MARKETING
How generative AI is improving customer experience and service calls
Generative AI and large language models are making customer experience platforms more accessible and humanized. These advances in recent months build on years of AI development that customer service and experience company NICE has put into their experience software.
The company unveiled generative AI use cases at this week’s NICE Interactions event in New York. Enlighten Actions and Enlighten Copilot use OpenAI generative models added to NICE’s AI-for-CX Enlighten platform.
“It makes applications broader and more easy to get to,” said Barry Cooper, president of NICE CX Division.
Using AI for customer service calls helps agents serve customers more efficiently. It also makes customer data available to inform experiences and actions across the customer journey.
“We started in service, but once you go to digital, you quickly go into ‘async’ (asynchronous communication),” said Cooper. “The moment you go to digital, async — WhatsApp and those kinds of things — the likelihood for an interaction to last for days, weeks, years is much greater. And then the likelihood of something that started as service to move to sales or other things is much greater because you have this open channel of communication [with the customer].”
Why we care. In the wave of new generative AI products and features for martech applications unleashed since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, it’s easy to forget the history of chatbots in customer service. Marketers now look to use generative AI and large language models to help them navigate a CRM or ramp up production of marketing content across the entire marketing org. However, CX and customer service remain critical sources for getting to know customers better and retaining them with better experiences.
Enlighten Actions and Copilot features. NICE’s Enlighten AI offerings have already been on the market for three years; NICE’s CXone for eight years. By implementing these platforms, organizations move from having to manually spot-check customer service calls for quality and training to having 100% of customer interactions ready to be analyzed and acted on across the organization.
As a result of adding generative AI, Enlighten gives consumers access to self-service as effective as the best agents, Cooper said. And it gives call agents “super powers” by solving more customer issues quickly with easy-to-use dashboards that help generate solutions.
For instance, if a travel customer has a canceled flight (as many attendees in New York had with the Canadian wildfire smoke that fogged up the city), an agent would have hotels generated in their dashboard which they could then offer to book for the customer. And at the supervisor level, managers can easily spot trends and see that many customers in New York were having the same problem.
Generative web content. Enlighten Actions will also identify common problems and generate web articles and publish them automatically. They will be search engine optimized so that they come up as a top search in a search engine. These articles then serve as another self-help tool for customers who search on Google first instead of searching for clues on the company’s homepage or messaging a live agent or chatbot.
The end goal for these automatically-created articles is to help customers and cut down on call volume, but they have potential for broader content marketing uses.
Data payload. Generative AI helps make interactions more conversational, but the deep knowledge about customers comes from interactions with them through Enlighten and through knowledge within the organization.
“The payload is knowledge,” said Cooper. “We didn’t go to the Internet to get that knowledge, it doesn’t exist on the Internet. If you’re H&R Block, and [you create an article] ‘How to solve this tax issue’ it’s very specific and doesn’t exist on the Internet.”
The Enlighten platform applies AI to hundreds of stages in the customer journey that are mapped out in their previous and ongoing platform CXone. This means that marketers have an effective way to identify opportunities across the customer journey, based on what a customer shares during a conversation with an agent.
Additionally, marketers can draw on customer data elsewhere within their stack — from a CRM for instance — to add more context when a customer calls or messages.
Dig deeper: How CMOs should respond to ChatGPT’s marketing impact
Disney ups sales. Disney uses a number of NICE CX solutions and was among the number of companies present at the New York conference.
Disney was able to identify and measure trends in agent calls and improve strategies that led to sales. Craig Nordengren, a system integration and development manager at Disney, was tasked with using the technology to improve the sales of “Magic Moments” photo sessions that visitors to Disney World can purchase for an extra cost.
A full analysis of calls showed that when agents mentioned “Magic Moments” to a customer during a call, this was more likely to lead to a sale. Nordengren implemented an incentive structure not just for more sales, but for more mentions of “Magic Moments” by the agents. Disney could then see the improvement of individual agents by having a running count of how many more times the agents said “Magic Moments.”
“We make sure that these are actions agents should be able to accomplish, but it’s a little bit of a stretch, so they can do it,” said Nordengren in a session at the conference. “And then we go into analyzing the performance and making adjustments, and this process keeps going over and over again.”
The advantage of using AI is that as processes repeat, the models get smarter and more insightful about the specific business that uses it.
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MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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