Marketers are excited about using ChatGPT, but are customers excited to experience ChatGPT-generated marketing messages? As a customer, I would like the quality of marketing messages I receive to increase, while the quantity of them decreases. That doesn't sound like an automatic result of using any AI tool. Thanks to Liz Miller for laying out a big set of questions that companies and their marketing departments will have to work through.
Unfortunately, I expect an AI race to break out among companies to be first to improve profits by using products like ChatGPT. A lot of guardrails will not be created until customer experience plummets over the edge.
Destination CRM: ChatGPT: Looking Beyond the Hype, 2023-Mar-24 by Liz Miller
It is time to have AI strategy discussions to outline strategic imperatives, guardrails, and intentional applications, especially across employee and customer experience environments. That involves asking these questions:
What? What are the processes and workflows that can and should be influenced, impacted, or automated thanks to AI? What impacts do you expect due to this new automation or influx of actionable intelligence? What will meet, exceed, or destroy customer trust or relationships? Will your customers appreciate an account update written by ChatGPT? Will they want to get a “personalized” failure-to-pay message in the voice of your CEO?
How? How will these new AI applications be trained? How has it already been trained and with whose data? How will the model continuously improve? What data is being brought to the new graph on which the insatiable beast known as AI will feed? How will accuracy, legitimacy, and dare I say ethical AI manifest in this new model? How will the value of AI be communicated and shared across both customer and employee cohorts? How will success be quantified outside of efficiencies or time saved? How will AI be measured?
Why? Why are these AI tools being deployed? To what end? Who will these improvements and accelerations impact and impress? How will stakeholders in the processes and output be impacted—and how will they react and why? Why are people hesitant to use AI tools? Why will they embrace them? Why will your teams lean into these co-pilots and assistants? Why will they feel threatened? Where and how can early or better communication about tools and their proposed impact change this reaction? Are the processes and automations being impacted thanks to generative AI being recognized as AI-generated? Does it matter to your people or your customers?
You get the idea. There are a lot of questions!
It will be more important to establish AI strategies now as more tools hit the market and turn the heads of employees and customers alike. So far, most organizations have looked at AI as a grand experiment, making selective and limited introductions in highly controlled and specific spaces. But that luxury of lengthy experimentation will quickly come to a close, as both customers and employees will expect more tools and solutions that add more value to their digital experiences. That’s why you need to bring the right teams together now to talk through these key “what,” “how,” and “why” questions.
The cautionary tales are plentiful: that time a major company unleashed its AI onto the world only for it to become a grouchy, foulmouthed racist, or the time that generative AI users started to get self-portrait avatars that were more boudoir than business portrait, or that time that AI outed a pregnant teenager to the outrage of her in-denial parents. At the same time, the wins and benefits are impossible to ignore: process improvements; employee satisfaction and documented performance improvements; revenue improvements thanks to experience improvements. This is why these strategic conversations aren’t something that can happen once the plane is in the air. The time is now. The cost is experience. It is just that simple. And not even ChatGPT can rewrite that truth.
Liz Miller is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the broad landscape of customer experience strategy and technologies.
