How AI is changing the customer experience
Kristina: How has e-commerce changed over the past 12 months?
Guilherme Cerqueira, CEO, Worthix: The pandemic accelerated the growth of e-commerce. With health risks forcing potential customers to stay at home, more companies were forced to bring their businesses online, which amplified access on a global scale. As a result, customer needs and expectations have shifted. Although more businesses are reopening their brick-and-mortar presence, today’s consumers now expect easy, reliable and quick online shopping experiences, or even a smooth blended digital/in-person experience. While these new demands mean that businesses must offer a more sophisticated online presence than ever before, it also means they have greater insights and metrics to better understand consumer shopping habits, such as when they purchase, what they purchase, and how they purchase. All of these changes have created a hyper-competitive e-commerce landscape.
Kristina: You’re using AI to inform brands of their consumers’ wants/needs – tell me about the process?
Guilherme: First, we define the product or service these brands want to gain feedback on, and then generate a unique dialogue link which the brand can send out to their customers. We then deploy our conversation-based AI, which is used to have unique discussions directly with each customer. We empower the customer to lead the conversation, as we use our AI technology, called LUCI (Listen, Understand, Converse, Improve), to determine the direction of questions asked based on customers’ responses. In just two minutes of conversation, we’re able to gather valuable insights on what matters most to each customer. Our platform then runs mathematical models in real time to calculate the impact that each topic – expressed during their conversation with LUCI – has on each of their decisions. Worthix then pinpoints exactly which facets of the experience ultimately drive each customers’ decision to buy or not. Armed with these powerful, actionable insights, companies are able to invest resources where they will see the greatest return and drive the most positive customer experiences.
Kristina: What kinds of insights can executives glean from surveys such as these?
Guilherme: Worthix might feel like a survey, but it’s not. The Worthix A.I. technology uses a conversational framework to empower companies to analyze the “why” behind the buy from the customer’s perspective. These conversations explore customers’ tangible (rational), intangible (emotional), and market (competing/alternative options) perceptions. In the end we rank the most important influencers of the customers decision-making process taking into consideration the variety of expectations they have depending on their unique realities as individuals. Worthix results empower executives to create segmented and accurately balanced strategies all the way from branding and ads positioning to customer service, products, pricing and everything else that surrounds customers perception of value. And these strategies can be delivered in a way that would cause different groups of customers to feel uniquely impacted, making the company empathetic at scale.
What impacts customers’ purchase decisions also changes drastically across regions and demographics. Our technology allows companies to pinpoint those granular differences, including how they change across time. For example, we recently released a joint report with the University of Georgia, which analyzed customers’ decision-making process during the pandemic using Worthix’s technology. The report revealed that “social proof” became key to our purchasing decisions — we lost confidence in our own ability to make decisions and relied on our peers for reinforcement. By understanding the “why” behind a purchase, Worthix enables executives to empathize with their customers across different cultures, languages and locations, and create a more efficient product by integrating that customer feedback. It shows customers you’re listening.
Kristina: When is it time for a brand to delve deeper into their shoppers’ purchase intents/shopping habits?
Guilherme: Customers’ decisions are dictating the flow of the $37 trillion dollars circulating around the globe. In order to survive, brands must consistently delve deeper into what’s behind consumer decision-making, as it is always changing in response to internal and external circumstances. There’s so much technology to capture customer data, but truly understanding behavior allows brands to double-down on what’s resonating or pivot their offers — and there is always room for improvement. Once brands understand their customers on a deeper level, they’re able to build invaluable trust and loyalty.
