In the safe space of this blog post, let’s start with some frank questions.
- How successful has your website’s personalisation strategy been?
- How well do you adapt your online messaging according to customer segments, and what kinds of message work best for each segment?
- What do your loyal customers have in common, and how do you use this insight to grow your business?
In my experience, it’s normal, even for big brands to answer these questions with some version of: 1) Hm… 2) Er, um… and 3) Ah. Yes… we did some research two years ago, I can send you the deck, it’s quite long but there’s some useful nuggets in there…
I’m joking. Half-joking.
We all know personalised, segmented content converts better - of course it does. So why do so many brands struggle to do it? It’s not for want of trying. It’s just a plain fact that managing any business online gets complicated quickly. The bigger the business, the greater the complexity - and that’s even more true if we’re running a retail site with high trading volumes. So it’s quite understandable that our priority defaults to technical performance - things like: does the site look good? Are my products displaying accurately? Are pages loading fast enough? Are payments processing properly? And so on… Perfectly understandable. But ultimately, strategically speaking, it’s a defensive posture.
We’re always under some degree of pressure to attract new customers, increase sales and grow loyalty, aren’t we? Staring directly into the full glare of these stressors, we can’t expect to steward continuous growth (or turn-around poor performance) unless we gear-shift from a ‘failure-avoidance’ mindset to one of ‘over-performance’.
AI will help us make this shift. But before we discuss how, picture the following situation.
We walk into a car showroom or an up-market furniture shop. What tends to happen after a few minutes of browsing? Of course, we get approached (hopefully) by a likeable individual who offers to assist. Let’s be clear. In these big-ticket retail situations, this person is not employed to ‘assist’ us, they are there to convert us. They are nearly always incentivised by commission and this motivates them to engage with purpose. They are often trained (autodidactically, or otherwise) with scripts designed to tease real and perceived needs, detect our buying intent, and guide us toward a sale. You may even get a complimentary cortado.
Now compare this to a trip to a big supermarket. After several minutes of fruitless searching for the eggs, we ask some guy bent double replenishing a chest freezer to assist us. He glances up and says, “aisle 6” then reinserts his head into the freezer indicating the customer experience has ended. This person is paid by the hour to stack shelves and maybe jump on the till when it’s busy. He is neither employed to assist or convert us. No cortado offered.
It's certainly true that sometimes, the high-end sales assistant comes on too strong and once in a while, the shop worker walks us all the way to the eggs, chatting happily. Nonetheless, these ‘retail experiences’ feel familiar to us, and we recognise that they exist as a result of their attendant economics. Lidl will see no ROI employing personal shoppers. Mercedes dealers must slather customers with obsequious flattery (I imagine). Mohamed Al Fayed had no choice but to cordon Harrods for Michael Jackson.
It's often hard to imagine the world we’d actually like to live in. But perhaps we could all agree that in an ideal world every retail experience would feel polite, convenient, perceptive, pleasant, and personal. In that utopia, whether we’re spending £20 or £20,000, a helpful human would appear and perform the following five actions:
1. Make eye contact and smile
2. Strike a friendly and sincere tone
3. Ask questions
4. Listen attentively
5. Make expertly judged recommendations
Now... Let’s think about online shopping.
Could AI help us simulate those five qualities? We think the answer is yes. Even the smiling part, with realistic avatars, why not?
Our vision needs change focus. Rising from our feet and toward the horizon. Traditional websites (whether they exist for ecommerce, brochureware or lead generation) will soon start to feel like just that, ‘traditional’. And just as physical stores will always have their place, so too will traditional websites, but, let’s be honest, realistic humanistic one-to-one conversations will inevitably become everyone’s favourite UI - and brands who offer it, regardless of ticket value, will win out.
“How can I help today? Sounds great… Here’s what I think you’d like, is that right? No? I’m sorry, help me understand better… Oh, I get it, how about this…?”
This is not about making superficial improvements to a gimmicky chat bot. We’re talking about an AI driven personal assistant who never loses their cool, who’s never too pushy, who remembers everything about our customers combined with an impeccable understanding of our products and services. An AI employee who stays on brand no matter what, who learns in real-time and files everything they learn perfectly. And not only that, they’ll advise us about how to describe our products better - more closely attuned to how our customers think, based on the conversations they are having at a massive scale.
Think about what that would mean to our conversion rate.
Imagine what that would do for loyalty.
All of this is possible, right now.
When we place AI at the heart of both our customer experience strategy and our sales and service strategy, the lines between user experience design and technical architecture begin to blur. Arguably, for the first time, we’re placing our customer (every single one of them) at the centre of our business.
No more customer data disconnection. No more dark UX patterns (no, I don’t want to see your FAQs, they’re FAQing useless). No more forcing customers to interact on our terms rather than theirs. No more excuses for a one-size-fits-all customer experience.
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s happening now, all of it.
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