Where AI Meets CX: The Remarkable Future for Humanizing Brands

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the customer experience in many ways in the coming years. One area that we see interesting applications of AI Technology is the brand personification and social media management. This new way of creating meaningful interactions with your customers will build emotional engagement with your company, even though the entity doing it is not a human being. 

 

Brand personification is a fundamental principle of the concept of Conversational Commerce first introduced in 2016 by Chris Messina, tech expert, and inventor of the hashtag. Conversational Commerce is a way to describe how customers interact with brands on social media and other channels to move them through the sales cycle. These interactions will be handled more and more by AI, at least in the beginning stages. Brand personification represents how the values of your brand become a persona that interacts with customers in this way. 

 

When you consider brand personification, you can see it follows the “cult of the entrepreneur” prevalent over the past 20 years. Brands like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla all have a persona, and it seems to resemble the founders that introduced them to us. These organizations are a manifestation of the entrepreneurs themselves, from how they do business to the culture that supports their work. 

 

Messina says that you don’t have to have a super-famous founder to have a brand persona. Any organization can adopt one. By using a set of principles your team decides best represents the values you want to deliver in your Customer Experience, you can “humanize” your brand to be a persona that says and does things that communicate these values. Many of these communications will take place on social media platforms. In other words, you use your values to envision what that would look like in a real human. Then, you communicate as if that human were your brand in your social media presence. 

 

As this technology progresses, chatbots will do the heavy lifting in these efforts. Moreover, they will populate with responses from AI-powered technology. AI will help technology mimic authentic human behavior. However, organizations will still need to determine what they want these personas to be. 

 

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss with Messina how an organization should undertake humanizing its brand for customers in the second of a two-part interview. Building on the concept of Conversational Commerce addressed in Part 1, we take a deeper dive into the practicalities of developing an AI-powered anthropomorphized brand that will interact on social media on your behalf to build a relationship and how that might affect customer behavior and, perhaps most importantly customer-driven growth.

 

The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.

 

To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. 

 

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