Your usage of AI sucks 🙇‍♂️

Hi Squad, 

This was the fastest Q1 in my career and boy, I’ve learned a lot. 

NRR, SQL, RKO, PRD… I have a whole new acronym dictionary. I’ve also gotten to see a whole other side of ecom and share some of my brand-side learnings with the Yotpo team. 

We launched the Frown Campaign, and (my favorite campaign I’ve been part of) Is Typing. 

So much more coming down the pipeline, and I am so excited to share the evolution of Yotpo from the OG reviews platform to the Retention platform I dreamed of as a retention-obsessed person. 

More on that later. For now, let’s get into this week’s topic. 

There is a never-ending convo around the usage and necessity of AI, both on the brand side (chatGPT in CX and Marketing) and in the actual product on the tech side (AI Analysis, etc). 

In the last year or so, AI has transformed many parts of our day-to-day world and has certainly not shown any mercy on ecom.

But, as an executive from Lululemon said at ShopTalk, AI is a solution looking for a problem. We throw AI in every room, sometimes for a welcome visit and sometimes uninvited. 

Today, I’d like to walk through some of my favorite use cases I’ve observed AI being used in our universe and some of my least favorites that I wish would disappear (pls). 

Let’s talk.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Siena AI!

This week, let's shine a spotlight on Siena AI, DTC's secret sauce to scaling empathic, intelligent customer interactions.

What Makes Siena Stand Out:

• Intuitive Conversations: Siena masters the art of human-like chats, elevating customer satisfaction by understanding nuances and emotions.

• Beyond Basic Q&A: It's an action hero in AI disguise, adept at resolving issues proactively, from updating subscriptions on Shopify to tweaking delivery details, even taking care of the process of damaged items with its image recognition capabilities.

• Empowering Your Teams: When faced with complex queries, Siena preps your team with all the right info, ensuring they're ready to tackle escalations with grace.

Spotlight on Success:

Hero Bread™: "Leveraging Siena, Hero Bread™ now handles 10x the support tickets, skyrocketing our automation rate to over 50% since April, without the need to scale our team. A true game-changer in meeting our ambitious sales goals."
- Shannon Long, Head of Customer Experience.

Loftie: "With Siena, Loftie answers customer tickets in under 60 seconds, driving significant operational efficiencies and elevating customer engagement, especially for our innovative products like the AI-powered Magic Storymaker."
- Matthew Hassett, Founder and CEO.

Superfoods Company: "Cutting ticket resolution times by 40%, Siena has become an integral part of our team, understanding our products and voice, and offering our customers exceptional support that they trust and value."
- Kayla Mosebrook, Customer Experience Manager.

With Siena AI, dive into the new era of CX where every interaction counts. Don't just take my word for it; these case studies speak volumes. 

Siena is offering my readers an exclusive 3-month free trial. Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss. 

Dive into what empathic AI can do for your business.

Book a demo here.

MY MOST FAV (I want to see more of this)

1. Analyzing data by asking simple “human questions.” 

Most brands look at the same generic data to better understand how they are doing, and while some of it is basic but great (LTV), other data is frequently not helpful.

Shopify dashboard gives you some basic info, and you decide you need more, so you sign up for Peel, Triple Whale, etc.

Then you realize you have a bunch of dashboards but are still not quite sure which ones to focus on and what you should prioritize. 

Data can help you answer a question, and sometimes very specific data will give you new questions to ask (why does this cohort have stronger LTV than others?).

But for many non-data savvy folks, being able to query your data in simple human-like questions is king.

Peel and TW offer options like this for analytics, and Yotpo offers this for creating segments, etc, in your email and SMS today.

Some examples:

• What happens to my LTV if I increase my AOV 5%?

• Which monthly cohort in the last 12 months was strongest?

• What are the most commonly purchased items in order #1 for my top 10% LTV customers?

• I need to send an email about a restock of x. Create a segment of customers most likely to purchase.

• Create a SMS segment of my most engaged 3+ times purchasers that have shown interest in x category.

I think there’s a ton of great opportunity here.

2. Querying large amounts of text to synthesize most prominent trends:

We’ve seen Amazon do this with their reviews a little while back, and it looks something like this:

Yotpo released something like this very recently as well. Before this, customers would scour through tens of reviews or just look at the most recent one.

Here is an easy way to synthesize the most commonly seen pros and cons up top, and hopefully increase CVR. 

3. Using AI to get the best customer resolution quickly.

My least favorite AI ever is the chat, which is 100% a robot and never answers the correct answer.

It’s almost like the goal is deflection by any means necessary. These robot overlords drown you in circular conversations that make you question your sanity and eventually give up and move on.

Shockingly, most AI chatbots are awful and rarely get you the correct answer. TBH, this is one of the reasons I love Siena’s emphatic CX; it studies various knowledge sources you upload to train her, and learns from your best agents’ responses to answer and engage with customers correctly, not send them on a wild goose chase. 

Siena has an internal CXP (Customer Experience Score) metric that takes into account 6 data points like CSAT, relevance, resolution outcome, effort index, sentiment shift, empathy, and EQ so that you can rest easy that your AI solves customers’ problems, not just deflects tickets.

MY LEAST FAVORITES (aka, I hope they disappear)

1. AI to do everything in your marketing department:

I guess this is a good segue into my least favorites as well. AI is either overused or underused in marketing.

Some marketers rely way too heavily on robots, and it shows. If AI is doing your ideation on strategy, writing your script, copy, and social plan, chances are it’ll sound/look like it.

The best marketers lean on AI to expand their current thinking and create more surface area to play in, not handing over everything to the bots.

TBH, while I know I sound pessimistic here, I am actually in the e/acc camp. I feel like most of us have no idea how to prompt AI properly, and lots of the marketing I see proudly being “AI created” is actually not a surprise to me. 🙃

It’s just not there yet.

2. AI Replying to your comments on social:

Your AI comments on LinkedIn suck. Please demand a refund from whatever app you paid to do this. Maybe even leave the engagement pod; it is making you look silly. 

Over time, I think most of us are learning the key tell signs of work from ChatGPT.

While you are probably super busy and recognize the benefit of engaging with other folks in your area, one can argue that doing it with an easily recognizable bot kinda defeats the point. 

I have some other things I hate, but to avoid sounding overly pessimistic about one of the largest technological breakthroughs of my lifetime, I’ll sit back down. 

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 💛