NEWS

Is it wise to rob CX to pay for growth?

Published

4 years ago

November 1, 2019

When it comes to the future of B2B and CX, a trend for 2020 is coming into focus, and it’s not looking good.

Looking back, Forrester’s Predictions 2018 considered 2018 a “year of reckoning” for digital transformation. This was to be the tipping point when inaction on transformation would start putting firms at risk. One of the surprising insights was that this risk wasn’t necessarily from an inability to attract new customers. It was from churn – from existing customers leaving for better experiences.

Skip forward a year to the 2019 edition, and Forrester is telling a similar, slightly tweaked story: 2019 is the year digital transformation “goes pragmatic.” If 2018 was all about recognizing the risks of failing to digitally transform, 2019 has been about mitigating those risks by putting plans into action.

These trends will have major implications in 2020. For firms that are trailing behind on CX, going pragmatic seems like a no-brainer. But how does the customer fit into this approach? Not very well, unfortunately. The same report states that 20 percent of brands will abandon their customer experience initiatives in 2019, opting for more traditional strategies, like price reductions, to achieve short-term objectives.

As marketers, we’re obsessed with the pain points customers face making their purchasing decisions. However, in our drive to reduce friction in that buyer’s journey, it’s easy to lose sight of the post-purchase experience. Like the CEOs, CIOs, and CMOs turning to pragmatic pre-purchase strategies to capture market share, transformation of the actual product or service experience becomes an afterthought.

Unsurprisingly, these risks are not a B2C-only concern. A 2019 Episerver survey revealed that nine out of ten B2B decision-makers identify increasing digital expectations from their customers or partners as their top external threat. Even worse, 50 percent of those same decision-makers say they lack funding to execute digital transformation programs in their organizations, echoing the Forrester predictions that more pragmatic tactics such as price will be the go-to strategy to spur growth.

What gets lost in this reactive mindset is the key to keeping (and expanding) market share: existing customers.

In B2B, where purchases are both complicated and time-consuming, this post-purchase customer service landscape can be particularly barren. End-users often have their product and/or service decisions made for them by senior managers, and the customer experience itself often reflects that power imbalance. This isn’t an unknown, of course. But if everyone agrees it’s is an issue, why isn’t it a priority? Currently, 59 percent of B2Bs point to legacy or in-house software as the primary reason for not being more digitally agile. That, combined with the lack of capital expenditure, maps out a grim path to declining customer loyalty.

Expensive and complicated purchasing decisions, typically made by senior managers, leave the end-user out of the equation, which in turn means that a user’s only interaction with a brand may be in the vacuum of the post-purchase experience. For many organizations, the product and/or service experience is the brand. And if the experience is poor, the brand perception will follow suit, no matter how low the purchase price might have been.

Perhaps the subconscious hope is that users will relent to a sort of digital Stockholm syndrome, where they develop an alliance with the tools they’re forced to use. More likely, though, the lack of attention to user needs will manifest as a bottom-up revolt, cultivating resentment and ill-will toward the brand responsible for their ongoing poor experience. And when those users become decision-makers, it’s not a leap to see how this can negatively impact business relationships and long-term profitability.

Clinical research has shown that emotions impact logical reasoning. And reasoning suffers the most when emotions are negative. At its base, a brand relationship is an emotional one, formed – and continuously informed – by the customer experience. When that experience is negative, it clouds every aspect of decision-making. Your product and/or service will look unappealing no matter how compelling its feature set or stated benefits.

So, B2B brands have a choice to make: Focus on the short-term gains that traditional price and features may garner, or invest in the long term, creating emotional engagement through meaningful brand interactions that speak to the needs of not only the purchasing decision-makers but also the end-users. Because the latter won’t always be just users—one day they’ll make the decisions.

And with 2020 on the horizon, here’s where B2B companies can take another lesson from B2C: An emotional connection is much stronger than a pragmatic one.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Theresa is the President of McMillan, an independent creative agency headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, with offices in NYC that specializes in the brand experience for a global clientele. She’s responsible for plotting the pragmatic course of action through business development, strategic services offerings and industry partnerships that define the agency’s growth and corporate strategies. Theresa’s been a B2C and B2B marketing professional for more than 25 years, honing her craft in the consumer-packaged goods, software and advocacy sectors and is a strategist-by-trade, which has amplified her life-long passion for pulling things apart to see how they work. She brought that insatiable curiosity to McMillan in 2007, building the agency’s strategic services practice from a one-woman operation into the guiding force behind successful projects for Intuit, LexisNexis and Trend Micro, and becoming President in 2018.

Marketingland.com

NEWS

We asked ChatGPT what will be Google (GOOG) stock price for 2030

Published

9 months ago

March 20, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

We asked ChatGPT what will be Google (GOOG) stock price for 2030

Investors who have invested in Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) stock have reaped significant benefits from the company’s robust financial performance over the last five years. Google’s dominance in the online advertising market has been a key driver of the company’s consistent revenue growth and impressive profit margins.

In addition, Google has expanded its operations into related fields such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. These areas show great promise as future growth drivers, making them increasingly attractive to investors. Notably, Alphabet’s stock price has been rising due to investor interest in the company’s recent initiatives in the fast-developing field of artificial intelligence (AI), adding generative AI features to Gmail and Google Docs.

However, when it comes to predicting the future pricing of a corporation like Google, there are many factors to consider. With this in mind, Finbold turned to the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to suggest a likely pricing range for GOOG stock by 2030. Although the tool was unable to give a definitive price range, it did note the following:

“Over the long term, Google has a track record of strong financial performance and has shown an ability to adapt to changing market conditions. As such, it’s reasonable to expect that Google’s stock price may continue to appreciate over time.”

GOOG stock price prediction

While attempting to estimate the price range of future transactions, it is essential to consider a variety of measures in addition to the AI chat tool, which includes deep learning algorithms and stock market experts.

Finbold collected forecasts provided by CoinPriceForecast, a finance prediction tool that utilizes machine self-learning technology, to anticipate Google stock price by the end of 2030 to compare with ChatGPT’s projection.

According to the most recent long-term estimate, which Finbold obtained on March 20, the price of Google will rise beyond $200 in 2030 and touch $247 by the end of the year, which would indicate a 141% gain from today to the end of the year.

2030 GOOG price prediction: Source: CoinPriceForecast

Google has been assigned a recommendation of ‘strong buy’ by the majority of analysts working on Wall Street for a more near-term time frame. Significantly, 36 analysts of the 48 have recommended a “strong buy,” while seven people have advocated a “buy.” The remaining five analysts had given a ‘hold’ rating.

1679313229 737 We asked ChatGPT what will be Google GOOG stock price — *Wall Street GOOG 12-month price prediction: Source: TradingView*

The average price projection for Alphabet stock over the last three months has been $125.32; this objective represents a 22.31% upside from its current price. It’s interesting to note that the maximum price forecast for the next year is $160, representing a gain of 56.16% from the stock’s current price of $102.46.

While the outlook for Google stock may be positive, it’s important to keep in mind that some potential challenges and risks could impact its performance, including competition from ChatGPT itself, which could affect Google’s price.

Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.

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NEWS

This Apple Watch app brings ChatGPT to your wrist — here’s why you want it

Published

9 months ago

March 10, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

ChatGPT feels like it is everywhere at the moment; the AI-powered tool is rapidly starting to feel like internet connected home devices where you are left wondering if your flower pot really needed Bluetooth. However, after hearing about a new Apple Watch app that brings ChatGPT to your favorite wrist computer, I’m actually convinced this one is worth checking out.

The new app is called watchGPT and as I tipped off already, it gives you access to ChatGPT from your Apple Watch. Now the $10,000 question (or more accurately the $3.99 question, as that is the one-time cost of the app) is why having ChatGPT on your wrist is remotely necessary, so let’s dive into what exactly the app can do.

What can watchGPT do?

Now if you need a quick refresher on ChatGPT in general, you can read our handy guide answering what is ChatGPT, but in short the artificial intelligence (AI) tool understands and responds to natural language questions based on its vast trove of knowledge gleaned from around the web. Now that can be applied in lots of different ways, to answer questions for you or produce written content based around a prompt.

That core functionality of ChatGPT is a big part of what you can do with watchGPT, quickly accessing it through a complication on your watch. Imagine an actually useful version of Siri on your wrist, that’s what watchGPT promises. Whether the answers are incredibly helpful or completely off-the-wall (which happens), you can easily share the results of your chats over text, email, or on social media (internet celebrity here you come).

The other major use case for watchGPT is generating longer messages quickly on your watch without trying to type with the built-in keyboard or relying on the at times questionable dictation results. Tell watchGPT the type of message you want and it will just write it for you, whether that’s a sonnet for your spouse or a lengthy explanation to your boss on why you are going to be in late this morning.

The app doesn’t store any data, so your watchGPT questions and prompts are yours alone unless you share them with people.

The developer is at work on a number of updates as well. At present you can only pose a single question/prompt at a time, typically the conversational nature of ChatGPT is part of its appeal, that will be possible in the next update. Other updates include a history, the ability to set it to vocal input by default, and the option to have its responses read out loud.

For a one-time fee of $3.99 it’s certainly an interesting application for ChatGPT and one that I think is worth giving a try.

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(Image credit: Modum B.V.)

How to get ChatGPT on your Apple Watch

Just download watchGPT from the App Store (opens in new tab) and you’ll be on your way. Again the app allows you to set it up as a complication for easier access, but otherwise just ask it your question or ask it to type something out for you and it will quickly get the job done.

While ChatGPT may feel omnipresent already, we are still just seeing the tip of the iceberg for its potential usage, so we’ll be keeping our eye out for any unique or interesting applications of the versatile AI tool.

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NEWS

Discord goes all in with AI: chatbots, automods, whiteboards and more

Published

9 months ago

March 10, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Discord goes all in with AI: chatbots, automods, whiteboards and more

AI is the future, at least over on Discord.

The messaging application originally made for gamers has become Gen Z’s favorite online hangout destination of choice, and now it’s rolling out a number of features powered by artificial intelligence.

In an announcement(Opens in a new tab) on Thursday, Discord shared what’s coming to the platform soon: an AI chatbot, an automated AI moderator, a conversation summarizer, an avatar remixer, and a whiteboard. Some of these features begin rolling out today, March 9. Others will launch in the coming weeks and months.

While AI has jumped into the mainstream thanks to the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Discord has had an active AI community for quite a while now. According to the company, third-party AI apps already on the platform already have more than 30 million monthly users. Nearly 3 million servers on Discord have some AI element integrated into the community.

In fact, the biggest community on Discord is Midjourney, a text-to-image AI project which allows users to generate art from right within the server. Discord says Midjourney’s server has more than 13 million members.

So, with AI being such an integral part of Discord already, it seemed like only a matter of time before Discord itself started bringing AI directly into the platform.

images

AutoMod AI
Credit: Discord

The first feature coming to some Discord servers as soon as today is AutoMod AI. Discord already has an AutoMod feature, which basically automatically moderates rooms for admins based on the rules of the server. Discord has now integrated OpenAI-powered AI into AutoMod, allowing it to search the server and contact moderators when it thinks rules are possibly being broken. According to Discord, AutoMod AI can also consider the context of a conversation so, for example, users don’t get penalized for posts that are misconstrued.

Clyde is a bot that Discord users may already be familiar with, and starting next week, Clyde is getting an AI upgrade. Currently, the Clyde bot provides information, such as server error messages, and also responds to timeout or ban requests from users and mods. However, that’s pretty much all Clyde was able to do. Until now.

Clyde
Credit: Discord

Clyde will now be able to answer all sorts of questions from users, much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. Users simply have to type “@Clyde” followed by their prompt. Clyde will be able to pull up information and also help find specific emojis or GIFs based on a user’s description.

Another AI feature coming to Discord next week is Conversation Summaries. Again, the name is fairly descriptive of what it does. With users all over the world, many Discord channels are always moving regardless of time of day. Conversation Summaries will allow users to catch up on what they missed on a Discover Server. The AI-powered feature will “bundle” chats into topics so users can easily read up on what they find most interesting.

Conversation Summaries
Credit: Discord

Starting today, developers can start playing with Avatar Remix, an open-source Discord app that integrates AI art into the messaging app. Avatar Remix allows users to take a fellow user’s avatar and change it up “using the power of generative image models.” What does that mean? In the demo that Discord showed Mashable, a user was able to add a party hat or a mustache to a friend’s avatar by simply mentioning their username and describing what changes they’d like to make.

Avatar Remix
Credit: Discord

The company is also launching an “AI incubator,” offering support for developers creating AI-powered apps on Discord.

Finally, Discord revealed a feature that’s coming soon that has long been requested by the Discord community: a whiteboard. But, of course, this won’t be just any collaborative whiteboard feature. It’s going to be AI-powered, allowing users to collaborate in generating AI art and more.

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