Being Authentically Human in an AI-Driven Customer Experience

AI-driven automation is awesome. It’s a service Sureshot provides for a variety of marketing needs, from maintaining data quality and sending personalized messages, to crafting a perfectly timed friction-free customer journey and beyond. A proven martech tool, automation saves companies time and money and prevents valuable team members from checking out early, both mentally and physically. Take a gander at these impressive stats:

• 90% of knowledge workers say automation improves job satisfaction
• 66% of workers say automation increases productivity
• 86% of workers say it helps them be more efficient

What automation cannot do is build a real relationship with your customers. Yes, it can simulate good relationship skills for a while, but eventually canned emails, text messages and bot responses deliver the same experience as canned food — deeply unsatisfying, with a bland taste in your mouth and a desperate hunger for something more. In a world where tech-neck is not only a thing, but an actual health crisis for 64 percent of the population, I’m not crazy enough to suggest cutting the Wi-Fi to AI, but I am suggesting that the way to be surprisingly different and stand out in your space is to be strategic and artful in how you use AI and automation.

Are You For Real?

Using data to remember names, titles, important dates, preferences, and purchasing habits is vital to your ability to send personalized communications to customers and prospects that genuinely resonate. If you are doing a regular campaign or cold outreach of any kind via email, text or any other medium, by all means automate as much of the personalization as you can without being creepy. But, if you are sending something with a call to action intended to drive high response rates, when customers respond — which is the reason you spent all that money on a campaign in the first place — don’t shipwreck your potential sales with an impersonal automated reply.

Acting Human Is a Learned Behavior

All the latest marketing gurus claim “authentic human understanding” is the new craving of customers across all industries. Every time you respond to a potential or known customer, your message needs to be human and appropriate. If you can’t automate that, then don’t. Before you write this off as madness because your list has over 100,000 prospects, consider doing this: use automation to stagger your campaign in niche segments and have a team of real live humans standing by ready to respond via text, bot, email or voice. Let these service reps help keep leads warm after you automagically send prospects whatever they request. Perhaps have them reach out personally to introduce potential customers to the right sales person to handle their need. Use your imagination, not ChatGPTs. There are companies who provide service reps on-demand, which is ideal for small companies, but mid-size and above should consider hiring permanent rapid responders, preferably ones with great voices, and easygoing personalities. Companies like GTMnow have handy tables that show you how many human reps you need per customer count.

Supporting People Is Sexy

While paying to have real humans assist with a campaign may be a bit of an investment for some, it pays for itself when you make it your competitive differentiator. Tout it on your materials, and give folks a name to ask for when they make contact. When prospects and customers see that you value other humans by providing jobs and caring enough to make human help available to them, it will be far easier to believe your company actually values them as a person. It will also make them more willing to pay a premium for your products and services because there is a confidence and peace in knowing you can talk to a real person when you need one. Heck, if you want to actually be a good human, consider employing veterans, seniors, ex-cons and other people who need jobs, but have a hard time getting their foot in the glass door.   

Remember When Marketing Was Fun?

Although our world is currently in love with the speed and convenience of ChatGPT, there is a scary thing that happens when you let it do all the thinking for you—you stop thinking for yourself. The whole point of marketing is to bring your message to an intended audience and connect with them in a way that makes them prefer your brand to all others. This requires creativity, originality and the fresh perspective that comes from personally tinkering with a problem yourself. Because ChatGPT and all of its competitors are just amalgamations of what other writers have already written, the opportunity to say something new or be a thought leader is simply not possible when you use it. Help your marketing team reconnect with why they got in the field in the first place by inviting them to problem-solve and create original pieces that showcase what it means to be human.

Fine, Be a Cyborg

Here at Sureshot we take a hybrid approach to marketing automation. We have a team of human techsperts who implement all sorts of complex automations and martech solutions for our customers. These AI-driven automations allow modern marketers to obtain and keep superior data quality, scale personalized pieces that drive revenue, and create journeys that customers enjoy. We also employ a real team of human developers, sales folks, marketers and reps who think about marketing automation all the time and love talking to other humans about its potential. We’re good at using a half-human half-tech approach to solving marketing challenges and would love to help you go from setting revenue goals to achieving them. If you’re not ready to talk to one of our humans, check out more of our content, or take our FREE Martech Assessment.