Personal assistants

 

As AI overwhelms humans with speed and ubiquity, personal AI will rise.

The usage of AI outside of the tech world will determine its longevity. During the dot-com days it wasn’t the early adopters who defined how the Internet eventually took shape and became viable.

A real-world metaphor was needed to help those outside the tech world to grasp at least one use-case of a newly created SaaS product. I had led a training session for procurement personnel at a major retailer in their basement computer training room in Texas. They ordered pizza for everyone - sticky fingers for a sticky product. After much hand-holding, users in major corporations began embracing and enjoying the SaaS tool.

About three years after the dot-com bust, at a home-showing with a realtor, she arrived carrying printed materials from her MLS listing while I knew about comparable properties she hadn’t yet researched. She got visibly upset with the “darned Internet”. Car dealerships, similarly, didn’t appreciate prospective customers walking in knowing the price they will pay.

Software efficiencies are harder to communicate as one moves away from the epicenter of software innovation and venture financing. Where incentives are misaligned or perceived as misaligned, it’s a harder sell. Then change gets imposed on consumers as investors in new technologies run out of patience. Rarely is there an outside event like Covid to be the catalyst for a technology to mature in its lifecycle overnight and be embraced far and wide. Artificial intelligence in corporate sales and support processes is being imposed on unsuspecting consumers.

The manner in which artificially intelligent agents were first introduced to the world outside of the technology labs and research centers tells us what to expect about the rate of adoption. The release of the familiar chat interface made AI approachable.

Among working professionals in not-so-technical operations, I hear of haphazard usage of Chat making emails longer, reports more copious, and writing flawless, but information flows are now data gushers breaching the banks of an organization’s time-tested workflows.

Unlike processes being snapped into place by an ERP system, companies risk ‘clauded judgment’ by mandating companywide ‘AI transformations’ without a clear purpose, prioritization or care for customers. Outside of the corporate world, I ran a straw poll of retired but active over-achievers. Of the few respondents, 57% use AI as a search engine on steroids, 21% as a friend, philosopher and guide, 14% use it for coding, and 7% have shunned it. The vast majority ignored my poll and I assume, ignore AI. There’s still a long way to go for its adoption.

The frustration caused by AI voice-agents becoming pervasive in corporate customer support could be a Covid-moment, forcing mass AI-adoption through a demand for special-purpose personal AI assistants: haggling with healthcare billing departments, chasing insurance and refund claims, booking tickets for events, or making appointments. A new kind of personal assistant will arise, but not a human. It might be an app on our phones.

[Picture credit: Photo by Marissa Grootes on Unsplash]

Aim for feelback, not feedback

 

Marketers want to know how customers feel in the moment.

‘Feedback’ doesn’t quite capture the essence of what marketers need to know when end-users experience a product through any of the senses, whether it is the texture, the taste, the solid feel to a product, the design on the packaging or when one smells a product. Marketers like to know what customers feel when experiencing a product. They need ‘feelback’.

Feelings can be fleeting. A feeling can’t be captured by on online form asking one to check boxes and write a paragraph. Feelbacks must be captured in the moment for them to be authentic and useful.

When you try on a new jacket or a new pair of glasses, you might ask your family members, “So, what do you think?”, and regardless of what they say, you are going to look for those non-verbal cues. The pause in search of the right words, the crinkled eyebrow, the suppressed chuckle, the instant jaw-drop or backslap – that first blush reaction is what you value. You know how they feel about that jacket even before they say anything. That’s hard to pull off in marketing without invading privacy. Not everyone’s comfortable to be on camera providing video feedback in the moment.

However, as a marketer, such instant emotion is the kind of feedback you want captured. Even if it’s imperfect, you want to know the gut feeling, the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" popularized by movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

There’s the innovative ‘Happy Or Not’ machines you can see set up at service establishments. I like the idea, except when I saw one outside the men’s room, probably at the Heathrow airport, the wrong place for a touch-screen survey. Besides, only curious marketers and curious kids may take the time to complete such surveys. Consumers, whether at a store or online are usually too busy or distracted to bother to stop and leave feedback if they are happy with a product or service.

However, when service is bad, you can be assured they will take the time to not only let you know, but sometimes, let the world know with detailed commentary and even a video posted on social media. Perhaps, a mere ‘Not Happy’ button might suffice, but how would a brand capture the feelings and the reason for a user being unhappy.

Can retail stores offer a mechanism for brands to capture instant reactions to products on shelves? Store shelves ought to enable shoppers to leave a voice memo about a product. The mother who’s appalled at the packaging of a shampoo that resembles a half-gallon of fruit juice must be able to slam a button in fury right at the shelf and give the brand owner a piece of her mind. The Costco sample station man said he observes and relays reactions back to the company whose product is being sampled.

Brands cherish feelback, served hot, as soon as their product elicits a reaction.

Counting the sales that count.

In measuring the success of a product, not all sales are born equal.

Sunbeam is a name that’s seared on my mind. My earliest memory of the brand is as a kid in Mumbai, when my uncle had gifted us a Sunbeam steam iron. Once, the iron fell, breaking key plastic parts while more rattled inside. My father got his typewriter out and wrote a letter to the company explaining our predicament. Going to work in crumpled shirts isn’t an option, he said, I presume, and we mailed the letter to England in an airmail envelope bordered with red and blue stripes. Then we forgot all about it, and also about the iron.

Several months later, the postman delivered a small package with replacement parts sent to us by the manufacturer. We took it to the local ‘jugaad’, or make-do repair shop, and our Sunbeam iron was back in action, as good as new. When I shop for an iron, it’s no surprise that I first look for a Sunbeam. I could be their legacy customer.

Often, the trajectory of companies that have booming sales for their top notch ‘gratitude’ product, one that leaves customers in gratitude for having made their lives easier or for solving a pressing problem, is one worth studying. Before a company celebrates sales, they must seek to learn their customers’ ‘why’. That will help them figure out the ‘how’ for sustaining growth.

Separating sales revenues by product lines or territories are important. However, it is just as important to understand the propulsion powering a sales trajectory from a long-term investor’s perspective. In a startup, understanding that trajectory is important even for family members or a significant other emotionally or financially invested in the entrepreneur’s dream.

Financial reports must break down sales by loyalty – the reason customers invest in a product or brand. Loyalty is demonstrated through different kinds of repeat customers.

• Product-Repeat: Is the customer a product-repeat buyer because of a great experience the first time they bought the same product?

• Brand-Repeat: Are they a brand-repeat buyer because they loved a different product being sold under a brand name?

• Referred-Repeat: Are they a referral-repeat buyer because someone they trust recommended a product? If your siblings purchase a product or brand you use, it’s effectively a repeat purchase by a family.

The greater the proportion of repeat sales in overall revenues, the stronger is the wind beneath the sales trajectory wing. Knowing the repeat-sale component would help one understand whether a sales trajectory is merely passing through the silver lining and heading for cloudy skies, or if it is going to be through sunny skies all the way.

Repeat sales also keep lowering the costs of customer acquisition.  

What sustains a company long-term is loyalty manifesting as sales – not the transactional loyalty of frequent flyer miles to keep airline customers returning, or the ransom loyalty through retail store-credit on returned products. When marketing, aim for the repeat sale.

 [ Picture credit: Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash ]

The Sales DNA in a business organization

 

A company must awaken the seller within every team member.

Every once in a while, you meet someone with impressive communication and sales skills. Sales may not even be in their job description. Sergio, the mechanic who came to repair the refrigerator was one such person. He did his work quietly and had a reassuring manner about him. He was a man of few words. After he finished his work, he took the time to explain what he did. He didn’t have to. He showed the parts he was swapping out. He didn’t have to. I wouldn’t have known any better. He even cleaned up and hauled away the packaging material.

The repair company was fortunate that their technician was not merely repairing our refrigerator. Unbeknownst to them, he was ensuring that we would renew their service contract, which we did.

Will the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software attribute the sale of the next renewal of the service contract to the mild-mannered technician? I certainly hope so.

Every team member of a company has what it takes to become an ambassador for the company, whether it is during the working hours when they interact with the world outside, or whether it’s after-hours when they are playing video games with friends, volunteering in their community, or just at a neighborhood barbeque.

Whether a business has 10 employees or 100, it has the unique opportunity of unleashing its entire workforce out into the world as its own army of brand evangelists.

The pleasant mannered receptionist who takes a phone call and casually drops the factoid that your company won an industry award is in selling mode. When your machinist is dropping off the kids at the daycare center and mentions that it’s going to be a busy day because a major customer is visiting your factory, they are indirectly promoting your brand.

When, at the local watering hole, someone asks your colleague, “so what does your company do”, have you equipped them with an elevator pitch?

It’s as simple as adding a page in the new employee orientation, to not only help team members understand what their company is doing, but also to help them explain it succinctly to the world outside. It’s about knowing jargon-free language to share at a family reunion about what your company does.

Robust brand evangelism gives team members a sense of purpose when they learn to connect the dots between what their role is and the eventual impact they are making in the world. When equipped with language to describe the company’s product and the problem it solves, it builds a sense of pride in a team about their place in the world. Such ambassadors make it easier to recruit and retain customers and employees.

Every employee of a company is directly or indirectly a part of your sales team even if they are introverted. Infusing the sales DNA in a business organization is surprisingly simple.

Selling Authenticity

As human endeavor becomes rare, imperfections become certifications.

Hair appears natural and authentic when a hair stylist with a mandate to camouflage greying hair forgets a spot and leaves a few strands untouched. There’s value attached to that imperfection for the discerning eye of someone who likes to portray authenticity.

When you travel in certain parts of India, a tour guide may steer you to watch a craftsman working a handloom weaving complex designs on fabric. Then another person will invite you to an adjacent showroom to sell you similar looking fabric. Someone with a trained eye looks for imperfections in the embroidered motifs at the back of the fabric or holds it up against light. Tourists pay top dollar for those imperfections.

David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh), the creator of Ruby on Rails said in a recent interview that successful folks have an obligation to send some of their money to the craftsmen in Italy who make a beautiful Ferrari and hand-stitch the leather seats in the car. That is valued more than flawless stitches on leather seats by a machine. Authentic human endeavor is celebrated.

For a marketer who takes pride in writing and obsesses not just over the choice of words, but also how to make words catalysts of emotional changes in a reader, would a perfectly written letter appear less valuable if it reads like an AI-generated one? Should we then deliberately insert typos and errors to convey authenticity? Should we ‘forget’ to spell-check?

There are online forms which hint at the importance of authenticity with the words “Human-written messages are more likely to get our attention.” If my writing is AI-like or when an AI agent has figured out my writing style should I be worried that a condolence letter that I write from the bottom of my heart might seem inauthentic? Do we stop using the em dash since the word is out that AI peppers its writing with the em dash. What about paragraphs starting with sub-titles in bold? Do we find ourselves manually correcting the em dash to remove any doubt in a reader’s mind that our writing isn’t entirely ‘human-written’?

There’s the robotic sculptor Robotor (https://www.robotor.it/) in Italy, of all places. Should the robot’s sculpture be considered inauthentic? Or is the robot merely an intelligent chisel where the artist is, or once was, working at a computer?

While we rush towards a world where endeavors once reserved for humans can be handled better by intelligent machines, we will need new ways to certify and sell authenticity. We will need new definitions of craftmanship to differentiate the values we assign to the artistry of humans versus that of machines. Our desire to stay relevant and valuable might bias us in favor of placing a premium on human authenticity. It’s the story we will have to keep telling ourselves and keep believing for such a premium pricing to keep defying gravity. Authenticity might command a premium, probably as long as the buyer is human or human-like.

Selling with shortcuts

 Offering a shortcut to a human in an AI-led sales process makes business sense.

“Can you please repeat that? I am writing it down,” requested the elderly caller, but the sales agent from the assisted living facility (ALF), who identified herself as Ashley, clearly did not understand that he was really asking her to also slow down so he could note down the facility’s street address.

I have been a part of many sales pitches, either leading them, or listening in when my team is making a sales pitch. I have also been privy to startup pitches of tools to help sales teams get a leg up on their competition. Today, I got an opportunity to not only listen in on the buy-side, but to also observe it.

I got to listen to an elderly person trying to obtain information from a sales representative on a phone call, a surprisingly impatient and indifferent representative. This was not the first time I have heard the same elder making calls to customer service representatives. Those calls usually start with banter, move on to a bargain and then, a buy. It took me a few seconds to realize he was speaking with an AI agent, an AI agent not trained to listen. It was not the near lack of latency in the conversation. It was the lack of emotional intelligence. It was an apparent lack of kindness and warmth. If your AI does all the talking, who will listen to your customer?

Last fall, I had the privilege of watching kids and teens react to the demo of an AI product that small businesses can use to never miss a customer call, day or night. One of the questions from a teenager in the audience was how the AI agent would handle a customer who knows only to speak in Mandarin or Spanish. Live-translation is probably easy to add with existing technology. However, it’s what’s unsaid that can be missed.

The apparent lack of empathy in Ashley’s voice when taking a customer’s call would soon cause frustration and abandonment. For an effective sales conversation, Ashley had to compensate for the impatience of the octogenarian customer with an extra dose of patience and some humor.

That is the bigger challenge for a sales agent to overcome, regardless of whether the sales agent is human or not. It is a listening challenge. It is listening for the unsaid, the hesitation in the voice of a prospective buyer, the pause, the sigh, and the repeated interruptions when the sales agent is talking.

For a marketer, the opportunity to observe prospective buyers while they are interacting with a product, a brand or a sales team carries more valuable insights than all the number crunching done at one’s desk. An opportunity to gauge the prospective buyer’s emotions through their expression, the tone of their voice, and everything expressed or bottled carries more weight than a list of the product’s features or benefits.

A successful AI sales agent is the one that helps a prospective customer breathe easier at the end of the sales call, even if that means constantly offering the prospect an opportunity to speak to a human.

It reminds me of my general reluctance to enter a mega furnishing store when I know what precisely I need to buy as a gift for my college-bound niece, when the store’s layout aims to keep me wandering and wondering about dorm decor. When I must walk in, I look for the quickest way to check out or ask for help to exit. On my last visit, for the first time, I saw signs for shortcuts to the checkout area. That is thoughtful.

An effective AI sales agent must be kind and thoughtful by listening for signs of impatience in the voice at the other end and before it turns into frustration, offer a shortcut to a human, so buyers never lose the joy of shopping.

When asked if she was an AI, Ashley said she was a virtual agent and would be happy to have the Director of Sales return the call. Luckily for the ALF company, even though the call ended abruptly, the shopping wasn’t abandoned.

Selling by Stagedooring

Builders of products have a different star power than actors hired as expo booth staffers.

The sensory experience of even a day in New York City can spark ideas in any marketer’s mind, and what better source of inspiration than a live performance. However, it’s hard to sit and watch a Broadway show with the incessant chatter of questions in one’s mind, especially when one can’t have them answered instantly. While the many unanswered questions occasionally got in the way of complete immersion in the experience of a brilliant show, it was what occurred after the play that got me thinking about trade shows as performative art.

As everyone spilled out of the theater late in the night, I saw another line forming on a side street, of audience members, playbills in hand. For the theater-novice like me, playbills are like a show guide. You can learn about the actors who are characters in the play. The protocol is to review their pictures on the playbill to know what the actors look like in real life, so when they walk out that stage door in everyday attire, they are still recognizable for that must-have selfie.

Since lines are meant to be joined without question to make the most of life, I got to watch up-close the hero-worship that the actors enjoyed. I observed how delighted the members of the audience waiting in the line were to chat with the artistes. There was the banter, the autographing of the playbill, followed by a selfie. Apparently, there’s a word for it: stagedooring.

That brings me to the topic at hand. Trade show exhibitors can learn from Broadway.

At a trade show in Washington DC, I passed by a booth that featured models in factory overalls. At a trade show in another industry in Austin, TX, there were no actors or models, just industry professionals who had compounded decades of work and acquired deep domain expertise. In both instances, there was a certain star power. However, in the case of actors and models, the products or brand weren’t the main attraction. Therein lies a lost opportunity on many fronts.

Steve Jobs and his team had their signatures etched into the Macintosh mold because they were considered artists. How about arranging stagedooring to meet these artists? A company could showcase its craftspeople or designers at its trade show exhibit alongside products or product imagery. Besides a product brochure, pass around a playbill. Allow your customers the chance to learn about your products from those who manifested them. Encourage your designers and makers to obtain firsthand feedback and seek suggestions. Offer autographs, banter and selfies at your booth.

The exposure is definitely not for the faint of heart, nor for the slim of budget, and certainly not for an industry with a culture of talent-poaching by competitors. Still, it’s tempting because showcasing that kind of inhouse star-power and the consequent visible hero-worship can do wonders, both, for a brand, and its creators.

Selling Delayed Gratification

Clairvoyance is a hard sell without something to show but hops of faith sustain a venture.

In an age of instant gratification, impatience and distraction, consumers swim against the tide of noise to fish for signal. How then does a marketer attract a following and retain the interest of early adopters for an offering that won’t show results for a while?

For a product that takes years to manifest, building a brand becomes mission critical. Convincing early adopters to keep faith requires visible milestones worthy of celebration along the way to delivering on the brand’s promise, like med schools which ship out a ‘Certificate of Admission’ after an emailed offer.

Imagine a product, perfecting which, takes generations like the Sagrada Família in Barcelona that is expected to be completed in 2026, after 144 years. How does a brand that is years ahead of its time develop the stamina to stay the course until the market recognizes its value?

A few years back I had the opportunity to design a summer workshop for middle-schoolers on developing an entrepreneurial mindset. Unlike Kumon or SAT prep, such alternative programs take multiple years to bear fruit and a different level of patience in the customer. Alternative learning works when the environment extends home, which makes it a family affair. Expectations that 11-year-olds will go into launch mode without figuring out what can make them self-motivated was a challenge. Usually, about half-way in the duration of the workshop one could see parents’ complete buy-in. It still required a leap of faith on the part of the parents.

What does selling delayed gratification look like, especially for a product that takes a long time to yield results, or a tough training or certification program? For an alternative education program that isn’t like SAT prep where one can see measurable results after each practice test there are lessons to be learned from horticulturists who must sell a small bag of dirt promising a flowering plant, or universities that promise future professional success. Let’s break them down.

·       Strength in numbers: External validation needs a community of believers lined up to cheer participants along their long arduous path like the cheering crowds lining a marathon route.

·       Validation milestones: In learning and development programs, milestones like completing market surveys or interviews of industry stalwarts provides intermittent feedback and reinforcement that encourages participants to sense progress.

·       Celebrate micro success: Recognize success as soon as the first plant yields flowers or the first student has a story worth sharing, with a reward or a social media re-post.

·       Foster peer-support: Remove hurdles for customers to share their progress with one another.

·       Gather multi-generational audiences: A multi-generational gathering with successful alumni helps current participants to keep faith with a long-term view. Hence, user conferences.

As many of the alumni will say, in the end it all works out. However, entrepreneurs and investors need more patience than what they expect of their customers for products with long gestation periods.

What’s in a nametag after all?

Getting the name tag right is the linchpin of a successful conference.

As another conference season gets underway and event planners go through their checklist of important things to take care of, I suspect, somewhere at the bottom of their list lies the chore of printing the lowly nametag.

The purpose of the time, money and effort of going to a conference ranges from the nostalgic college-time pursuit of pub crawls to the pursuit of learning about new products and continuing education credits. Across these various goals the common thread remains the human connections, that get choreographed and managed by how an event is structured.

There are conferences where the human connection is designed to be casual and not professional. You walk away having met seven Timothy’s and five Tammy’s, not knowing who's who or what role they play in the industry. In the theater that is a business conference, what’s missing is a simple way to learn about someone you meet, learn about their industry experience, and leave with an exchange of new knowledge, a new business lead or a new opportunity. Personal identities and stories are how one makes friends in an industry. It is how one gets known in an industry.

That is why the lowly nametag is not to be taken lightly. Until AR glasses become the norm, where someone you meet is instantly identified by your eyeglasses, the name tag is key. The current trend of name tags showing only the first name in large font is useless except for the barista at the café to announce that your order is ready. Effective networking requires learning about a stranger quickly and getting down to business.

Avoid excessive white space on a conference badge. The tiny real estate on a badge is like a billboard you pass by at 30 miles an hour. It must give a snapshot of who the person is in the context of the industry so that attendees can network judiciously. Less time trying to figure out if we can help each other, and more time helping each other. Conference badges that make me scan a QR code to drop a contact into my phone should be more thoughtfully designed to add context, so I can identify whom I met at which conference. Last, but not the least, the conference badge must be printed on the back and front so that no matter which way it dangles, the attendee’s identity isn’t hidden.

In a world of AI agents, in-person events are the last sanctuary for human connections in business settings. The only way to preserve the sanctity of that human interaction is to have nametags that tell a conference delegate’s story – at a mere glance. 

Imposter Packaging

Personal care product packaging that evokes emotions associated with popular foods and beverages may not hold water.

You reach for those bars of soap and sniff on them, and they remind you of your favorite foods – enough to want to take a bite. There are liquid soaps filled in cartons which at a glance look like fruit juices. I recently spotted a brand of shaving cream labeled as ‘Coffee Shaving Cream’ that is probably trying to find appeal among the caffeinated.

It’s the real-world equivalent of click-bait, gimmicks in the appearance and other sensory aspects of a product such as fragrances, shapes and colors. While they might catch one’s eye in a store, they risk not being taken seriously. They also may be an accident away from being abandoned or becoming a legal or public relations nightmare, no matter what the fine print on the package says.

What can marketers learn from such imposter packaging? There are probably many unwritten commonsense rules in product differentiation through packaging and their sensory experience. Let us consider a few.

1. If a product that’s not meant for ingesting can be mistakenly consumed as a drink or food item because of its packaging, placement or appearance on a retail store shelf, tell your designers to not go there with their design. The color of liquids in clear bottles is equally important – absolutely do not make it look like a popular drink, and hope that your customer is not color-blind.

1. Do not assume that all your customers will read and understand labels on your clever packaging. Task your designer to come up with graphics, signs and symbols to communicate warnings or usage instructions on the packaging. Run your designs by children – they have a refreshing way of looking at the world without biases. Show the design to the elderly; they have seen too much of the world. Find a happy medium between those two opinions.

1. If you want to differentiate your product, create a unique design for your packaging that becomes your brand’s signature. Do not cut corners by using milk cartons to package soaps, chemicals and oil-based products. Not only is that deceptive to the customer of a soap, but also disappointing for the connoisseur of milk or juices.

1. One way to differentiate your packaging is to make it easy to be opened by arthritic customers with perhaps a self-contained opening tool, and child-proofed where needed.

1. Make art that doubles as packaging so customers will covet it. Make it reusable for multiple purposes so that empty packages do not end up in landfills. Give your packaging a life beyond the expiration of the product it carries and your return on branding investment will improve dramatically.

If you are in the business of selling non-food products that smell like popular foods, consider adding a warning label for your customers: “This product may cause hunger pangs in those you meet. For best outcomes, avoid meetings before lunch hour.”