Digest Data, and Discover Direction

Hey Team,

It's a weird week here. While I’d traditionally be running after tracking numbers to ensure CPG items arrive in time for Christmas, I’ve instead spent time here in TLV working on 2024.

Yeah, you’ll probably see a lot of “new year, new me” energy in these streets, but the new year calls for more empathy, humility, and willingness to think about things differently. 

I’m talking mainly to myself here. Entering the SaaSy tech world after a decade in DTC allows me to pull all of my learnings from the past and bring them here to Yotpo, but I also have a ton to learn about a whole new industry.

I will be thoughtful about learning and building vs. just running with my eyes closed, and I encourage all of you to do the same.

The last year has been nothing short of magical on both the personal and professional side.

On the personal side, I put my mental health first and continued to invest in ways to buy back time so I could focus on the things that truly mattered to me.

On the professional side, I spent the bulk of the year working alongside incredible folks at Jones Road, building a 9-figure beauty brand, and ended the year at ecom tech royalty, Yotpo, to work on building the future of Customer Retention.

Oh, and on the newsletter side, I tripled the subscriber base and had the ability to work with incredible sponsors to continue pushing the envelope on educating our industry about the importance of Retention and Customer Experience.

To the few thousand folks who have signed up in the last few months:

Welcome. 

I will do my best not to disappoint.

In 2024, I hope we’ll all open our eyes to learn (and maybe unlearn) new ideas.

One of my most significant “unlearning” experiences this year was opening my mind to accelerating customer responses and solving problems using AI.

I think, in general, we’ve gone through this entire arc a few times in 2023.

E/acc kings and queens, what if we just focused on one major idea this week:

AI can tremendously help do two things: digest data and discover the correct direction. 

We’ll walk through four fun ways AI can accelerate learning, understanding, and direction in your business.

These ideas are across Customer Insights, Segmentation, CX, and more. 

Let’s dive in. 

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Siena AI. They're doing something unique in the CX space that deserves your attention.

Imagine an AI agent that doesn't just respond to your customers but truly understands them. That's Siena AI for you. They've crafted a customer service experience that feels more human, blending empathy with technology in a way that genuinely stands out.

What Sets Siena Apart:

1. Empathy at Scale: Siena’s AI isn't just efficient; it brings your brand's personality to life in every interaction, making customers feel genuinely understood and valued.

2. Efficiency with Heart: Whether managing subscriptions or tackling complex queries, Siena’s AI does it all, but with a personal touch that sets it apart.

3. Intelligent Decision-Making: Their CORE reasoning-based engine goes beyond pre-defined scripts. It's about intelligent, nuanced decision-making that truly understands customer needs.

Siena currently scores a 4.81 out of 5 on the CSAT scale based on 50,000+ customer satisfaction surveys sent by their customers. 

• Bokksu: Automates 83% of their support tickets with Siena. Verb Energy Bars: Scaled their brand voice thanks to Siena which handles the majority of day-to-day repetitive CX tasks.

• Loftie: Saves over 100 hours each month by automating 65% of their support tickets, scaling while maintaining a lean team.

For my readers, there's a special treat. Siena AI is offering an exclusive 3-month pilot. 

Just schedule a chat with their team and mention that Eli Weiss sent you. It's a fantastic opportunity to see what empathic AI can do for your customer service.

So, if you're looking to elevate your CX game and want to do it with technology that's as empathic and smart as it is efficient, give Siena a look. It's about making every customer interaction count, and with Siena, that's exactly what you'll get.

1. AI-Driven Insights into the Customer Journey:

We’ve seen a whole bunch of threads with 69+ ways to leverage AI to crush your goals.

Some of them are reasonable, others are far-fetched, and the rest are silly and save you no time. 

Here's how using AI can provide deeper insights into your customers, with predictive analytics playing a key supporting role:

AI tools can aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources to create comprehensive customer profiles.

This includes analyzing purchasing patterns, browsing behavior, and engagement levels, giving you a clearer picture of who your customers are and what they want. 

Imagine a genie you can ask any question about your customers and get a detailed and helpful answer.

AI’s predictive capabilities enable you to then anticipate future customer actions. This proactive approach allows for tailored marketing strategies and product development that resonates more effectively with your target audience. 

We’ve seen a very early version of this with Klaviyo’s predictive analytics and an even more data-forward one with Repeat’s.

Additionally, tools like Octane AI's Insight Analyst revolutionize how businesses conduct Voice of Customer (VoC) research. By automating the import of product reviews and analyzing them with AI, you can quickly gain valuable insights and answers to key research questions. 

With over 35k reviews on the Jones Road Miracle Balm, ingesting all that data and asking key questions saved us a ton of time. 

2. Cutting Through the Noise with Data-Driven Messaging:

I find it so fascinating that with the hundreds of data points most brands have, the status quo is still “batch and blast.”

Given the data at our fingertips – the acquisition source, the first-order contents, geographical locations, and even the finer details from customer surveys – it’s a missed opportunity to lump everyone into the same communication bucket.

I’ve consulted with over 85 brands in the last year or two, and the story is the same: they’re aware that certain first orders hint at a higher LTV.

Yet, the communication to these customers remains as generic as ever. Why not break this cycle?

At a high level, I love the idea of being able to query all of these data points and use AI to create segments, email ideas, and next steps.

Tbh, one of the reasons I got excited about Yotpo, was their vision around Tailor, a GPT-like interface that sits on top of their email, SMS, and retention platform to help better analyze your data and suggest segments, messaging, and even content.

It’s like an army of analysts always at your side, and the future plans for it are wild. 🚀

The noisier the customer inbox gets, the more your content needs to be the signal among it. 

In my opinion, the future of AI is to digest data, discover direction, and then initiate action.

3. CX Strategies Powered by AI

As we step into the new year, leveraging AI in customer experience (CX) is more crucial than ever. Here's how using a tool like Siena AI can transform your CX strategy:

Predictive Customer Insights: Siena AI analyzes data from subscription programs and customer interactions across all channels, including social media DMs, comments, or texts. It even offers insights into ad comments, automating responses and providing valuable data on automation and subscription performance, as well as customer experience scores.

Reducing Workload, Enhancing Efficiency: Siena's co-pilot feature within Gorgias acts as an AI sidekick for teams. It can summarize long threads, translate messages, and draft empathic, on-brand messages, ready to be sent to customers. This significantly reduces workload and allows teams to focus on more value-added activities.

Continuous Learning for Continuous Improvement: Siena AI continuously learns from agents' best responses, constantly improving and augmenting the team's capabilities. This ensures that your CX strategy is not only effective but also evolves over time, becoming more efficient and aligned with customer needs and preferences.

By integrating Siena AI, businesses can enter the new year with smarter, more efficient CX strategies, embodying Sam Altman's vision of creating more value with minimal effort.

4. AMA on your Customer Data: 

Brands collect hundreds of data points, and having the ability to host it all in one place and query it is a superpower.

Even with most standard CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), you still need an analyst or two who can comb through the data.

But on top of that, the question is always, “What data should I be looking for?”

Data can generally answer your questions or bring you to ask new ones. I find that most fun data finds are from folks who learn that a competing brand found a similarly interesting action based on a piece of data. 

For example, if I find out that Il Makiage offers customers a much larger store credit instead of a refund upon processing a return, I might ask my analyst to start hunting for a data point or perhaps run some tests to see if that would work great with our margins, too. 

The future of data, however, would be a tool that can continue to surface interesting data points based on the data you are already collecting.

Analysts who are working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning and surfacing data points and insights that you would never have known about. 

A glorious future indeed. 

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you'd like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers, 

Eli 💛