As AI Drives Marketing, Customers Still Clamor For Human Support

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become table stakes for marketers to keep up with consumer preferences.  AI is enabling marketers to respond to customers in near real time – but not all the time.

Recently, I spoke to a retailer with more than 500,000 customers.  She noted that their company had difficulty reaching customers in time to “help them” in their shopping journey. She noted, “We have struggled at times to adapt to the pace of changing consumer behaviors, which demands better personalization across channels, more / easier options to buy and improved campaign and reporting workflows.”

We talked a little more and their core problem was that their marketing system had inefficient breakpoints that included single customer view technology that wasn’t ‘actionable’, offline to online data gaps, and a lack of third-party integrations to extend their marketing systems’ reach.

The post-pandemic retail shift to online was dramatic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the most recent 2020 Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS) release, e-commerce sales increased by $244.2 billion or 43% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, rising from $571.2 billion in 2019 to $815.4 billion in 2020.

With the shift, 82% of consumers said they would share personal data for a better experience, with such information as email address, birthday and age, and sex/gender identity at the top of the list according to the PwC 2022 survey entitled: Creating loyalty in volatile times.

However, total retail trade according to the U.S. Census was more than $5.5 trillion in 2020. While consumers rely on online shopping, brick and mortar sales are still the lion’s share of purchasing. Our opinion is that whether online or in-person, consumers want personalized service.  And a seamless transition from AI-enabled/digital service to human service is critical.

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Three pervasive problems cause a breakdown between online and in-person service from retailers:

1. First, many retailers have marketing technology that does not support the seamless collection and integration of online and offline channels. As a result, they cannot fully facilitate end-to-end AI-led customer journeys.
2. Second, increased complexity to manage and operate today’s marketing technology tools is a significant challenge. Marketers need simple-to-use tools that manage the complex relationships between customer and retailer. Many marketers are adding tools to kluge a solution which can be fraught with interoperability issues and actually increase marketing costs while making decision making and consumer service slower.
3. Of course, traditional channels aren’t secondary: while digital continues to improve, human service is still important. At least one-thirdof respondents in the PwC Customer Loyalty Survey (2022) said human interaction is important to their loyalty, and for many types of businesses it was more than 50%.

When there is a breakdown in personalized customer service, the relationship between the consumer and marketer is at stake. For example, the Optimove 2022 Consumer Holiday Shopping Survey of 504 consumers revealed that 54% of the consumers surveyed said they will unsubscribe from 1 to 5 brands during the holiday season. In addition, the aforementioned PwC survey revealed that 26% of consumers stopped using or buying from a business in the past year, and 51% would be less loyal if the online experience isn’t as enjoyable as in person.

To state the obvious, at the core of a better personalized experience for consumers is companies that start marketing with the customer, not a campaign, product, or service. Customers should lead the marketing journey and all marketing should mimic the best salesperson providing highly personalized service.

At the core of all marketing should be a customer data platform (CDP) that is the single source of truth.  It should be accessible by AI and by humans, so the customer experiences a seamless experience. A customer-led marketing platform can empower marketers to drive measurable growth by planning, orchestrating, and optimizing marketing programs starting with the customer.

To make it all work, retailers should do the following:

1. Leverage an actionable CDP that unifies all customer data including historical, real-time, and predictive, eliminating the need for management of multiple data silos.
2. Use a predictive marketing platform with a real-time decisioning tied to native channel execution outlets, allowing retail marketers to save time orchestrating comms with hundreds of segments across multiple channels.
3. Continuously improve campaigns and customer journeys with self-optimizing algorithms and one-click recommendations, reducing marketing ops planning and execution times.

In the end, the goal is seamless personalized service for the customer.  So, when customers clamor for support, AI informs personalized digital and human service without a hitch.

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