The newer, subtler AI revolution is already arriving—and it’s one that brands absolutely cannot afford to ignore.
While we’ve been hearing about AI personalization efforts for years, the real winners of 2024 will be those who can use AI not just to optimize what they’re already doing, but instead to create fundamentally new types of customer journeys and interactions.
It’s an area of focus I like to call generative AI customer experiences.
However, to seize this moment, brands must start with a simple question: “What would actually create real value for our customers?”
This sounds obvious, but we’ve seen this story play out before under a different name: digital transformation. Remember, 70% of digital transformations fail, oftentimes because they don’t start from a place of solving existing customer needs.
It’s our responsibility as marketers to avoid creating AI Potemkin villages and instead use these new tools to revolutionize the user experience.
As the digital front door for customers, the corporate website experience is a perfect place to see what that might look like in practice.
We’ve all visited corporate websites before and wondered exactly whom they’re designed for. The simple answer is everyone, therefore no one. One-size-fits-all publishing means every customer gets the same grab bag of articles about your corporate purpose, a hiring announcement, and maybe the actual case study they were looking for. No wonder engagement rates are so low and bounce rates so high.
Imagine a different world, where AI insights enable a much more tailored view of which content is resonating with your customers and where their searches are coming up short. This valuable knowledge would help you greatly prune your existing content and better predict what types of changes you need to make.
Equally valuable, however, is using AI to reimagine how customers interact with your website at a fundamental level.
Let’s face it, the average corporate page, as it exists today, is making your customers do a tremendous amount of legwork. Frequently, they are faced with two not-great discovery paths: using the cumbersome search feature or, even worse, wading through the above-mentioned library of static pages.
Strategic applications of AI, however, can solve for this.
As I’ve argued before, customers love the intuitive experience of conversing with generative AI tools, and there’s great potential to incorporate this type of discoverability into your web pages. This experience, woven together with the ongoing collection of customer insights, will get you much closer to being able to serve truly personalized content that is specific to your individual customers and their distinct user journeys.
Rethinking the corporate website is just one aspect of furthering your 2024 AI strategy. However, as brands think through the whole customer journey, they will be well served to ensure that every aspect generates something useful for customers, not just a box-checking exercise.
