🤖 Did you know 72% of business-to-business buyers believe Generative AI (GenAI) will improve how companies serve customers? However, according to Salesforce, only 61% of sales professionals accept GenAI will better serve customers. I think regardless of your functional role, AI will require a significant mindset shift that senior leadership must pay attention to.
The study also highlights that 84% of professionals are the most optimistic about GenAI and how it enables them to better serve customers. Marketers follow at 70% and service professionals at 62%.
🏦 IT Professionals: Will continue to see greater automation of the processes, code development, and website development. This includes items like documentation and managing operational requests from internal customers for support. Security will also be a key area to leverage GenAI to handle audits and apply patches. The challenge will be how confident IT is in explaining the changes or rolling them back if the patches don’t work.
💻 Marketing: GenAI will enable product marketing to develop the first draft of personas, marketing briefs, collateral, product naming, and competitive battle cards. Marketing will use GenAI to create email campaigns and SEO keywords and track campaign results in real time. While content development will happen quicker, the next level challenge is how to personalize the personas and uncover the different emotional drivers for each persona throughout the customer journey.
🤖 Services and Support: Chatbots will become ubiquitous both internally and externally to answer customer and employee questions. Customers will turn to the chatbot before reading the website for answers. Firms will use chatbots to continuously train their service and support teams to provide real-time answers or escalate issues to improve the overall customer experience. The question is whether the systems can keep up with the continuous development and updates.
💼 Sales: While concerned about how GenAI could encroach on their personal engagement with customers, GenAI would also be the efficient administrative assistant they’ve dreamed of. GenAI offloads presentation development updates CRM and writes email follow-ups. However, GenAI could increase sales reps’ anxiety and break customer trust if the data provided lacks accuracy and violates privacy regulations.
These examples provide an exciting and optimistic view of GenAI as an efficient assistant, issues such as data privacy and accuracy are top of mind for legal teams and must be addressed before AI can be trusted as an assistant.
It also requires a major mindset change, where each function will have to redefine its role and handoffs to its peers. Senior leaders must understand the strategic implications and what GenAI can deliver and manage expectations before we deliver on those improvements for customers.
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