CX News
Gen Z taking feedback third-party
Customer feedback rates have dropped steadily - because younger consumers are taking their feedback elsewhere. CX Dive reports:
- Gen Z is twice as likely as baby boomers to provide feedback on companies to third-party review sites or on social media
- Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z consumers have shared their experiences on third-party review sites
- 60% have posted on discussion forums like Reddit
Regardless of your typical customer demographics, you can’t ignore the conversation about your brand happening on social media - which is usually owned by the marketing team. Partner to build a workflow on how to address comments and complaints.
Being proactive will build you enough goodwill and loyalty that it’s worth doing even if it’s not as neatly trackable as feedback in a CSAT survey.
Can IT save customer service?
An article in CIO magazine suggests that IT can fill in existing gaps that allow for bad experiences, and speed up resolution times and improve the rate of first-call resolutions.
The CIO for the State of Illinois seems to agree - a combination of getting back to basics and using AI to empower resource-constrained teams can allow them to deliver better service to the state agencies that serve residents.
Tech is important, but it’s not the only answer. Going back to basics and being customer-centric is always key. Ultimately, the human-in-the-loop model combines the best of what tech can do with the authentic empathy that customers seek when they need help.
Airlines charge more, offer less, and passengers don't fight back
Thanks to price disaggregation (unbundling) and consumers shopping based on low ticket prices, airlines have been charging more once all fees and extras are factored in. And experts say consumers accept lower levels of service because they’ve become used to this and associate the service with the price paid, and have prioritized cost - which reinforces to brands that cost matters more than service.
CX leaders, especially those in the travel industry: if you invest in efficient ways to uplevel your service, you can surprise and delight consumers who come in with low expectations - a key to retaining new guests who have patronized your brand for the first time. Check out why omnichannel platforms are critical for travel brands and how travel brands are using AI to deliver better experiences.
Prepare for BFCM
We partnered with 8 brands to bring you The BFCM Playbook Stack and it’s truly the one resource everyone in ecom should be grabbing (and implementing, pronto).
These playbooks cover:
- SMS conversations
- Delivery as a profit driver
- Influencer + affiliate gold
- Retention & LTV
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…and so much more.
Each playbook is packed with real strategy, ready to run.
AI News
Why Agentic AI Projects Fail—and How to Set Yours Up for Success - Harvard Business Review reports that the top reason they fail is the misalignment between AI’s current capabilities and the business problem the user faces. Working agentic AI into legacy systems is tricky. To set yours up for success, identify where the agentic AI tech of today is well-suited to solve your business problems, and stick to automation for other business problems like repeatable tasks.
Slow AI adoption is pushing vendors to drop the paywall - Salesforce has only converted 12,000 of its 150,000 customers to Agentforce. CX tools are finding the balance of which AI features are behind the paywall vs. included in the base platform and existing tools.
AI Models Can Now Be Customized with Far Less Data and Computing Power - Engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a new method to retrain large language models (LLMs) more efficiently by only updating the parts that matter rather than the whole thing. This development could make AI more accessible and help advance the technology overall.
Exploring the human side of AI - Central Michigan University professor Gustav Verhulsdonck reflects on responsible innovation and the future of AI in learning. He describes this moment in history as a “horse-and-cart vs. cars era” for AI — we’re experimenting and adjusting, and we need to learn to think with this new technology.
Veeam acquires data security company Securiti AI for $1.7bn - AI governance and security is increasingly important and this acquisition aims to help give customers more control and security over their data given this emerging technology.
