Distancing Ourselves from Customers with the Help of AI: Here’s the Solution

Human beings are social creatures. I don’t mean big, loud parties. I mean close connections between caring individuals. Societies work best when that is happening. There is more to cherish and much less to fear. But that’s not what is happening now. In fact, the trend toward social distancing has been going on for a long time, before COVID made it mandatory. The latest contributor to this pattern is everyone’s new friend: AI.

Ironically, “social” media was the first distancing wave. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone (that’s everyone, pretty much) could comment anonymously and often rudely or maliciously about someone or something else.?

Gossip is like that, and before social media came along, the main gossipers in our society were the members of the “news” community, who went around with cameras and pointed those cameras at the worst examples of human behavior.

That’s still happening, but now everyone has a camera in their pocket. At any given moment, anyone in a developed country could find and expose bad behavior. One could also argue that those same cameras also capture heart-warming moments, but the trend seems to be moving toward the negative end of the spectrum.?

It’s not just the posts themselves, though. It’s the amount of time we spend glued to our screens versus time spent interacting with those we care about. It’s common now to see a couple or a family at a restaurant, each person looking at their phones instead of talking to each other.?

Distancing from our customers

I think of business and marketing as ongoing interactions with individuals. Our customers come to us in the hopes of getting a problem solved or a need met.?

Voicemail, which I regretfully helped introduce years ago, marked the beginning of the gap between us and our customers. Instead of a very helpful person answering the phone and directing our call, we are greeted by a recorded voice, lying. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in this context.?

“Please listen carefully, as our menu has recently changed,” the recording says, which isn’t true. Then, we must patiently listen carefully until what we want is finally presented—or not. If not, we hope there will be an option to press zero for the operator, but that option is less and less available now.?

Instead of welcoming our customers with open arms (“Hi there! So glad you could come! I see that you are open to spending money with us today! How can I help?”), we place a machine between the customer and any sort of pleasant welcome for our own convenience.?

Websites are another form of distancing, although when done right—making it easy for the customer to find what they want, get their questions answered, and make a purchase—it can be more helpful than interacting with an ordinary salesperson.?

Obviously, an extraordinary salesperson who listens, doesn’t push, and can answer almost any question can give a customer a satisfying experience.??

Automated distancing: welcome to AI

All of this brings us to where we are now: the age of AI. We are all learning how to give our bots instructions so that many aspects of marketing can be automated. Instead of writing full copy ourselves, we are writing bits of copy and then entering those bits into an AI platform, which generates “personalized” versions of that copy according to each person’s information and combines that copy with what we have written.

The AI tool does our research for us, finding information about the person, their company, their products, or their preferences, and that information is inserted into the email. It’s definitely a different kind of copywriting.?

As a copywriter, always striving to “write personal letters to customers,” writing this way requires a new set of skills.?

And doing so has made me realize that this is yet another example of us putting a machine between us and our customers.?

I suppose the real problem, one that AI is supposed to help us solve, is that personal relationships with people we care about don’t scale well.?

We definitely care about our customers (well, we should, and if we don’t, we will struggle for every sale). But when we’re looking for new customers, and we are using digital methods to reach out to them, automation is required.

How to make sure you don’t turn your customers off with automation

As buyers, even in these early days of commercial AI, we are starting to develop a good sense of “automated” copy. “I see you attended San Francisco State University and got a degree in music,” is a good example. As humans, we find this a bit off-putting. We know “I” is not a real person who did real research. It feels disingenuous.?

So, we need to be sensitive about this when we are working with our AI writing helpers. It is better to back off the “I know who you are” messages and be more generic. It’s a fine line, and it takes a savvy marketer to be able to walk it.?

Even the most brilliant marketer will fail at this if he or she hasn’t personally interviewed customers after they have made a purchase. Interviewing a customer a week will keep you on track. It’s not difficult; you just go into your CRM and find customers who are most like the customers you want to attract going forward, send them an email requesting 30 minutes on a Zoom audio-only call so you can ask them questions about “how we can improve,” and make an appointment.

Then ask the open-ended questions I spell out in chapter 3 of my book.?

There is no substitute for these one-on-one conversations. It is the only way to get a realistic picture of the nuances and subtleties involved in the buying process.

No amount of research on customers, no amount of persona-building, and no amount of guessing or assuming will put you in a position to 1) be the company’s expert on exactly what your customers want and their buying process and 2) generate AI-assisted copy that works.