wednesday breakfast session at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Washington, D.C.
“Now, I think the conversation needs to evolve,” said Astha Malik, chief business and marketing officer at Braze. “Productivity is still very important, but it's also performance. Can you demonstrate what performance your AI tool is driving?”
“The new one-on-one personalization that you're sending — is that actually resulting in better loyalty or ROI for your marketing campaigns?” Malik said. “It's again, going back to the context and understanding what you're getting about your customers.”
Understanding a customer bases' many cohorts and differing needs is key to successful AI rollouts and can also give CX leaders and marketers a voice with executive leadership.
“Many of you will get that seat on the table to have a voice if you truly understand your customers better, and that will help you decide the business strategy and the vision,” Malik said.
Balancing automation and the human experience
At Brilliant Earth, an engagement ring and fine jewelry retailer, understanding customer needs — what can and ought to be automated and what needs to remain a human experience — is paramount, according to Pam Catlett, chief brand officer.
“We're participating with people, in many cases, the biggest purchase of their life to date,” Catlett said. “So knowing what their emotional needs are and the conditions for them to feel trust and safety in making this big purchase is really important.”
That knowledge is helping the company design not only its digital experience, but the in-person experience at its 42 storefronts.
The brand is looking at how AI can better enable the experience, whether through personalization, understanding sentiment from customer service perspective, or delivering products and completing repairs faster.
It’s being used in an “additive” way, as customers still often want that human element, Catlett said.
“We are digitally native, so most of our experiences begin online, but more than half go through a showroom because of the personal experience they can have in a private appointment,” Catlett later told CX Dive. “We have sales people who end up being invited to the wedding of customers because they have established a trusted relationship.”
None of this can happen, however, without comprehensive, clean data and data structures, according to Malik. First-party data is key to that.
“Customers don't mind sharing data as they know it's being put to good use,” she told CX Dive.
When customers receive a notification at exactly the right time with a useful offer, it provides delight, an improvement from five messages being sent and only one resonating, she said. AI not only helps with listening, but helps analyze that data and communicate personalized messages to customers at scale.
“Now I think AI is making it possible as well and turning that into composable intelligence from all these different sources, ultimately for better interactions with the brands,” Malik said.
