Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news. This week, we’re looking at Meta, Qualtrics, Hubspot and the latest insights about how customer behaviours reflect their care for the environmental issues. Let’s dive into it!
Key news
- Microsoft and Meta are expanding their longstanding partnership, with Microsoft as the preferred partner for LlaMA 2. On Wednesday, July 19, they introduced the availability of LlaMA 2, which is now free for research and commercial use.
- More about Meta? Norway says Meta uses behavioural advertising illegally. The tech giant will have to prove that they are not carrying out advertising based on data gleaned from its surveillance of Facebook and Instagram.
- Qualtrics announced XM/os2, the next generation of the Qualtrics platform, fully enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations act with empathy and create more relevant and meaningful experiences. With the launch of XM/os2, Qualtrics is investing $500 million in AI innovation over the next four years. Scroll down to read more about the functionalities of XM/os2.
- Protecting British jobs will be a challenge as artificial intelligence systems become more advanced, the new head of the government’s AI taskforce has told the BBC.
- According to the latest study by InMoment + NPSx by Bain & Company, across all industries, only a handful of large UK brands (~top10%) in Auto, Media and Financial Services have made it into the ‘over +40’s’ range on NPS. On average, UK Industries have an average NPS of +12, ranging from +35 for Automotive to -18 for Water Services. Product quality and innovation are the most important drivers of loyalty, followed by value and ease of getting help. Social Media & Energy providers have the widest range of customer loyalty scores.
The next generation of Meta’s open-source language model launched this week is free for all
Earlier this week, Meta launched its new language model LlaMA 2 (Large Language Model Meta AI), which will compete with Open AI’s ChatGTP. The model will be free for researchers and commercial use, as stated on their official page. Llama 2 is available through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hugging Face.
What do we know about LlaMA 2?
The model was trained on 40% more data than LlaMA 1 and has double the content length. However, to make the model better, users will have to interact with it continuously. This further means that the model is not free from errors and biases. With the purpose of promoting responsible technology, Meta has established a range of resources for all who use Llama 2 to promote a liable, collaborative AI innovation ecosystem.
The world didn’t have enough time to digest the launch of ChatGTP, and now we have LlaMA 2, you might think? In the meantime, many European countries are investigating if OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta are scraping people’s personal data to satisfy their hunger for data.
For instance, the Italian authorities have blocked the use of ChatGPT. Law regulations might be the only force to slow down this rapid AI revolution that develops faster than society itself.
If you are interested in how creators inside Open AI think about the tool they created and the unpredictable consequences it might have, we recommend this short documentary by Bloomberg.
What do we know about the next generation of the Qualtrics platform XM/os2?
Qualtrics currently captures and analyses more than 3.5 billion conversations and interactions a year—including call centre conversations, chat logs, survey responses, social media posts, product reviews and more. What will change with XM/os2?
Qualtrics hopes to deliver personalised content and drive automated actions that make frontline workers more productive, make HR leaders and managers more effective and empower product, brand and research teams with decision intelligence in seconds.
New generative AI capabilities in Qualtrics Automated Call Summaries will automatically summarise calls and enable agents to instantly generate support tickets, send personalised follow-up emails, and create support knowledge base articles using real-time information about customer issues.
Furthermore, research teams will be able to capture qualitative customer feedback in the form of video responses and analyse qualitative data efficiently.
‘Qualtrics Video Feedback, enhanced with generative AI, provides a whole new user experience that simplifies our analysis, saves time and makes the voice of the customer even more accessible and clear so we can take the right actions to improve our products and experiences‘, said Christina Sansone, VP, CX Transformation at DISH Network.
This innovation puts many CX players in a challenging situation, making their chances of competing with such investments almost impossible. Another question we must ask ourselves is why do we assume that our customers want frictionless and perfect experiences, problem resolved in a second, and machine suggesting managers what to ask their team members?
This revolution will impact how CX professionals do their jobs; some might not be able to keep them. Let’s explore it in the next topic.
Who is worries about AI potentially making parts of their roles obsolete?
New research from HubSpot shows that more than half of the managers surveyed from marketing (53%), sales (55%), and customer experience (57%) professions report being sidelined during strategic discussions.
Conversely, in the study encompassing 900 cross-industry managers, almost three-quarters of these professionals have a solid understanding of their organisations’ goals across marketing (78%), sales (76%), and customer experience (68%) and over 70% of these professionals strongly believe their teams are pivotal to reaching the desired goals.
In the current business landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) tools have been widely adopted; over three-quarters of managers across marketing (80%), sales (79%), and customer experience (82%) have used AI in their roles in the past year. The majority of managers (88% in marketing, 87% in sales, 92% in customer experience) endorse its effectiveness and its usage is projected to increase. Sales professionals, in particular, anticipate the largest growth, with an almost ten per cent surge.
However, despite the enthusiasm for AI, there are significant reservations. Whilst 59% of marketing managers feel the push from leadership for AI-enabled efficiency, half (50%) of them worry about AI potentially making parts of their roles obsolete. Similarly in sales, where, despite 85% planning to incorporate AI tools in the coming year, nearly half (49%) feel under-equipped. In customer experience, while 92% appreciate AI’s efficiency, concerns around accuracy (56%) and potential redundancy (53%) persist.
Budgetary limitations are a pressing issue across departments. Around half of all marketing (49%), sales (52%), and customer experience (52%) managers reported stagnant budgets, whilst a substantial number have endured budget cuts (25%, 27%, and 32%, respectively).
The financial crunch has instigated strategic recalibrations: sales managers are exploring cost-effective strategies like social selling (39%), customer experience managers are cutting down on staffing and training costs (41%), and marketing managers are amplifying focus on customer acquisition and creativity (40%).
What are the guidelines for maximising engagement and sales for the second half of 2023?
This week, AppsFlyer released the 2023 edition of its State of eCommerce App Marketing report. The report provides guidance to retail marketers in maximising engagement and sales potential for the second half of 2023.
While retail marketers continue operating in an uncertain economic landscape, last year’s Q4 holiday shopping season, should provide a glimmer of hope. Consumer spend on shopping apps climbed 37% in Q4 2022 compared to Q3 2022, 30% higher than the rise in 2021 over the same period.
On average, retail apps generated 10% more revenue in the peak shopping month of November 2022 compared to November 2021. Additionally, in-app purchases (IAP) remained high throughout the entire holiday season. Retailers focused on attracting customers with early discounts and continuous holiday season incentives.
‘Marketers looking to capitalise on the critical shopping days in November should start planning now. This includes organising user acquisition campaigns in the months leading up to Black Friday to benefit from the more affordable costs during this timeframe, and using remarketing strategies to guide users to the app to keep them engaged until those peak sale days‘, said Sue Azari, Industry Lead for eCommerce, AppsFlyer.
Are UK consumers sacrificing the environment for aesthetics?
Fresh research commissioned by sizing technology specialist, Makip, reveals that the majority (81%) of UK online shoppers have serious concerns about the environmental impact of ordering multiple items of clothing in different sizes to try on at home.
However, despite such a large majority being concerned about the environmental impact of their shopping habits, a worrying 42% of UK online shoppers would still continue with their purchase even if retailers highlighted the environmental impact of ordering multiple items in the knowledge they will be returned, at a significant cost to the environment.
Makip’s findings present a real issue for eCommerce fashion retailers. Given that in 2022, some 23 million items of returned fashion were sent to landfill or incinerated in the UK – generating 750,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, representing 75% of the approx 3% of all returns that can’t be resold – this issue is not going away.
The rising volume and cost of returns is a problem that has plagued retailers for years and in 2022, industry research showed that the top reason for returns was incorrect sizing or fit, with online returns costing retailers an average of £20 for every returned package – as well as the environmental impact of transporting and processing the returns.
These new insights into the level of trust UK shoppers place in online sizing technology are part of an independent research project that surveyed 2,000 UK-based online shoppers. Participants had to have used online sizing technology whilst shopping online and purchased a minimum of 11 items of clothing online in the past 12 months.
Thanks for tuning into CXM’s weekly roundup of industry news. Check back next Friday for the latest updates of the week!