The Role of AI in Messaging for Customer-Centric Success

We are living in a world where marketers must focus on customer-centricity, not channel-centricity. This is not news! The idea of putting the customer at the center of everything is easy to agree with.  

But for most companies, it remains a philosophical ideal. Many enterprises could be called “customer engaged” or “customer committed”, but they have yet to reach the goal of being customer obsessed.  

In fact, according to Forrester, only 6% of enterprises today fall into the category of customer obsessed. What makes them different? They are truly operationalizing the idea of making customers the center of everything they do. Their reward? These companies see 1.6 times faster revenue growth and 1.7 times better profit growth than their non-obsessed counterparts. They also boast a whopping 98% customer approval rate. Now, that’s a lot of applause!  

So how do you join this exclusive 6%? In this blog we’ll explore the pivotal role technology, content, and messaging play in cultivating a customer-obsessed culture and look at how businesses can harness the power of generative AI tools to make this happen. 

The Power of Generative AI

Generative AI is not just another buzzword; it’s a genuinely powerful and scalable tool that can augment human processes. Here are some practical ways in which generative AI can help your company become customer obsessed: 

1. Personalized and Customized Experiences: Generative AI can analyze vast amounts of data to help you understand individual customer preferences and behaviors. This data-driven insight can be used to deliver personalized product recommendations, customized offers, and tailored messaging, creating a more engaging and relevant experience for your customers. 
2. Content and Messaging Generation: Tools like Phrasee can generate content and messaging tailored to your brand and audience, at scale. We’re talking 60-70X increased output, and if you’re optimizing that content, you can also be delivering higher performance. On average, Phrasee users enjoy over 24% uplift in engagement rate.   
3. Predicting Future Behaviors: By analyzing data, generative AI can predict future customer behaviors and preferences. This enables businesses to anticipate their customers’ needs and interests, allowing for targeted and effective marketing campaigns. 
4. Sentiment Analysis: All of the above can help you understand how customers respond to your brand and how their sentiment changes over time, helping you make data-driven decisions.
5. Ethical Considerations: Finally, to build trust with your customers, you mustensure that you have an AI code of ethics in place.. Working with enterprise-grade tools like Phrasee can provide guardrails and workflow approvals to ensure ethical AI usage.

The Role of Content and Messaging in Customer Obsession

To reiterate: Being customer-centric means prioritizing the customer over the marketing channel. So, a truly customer-obsessed business is going to meet their customer with high performing content wherever they are.

To achieve this: 

1. Consistency Across Channels: Ensure your content maintains a consistent brand tone and message across all channels. Whether it’s email, in-app messaging, or social media, the customer should encounter a unified brand experience. 
2. Quality Matters: Content should be on-brand, diverse, safe, and optimized based on what is resonating with an audience or individual. Optimizing content performance allows you to personalize and act on real-time data insights. 
3. Automation for Efficiency: Automation powered by generative AI can enhance productivity. It allows teams to shift from mundane tasks to more strategic ones, ultimately driving better results. 

Brands that we see playing this way and succeeding have recognized the need to build a culture of testing, optimization, and measurement. They are maximizing engagement with new and existing customers by creating more personalized, effective, and automated content at scale and at speed. 

Take, for example, Currys, a leading omnichannel retailer that partners with Movable Ink and Phrasee to create and test their email content to drive customer engagement. Leveraging Phrasee’s AI Content and Movable Ink’s AI-powered personalization, Currys streamline their content creation process for email while also automating experimentation to identify the most effective elements, including headlines, calls to action, and subject lines for their email audience.

In a recent bank holiday campaign, Currys used Phrasee’s integration with Movable Ink to fine-tune the headline on an email image to ensure the best-performing message reached the widest possible audience.

Getting Started on the Journey to Customer Obsession

Becoming customer-obsessed might seem daunting, but it’s a journey that starts with small steps. Here’s our advice for businesses looking to embark on this journey: 

1. Build a Culture of Testing and Optimization: Start small by implementing a testing and optimization culture. Measure the impact and gather insights from data. 
2. Start Small, Think Big: Begin with limited test and optimization strategies. Once you see results and build confidence, expand and glean insights from customer data. 
3. Use Data to Inform Strategies: Utilize the data you collect to inform decision-making and personalize strategies across various areas of your organization. 
4. Customer-First Mindset: Shift your organization’s mindset to prioritize the customer in every decision and strategy. 

AI can be a powerful ally in your quest to become customer-obsessed. It can be used to automate marketing content generation, ensure brand safety, and provide deep customer insights. However, it’s essential to start small, measure the impact, and gradually build a customer-first culture across your organization. The journey may be long, but the rewards in customer satisfaction and business success are well worth it.