#99: personalization remains key to customer experience success

Happy?Friday?and welcome to This Week in CX! We're bringing you our roundup of industry news summarised in an exclusive LinkedIn newsletter. For more detail on any news featured here, check out 'This week in CX' on the Customer Experience Magazine (CXM)?website .

This week, we're looking at?what customers want, personalisation strategies, and what machine customers represent for the future of CX.

Customers don’t want AI in customer service, report claims

Gartner research?indicates that customers don’t like artificial intelligence, and would prefer companies didn’t use it at all.

According to the analyst firm,?64% of customers prefer firms not to use AI in their customer service.?The report also claimed?53% of customers would consider switching to a competitor brand if they found out a company was planning to use AI for its customer service.

Many customers feel that AI will simply become another obstacle between them and a genuine agent.?Previous research has found that ?human to human connection is important to the customer experience a business provides.

Over 42% of survey respondents also expressed concerns about?AI’s capability to provide reliable information and service. ?

The research clearly highlights that customers don’t want AI in their customer service interactions.?This is because they do not trust the service, and would much rather go straight to a human agent.?

Most executives are unprepared to build strong personalisation strategies?

The majority of executives are ill-equipped to track about consumers’ preferences and behaviour online following Google’s plans to eliminate third-party cookies.?

Research from Optimizely , which surveyed marketing, e-commerce and IT executives across six global markets found that a massive 97% were unprepared for the coming?changes due to take effect at the end of 2024.?

Personalisation of products and services is expected to be a key consumer battleground in the near future. According to research from 麦肯锡 , over?75% of consumers ?are more likely to consider buying products from brands that invest in personalisation.?

However, there is concern surrounding this too –?nearly half of respondents fear that an ineffective personalisation campaign will result in reduced future marketing budgets.?

Those already working on personalisation experiences are already facing stiff challenges, including uncertainty on how to understand and track success for these campaigns, as no single metric is being used across the board.?

• Zoom launched the new?Workflow Automation?in beta, allowing users to increase efficiency and reduce time spent on routine tasks. Workflow Automation helps users build complex workflows across Zoom Workplace and third-party applications so they can spend time on more meaningful work and collaborate more seamlessly with colleagues. It automates workflows within Zoom Team Chat, Zoom’s AI-powered chat solution, with more product capabilities coming soon.?
• In a 15-month trial of a reduced work week among 450 employees at South Cambridgeshire district council found that fewer workers quit and applications for planning permissions and social welfare benefits were assessed more quickly. Scores for employee physical and mental health improved, along with those for motivation and commitment.
• While some people enjoy planning their holidays, others will happily outsource as much of the process as possible. A growing number of travellers are leaning on artificial intelligence (AI) tools for their holiday planning. Holiday makers can ask large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude for suggestions on where to go and what to do when they get there.

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