Democratizing Generative AI: Customer Engagement

The AI hype seems to have no end in sight – with the latest updates from OpenAI, it seems achieving the potential of Generative AI has become almost trivial for businesses of any scale. From the largest tech powerhouses to consulting household names to your local grocery store, every business is trying hard to find a differentiation factor through AI. A sensible starting point is the proverbial low hanging fruit, like task automation, content writing, email sequencing. But those are rapidly being commoditized with hundreds of startups popping up left, right and center, promising the untrained eye to seamlessly solve needs such as:

1. Customer claim management

2. Order tracking

3. Lead finding, qualification, reach out and management

4. Customer acquisition and lifecycle management

Then again, with every new release of staples AI offerings like ChatGPT, many of these solutions are being at least partly solved through LLM multi-modality – offering users many of the solutions above a step or 2 away from an overly funded aspiring startup offering yet another paid service. Back in the early days of Google, companies were founded with the premise that prompting the search engine needed highly skilled pros and offering that as a service – I wholeheartedly hope you don’t see anyone offering that service anymore. So it is unclear how many of these companies will still be around in 2 years or even less.

And so, if your business is looking for an edge, can AI really make a big difference? My personal unequivocal answer: absolutely.

Ideas for GenAI-driven Differentiation

Since you’ve read this far, I’ll spare you the ever-growing list of customer services companies adding AI components to their solutions and I’ll assume you’re either not impressed or can’t afford the eye watering costs. Instead, I’ll offer three ideas you can implement on your business within a few weeks if you have the right talent or by hiring specialized agencies without breaking the bank. All within the scope of customer management.

1. Customer knowledge giveaways: in the services industry, one foundational and crucial aspect to gaining trust is credibility. This often takes the shape of multiple calls and workshops. But what if you offered your potential clients this proof automatically and frictionlessly? A good starting point is a carefully designed chatbot that can address your leads and customers some of their more pressing questions in a way that proves you have what it takes and at least partly solving their needs. This is, today, no trivial task, but it is not rocket-science either. A good combination of your business’ case studies, structured offerings, and prompt engineering can take existing chatbot tools to a higher level, providing your customers with near-live dedicated consulting calls.

2. Hyper personalization: this requires many touch points and data sources and it is certainly a hard undertaking even for the most seasoned data scientist. Generative AI, however, can greatly help reduce the time to value by enabling your analysts to speed up data crunching and also data gathering – through a well-designed chatbot, for example.

3. Channel consistency: a user being exposed to multiple inconsistent offerings within a few minutes is often a cause for lost engagement. After all, it is not uncommon for businesses to cater an offering based on the channel. Yet your ideal customers are likely to face your offering through more than one channel. Coupled with personalization, you can greatly reduce this risk on digital channels, allowing you to coordinate your offerings across touchpoints.

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Catch Up With Other Posts in This Series:

‍The Case for AI Assistants

‍Establishing AI Guardrails

‍Enhancing Product R&D