Dan Gingiss on personalized automation, ChatGPT and Chewy

With customers demanding personalization, individualization and convenience through automated initiatives many brands are trying to figure out how they can deliver all of this at scale.

With automation becoming a mainstay of customer service and ChatGPT showing us how personalized automation is done, we spoke with CX author and keynote speaker, Dan Gingiss, to hear his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of automation and personalization.

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CX Network: The idea of automating personalization and individualization is somewhat of an oxymoron, yet it is the only way to deliver personalization and individualization at scale. With that in mind how can automation help and where in the journey should brands be using it?

Dan Gingiss: It is a good point to note that it can be a little bit of an oxymoron, but automation can help a lot in personalization. The first thing that we have to do is take a step back and ask ourselves why we are personalizing in the first place and what it is that we are trying to accomplish.

I like to give the example that, “dear first name” in an email is not true personalization. That is just putting a variable into an email to make it sound like it is personalization. What would be more personal would be for somebody to recognize that while that email might say “Dear Daniel”, because that is my formal legal name, nobody calls me Daniel except my mother when she is mad at me!

This requires a company knows me and knows who I am, which is harder to automate and I would argue you should not automate that. You can learn that at some point and you can put it into your CRM so that the next time it calls on the variable ‘first name’, it calls the right name. Ultimately it has to be this combination of automated and manual CX because we have got to take the time to get to know our customers.

I believe there are very few businesses in the world with billions and billions of customers where it is impossible for them to get to know them all. I worked for one of them during my time at McDonald's, but most companies are not the size of McDonald's. Most businesses do not really have that same excuse of not getting to know their customers well enough to be able to use automation and still have it feel human.

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CX Network: What do you believe is driving the demand for and rise of personalization in CX?

DG: I like to humorously blame the millennials for this, and I do not really mean it as blame, I would actually say credit is more appropriate. The millennial generation was the first to grow up with social media – they’re social media natives – and as part of that, they grew up expecting a relationship with brands, which other generations did not have when we were growing up.

I know that when I was growing up, if I wanted to talk to a company I had to write them a letter. That was the only way that you could talk to a company, there was no other channel. All of a sudden, social media comes out and what people realized very quickly is that this is the first time that they can talk directly to a brand and have a brand talk directly back to them.

I think the millennials really jumped on to this first and loved it. Then the Gen Xers like me said: “Yeah, this is pretty cool, let's do this.” The Gen Zs, like my kids, have followed on with this idea that if we are going to spend our hard-earned money at a company, we want a relationship, and a relationship is two ways.

CX Network: What is your favorite example of automated personalization in CX and how successful was it?

DG: My favorite example of automated CX comes from the online pet retailer Chewy.com, and a lot of people have Chewy stories. It is a very popular brand here in the US and pet owners absolutely love them. The story that I like to tell comes from another customer, who bought some litter for her long-haired cat, Roma. The litter turned out to not be particularly good for a long-haired cat, so she went back onto Chewy's website and she left a negative review on the litter.

Keep in mind it was not Chewy's litter, they are just the distributor. She loves Chewy, but she wanted to warn other long-haired cat owners that maybe they should choose a different brand. The next day she received an email from Chewy customer service that said: “We're so sorry that the litter didn't work out for you. We've gone ahead and refunded your money now.” This is despite the fact that she never asked for a refund.

The email went on to say: “We researched litters that might be better for long-haired cats and here are four suggestions with links. Please give our love to Roma.” That is right, Chewy knows the name of her cat and is not afraid to use it! The email then says: “We have a furry wall of fame and if you send us a picture of Roma, we would love to put her up on it.”

I think this is one of the greatest customer service emails in the history of customer service or email. When I dissected it I realized it was a template, and yet it is the most personalized and customized email I have ever seen from a brand, even though it is automated, or it is mostly automated because it is set up as a template.

Certainly, there is a process there to highlight negative reviews and identify the customers they want to talk to. This template just gets pulled up by an agent and they fill in a couple of variables and send it out. Does anybody think this customer is upset with Chewy for having a bad experience with this litter? No, she loves them even more. To me, this is the perfect example of how you can use automation in a personalized way, and it is not even fully automated, it is automated plus human involved.

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CX Network: What are the biggest challenges brands face when looking to automate personalization in CX?

DG: First of all, that the bigger brands just have so many customers and so it becomes increasingly difficult to make millions of customers feel like they are the only customer that matters. The bigger you get, the harder this is. I would argue, however, that this gives a huge advantage to small and mid-sized businesses, especially if you are a start-up. If you start with this idea that we are going to be personalized and customized from the beginning, you can build that into the process so that as you grow, it grows with you.

For this reason, I think size is one of the biggest challenges, and the second challenge is the desire to fully automate when full automation is not the right answer. When chatbots first came out, there were a lot of companies that said: “Great, we can fire our entire customer service center and just use chatbots.”

Then they very quickly figured out that the chatbots were not good enough for that and they are still not good enough for that. They are good for certain circumstances, so we can absolutely automate certain parts of customer service with chatbots, and I highly recommend it.

However, automation is used here so that you can allow the humans to take care of the more complex customer service situations when you need human involvement and where full automation is just not the answer. I would say that this becomes a challenge as you have this push and pull of companies thinking that full automation is going to be the money saver and yet it is going to cost you in a different part of the business.

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CX Network: The launch of ChatGPT has put a new focus on how customer communications can be automated. What’s your outlook for how the use of conversational and generative AI will drive further automation in CX?

DG: I like to pride myself in not being a shiny object chaser. I am usually not the first person to a new social platform but I have to tell you, I am all in on ChatGPT, at least in the technology. What we have to remind ourselves is this is just the beginning of it and it is so powerful and so impressive.

Now, even with its quirks and its errors, you realize that over time as machine learning kicks in and it continues to learn, it is just going to get better. I think for now, what I suggest to brands is that you play around with it, that you learn what it can do, that you do not immediately lean in and say, OK, this is going to solve every one of my problems. Or to believe that you never have to blog again, you can just have ChatGPT do it. I do not think that is the right answer.

I do, however, think that ChatGPT can do a great job of building a template for a blog or building an outline for a blog in which you then fill in some of the details. What I have found is that on a lot of topics it is very good at scratching the surface on the topic, but it is less good as you want to get into the real nitty gritty details. Again, I think it will get better at that over time.

I would not be using it to pump out automated content, but I definitely think it can be used as a starting point for that, especially as more and more technologies are coming out of ChatGPT. I have been testing one that helps you answer emails and as you begin a reply to an email, it reads the original and it drafts a response for you. I have to say, it is pretty darn good at it. It

I think we are going to continue to find different places where this technology can be really beneficial and help with automation. But again, I am going to go back to cautioning: please do not think of it as the be all and end all that means you can fire your whole staff and just have ChatGPT do all the work.

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