Finding effective ways to maintain the customer relationship in the AI world
As AI increasingly handles customer interactions, marketing automation, and support, businesses face a challenge: How do you maintain real relationships with customers when much of the interaction is AI-driven?
Yes, personalized emails, CRM monitoring, and AI-driven recommendations help—but human connection and trust still matter. The key is combining AI’s efficiency with personal, value-driven engagement that makes customers feel like they’re more than just data points.
Leverage AI for Efficiency, But Keep Human Touchpoints
Pick up the phone! AI should enhance, not replace, human relationships. Take some time during a day a week to contact a customer on the phone. The phone is one of the most personal tactics in your marketing arsenal. Much overlooked, it one of the ways to find out the truth of what’s behind an email. Or the truth, period.
Conversation from Hell
In 2013, I wrote a blog called Conversation from Hell. In those days (before sophisticated SEO), I used to always number one in a google search when I typed in those words. Today, I’m no where to be found. But SEO is not the point this time…phone calls are.
The blog documented a call I had when a magazine rep. It became one of my most popular at the time. The phone call I had which inspired the blog, happened a lot in those days because of the way we monitored advertising results. You might enjoy it.
The point is a phone conversation brings out things you can’t do with AI. Try automated something like that! You would de-humanize it if you used AI. In fact, this blog generated Another Conversation from Hell a few years later that involved both email and phone calls!
Make Your Loyalty Program Feel Exclusive & Personalized
Loyalty programs still work—but not all loyalty programs create real engagement. We run some of the most successful because of the human beings behind the program.
When we got into the business, we quickly realized that nothing replaces a human being: there was no OCR software that would read accurately the submissions we receive to claim the rewards in our B2B program. Only human eyeballs do that.
However, we utilize AI to our advantage too. For example, in our payouts, Excel® is our go-to program but it is humans who create and verify the accuracy of the payouts! Even ACH payments requires human thought.
When we instituted ACH for our clients in our spiff programs, the greatest concern was the bad actors out there who make their mischief cracking down walls. Yes, even VPN walls can be broken; just ask any thief.
But what you minimize your exposure on the internet? In other words, what if you are OFFLINE and only appear ONLINE when you do the traction? This revolutionary thought never occurred and was applauded by our banker who said, “We never heard of that?” Then, the timing of the evil hacker has to be perfect, which increases the odds of his – not our – failure.
In What Makes a Shopper Loyal, we point out if you are going to study loyalty, you should study tides. Like tides movement is constant, loyalty movement is constant. To keep loyalty at its crest, something significant in the stimulus has to be present. That “something” is sometimes buried deep within a person’s belief system. Other times, it’s a change in the price or a coupon that can change the tide’s (and hence loyalty’s)direction. Therefore, if all shoppers eventually switch their loyalty, what we should study the types of stimuli that make a shopper loyal or a loyal shopper. What drives the tide of loyalty?
The answer? It’s not the brand, it’s the people behind the brand! AI can track customer behaviors (how often they engage, what they buy, what content they consume). But only human beings can do anything with that data!