AI will make marketing more empathetic, says Global Female Entrepreneur of the Year
Digital and data have sped up the way we do business, and given us more information about our customers than ever. But have they actually made the customer experience better? Resulticks CEO Redickaa Subrammanian says Artificial Intelligence will be the next stage of digital evolution, allowing marketers to apply empathy, intelligently.
In the American version of British sitcom, The Office, salesman Andy Bernard explains to a bemused colleague the secret of his success: “Name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake. I’m like a carpenter making stairs – always thinking one step ahead.”
The joke, of course, is that the archetype of the American salesman he represents, a man selling paper in a “paperless world,” is obsolete. The world has moved from analogue to digital, leaving “slap on the back” ways of doing business redundant. But some elements of “the deal” have endured. Selling still hinges on convincing someone you understand them well enough to know what’s good for them. And, as more business is executed online, this essential skill is facing serious obstacles.
Redickaa Subrammanian knows this better than most. The co-founder and CEO of the omni-channel martech platform Resulticks has always been passionate about communications. She got her start in advertising as a copywriter. While digital marketing wouldn’t see its first significant surge until 2006, Subrammanian was ahead of the curve when, in 2004 she founded communications agency Interakt. By 2014 the agency had grown it’s client base to over 150 brands, hundreds of staff, and locations all over the globe.
During this time, Subrammanian won the Stevie Award for female entrepreneur of the year and was named in Axial’s Growth 100 list. Interakt Digital’s success saw it courted by major agency groups like WPP, IPG, Publicis, and Omnicom. Indeed, Subrammanian and her co-founder Dakshen Ram came close to an agreement with WPP’s Martin Sorrell.
What stopped them from signing on the dotted line? Their work on global campaigns had given Interakt experience with virtually every marketing technology platform available. Subrammanian and Ram had gained knowledge of these platforms’ strengths, and their weaknesses. They were again and again confronted with the difficulty of measuring ROI due to siloed data. Increasingly, Subrammanian and Ram doubted the corporate giants looking to acquire them could be nimble enough to provide solutions for the next era of digital.
These companies were bringing multiple tools to the table that required extensive outsourced implementation while still leaving the task of extracting and reporting data in the unhappy hands of the marketer.
They realised that, while digital had sped up business, it had broken the handshake.
Subrammanian wanted a one-stop-shop, built by marketers for marketers. Interakt transitioned to Resulticks, a software as a service (SaaS) driven, fully integrated real-time conversation marketing platform.
The platform was designed to help brands overcome data silos and deliver complete views of the customer. Critically, the solution was designed to realise the promise of omni-channel—seamless, ever-evolving, trackable, and compassionate and responsive engagement with customers.
The technology that enabled this vision, of course, was AI.
Our most dystopian fantasies of AI, from Westworld to Ex Machina and Her, have hinged on the risk the AI might learn to empathise and form relationships with humans. While AI technology that so exceeds the Turing test may be a long way off, entrepreneurs like Subrammanian believe that AI has the potential to apply human empathy and responsiveness intelligently, enabling corporate systems to become more humane.
After all, the history of business hasn’t all been slaps on the back and firm handshakes. Human beings often get it wrong. We become defensive when criticised and refuse to change. We make deals that flatter our egos or serve our friends rather than the interests of our company and are swayed by leaders who assuage rather than address organisational anxieties. We get tired, hungover, irritable, and depressed and sign off on phenomenally bad ideas.
And the systems and technologies we have created, thus far, have failed to guide us.
It brings to mind ousted Pepsi president Brad Jakeman’s – who oversaw the soft drink brand’s poorly received campaign with Kendall Jenner – rueful observations that the tools marketers use when evaluating audience data for campaigns are outdated. Traditionally, analytics have drawn from the largest data point of a brand’s target consumer group. Such tactics don’t account for news, or broader behaviours and trends. In the age of social media, a handful of people with large followings can be vocal about campaigns that hit the wrong note – whether they ever would have bought your product or not. “We live in a world where one person with 50,000 Twitter followers can have a significant impact on your brand,” Jakeman reflects.
Insufficient empathy might not always affect your share price, but it will undoubtedly result in mediocre, and even callous, interactions with customers.
Subrammanian gives the example of a man who continued to receive automated birthday messages from an insurance company, addressed to his wife, long after her death. Her insurance was cancelled, but the information hadn’t been shared enterprise-wide. “That data should’ve been updated through the marketing system,” says Subrammanian, “What is the point of sending a happy birthday message to someone who is no longer alive?” She attributes these errors to the size of enterprises and the high volume of data and legacy systems that encumber them. But customers are increasingly impatient with such errors.
Poor personalisation costs businesses upwards of $756bn annually. Just under half of consumers will switch companies when frustrated by unresponsive systems, a trend that has seen marketers double their usage of AI between 2017 and 2018. While consumers have paradoxical reservations about data sharing, research indicates when it comes to personalisation, our expectations are set to outstrip our reservations.
CIO magazine found that when data sharing is seen as a value exchange, consumer acceptance increases. When consumers were asked how they felt about AI generally, only 35% said they were open to it. Yet when CIO rephrased the question and asked consumers how they felt about AI saving them time and money, acceptance skyrocketed to 75%. (CIO Summits Report)
Entrepreneur and academic Steven van Belleghem has referred to technology as humanity’s sixth sense. It is a sense we expect to be stimulated and satisfied like any other. We expect our phones to know where we are and where we want to go, we expect Google to guess our search terms and Netflix to anticipate what we want to watch next.
Technology that anticipates our needs has become so normalised that when these systems fail, there is the uncomfortable sensation of having missed a step.
Belleghem posits, “The successful customer relationship of the future will be built on both the rational (digital perfection) and the emotional (the human touch).” Increasingly, it looks like AI is set to be the hand that guides this human touch, and businesses that want to survive the next digital era will need to be ready for it.