This week in CX: Can customer reviews powered by generative AI be trusted?

Happy Friday! Here’s the latest roundup of industry news from this week in CX.
 
📢 This week, we’re looking at Qualtrics new Video Feedback, Amazon new product review powered by AI, and gift cards winning strategy by New Look. 

Key news

• According to the Forrester Wave™: Conversation Intelligence For Customer Service, Q3 2023, CallMiner is the only leader with Cresta, Nice, Qualtrics and a few others being recognised as strong performers. ‘While not necessarily pioneering the flashiest AI capabilities, CallMiner has a product vision and roadmap that are laser-focused on empowering its mature operations clients to drive customer-centered enhancements through an incremental and adaptable evolution of traditional contact center programs‘, states the report by Forrester.

• Twitter rival Threads had a buzzy start, but the number of daily active users (DAUs) worldwide collapsed by almost 80% in just over three weeks, the Financial Times reports, citing data from Similiarweb. Threads piggy-backed on Instagram’s existing audience of 1.4bn to help sign users up to Threads, but the number of people using the app has been in steady decline ever since.

• According to a Google blog post, AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), after months of testing, can now summarise articles you’re reading on the web. This is still an experiment, but will soon surely change how we search and read online.

• Britain’s Gen Z jobseekers are eschewing hustle culture in favour of lower stress roles, according to data from Adzuna. The job site noted a jump in clicks on roles associated with offering more flexibility and lower stress. Meanwhile, a recent survey from Deloitte found that 26% of Gen Z respondents internationally believed that the creation of more job-sharing options should be an area of focus for companies in trying to foster better work-life balance.

Commentary share: Kantar reports 2.2% point decrease in price inflation

“With interest rates being risen for the 14^th time in a row, a 2.2% drop in inflation is a relief. Customers who learned to watch their wallets during difficult economic times can breathe a sigh of relief in the run-up to Christmas. “The gloomy weather affecting footfall is a testament to how interconnected our economy, environment, and consumer behaviour truly are. In the current climate, retailers need to expand their services, ensuring their shop, whether physical or digital, offers value customers can’t find elsewhere.”

– Jat Sahi, Retail Consulting Lead at Fujitsu

Qualtrics launched new video feedback research tools for marketers and researchers 

One week ago, our team published an article about video feedback being the next big thing in the CX industry. This assumption came from the observation of new products by some of the leading companies. And we were right!

On August 15, 2023, Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management (XM) category, announced the general availability of Qualtrics® Automated Summaries for Video Feedback.

This powerful tool allows customers to capture six times more content than traditional interviewing. Furthermore, video feedback provides a richer understanding of feedback by allowing a researcher to see a user’s facial expressions and hear the tone of voice.

In addition, Qualtrics announced the general availability of new In-Depth Interviews and Focus Groups features. These new solutions allow market researchers to upload, transcribe and analyze long form videos in the Qualtrics Platform.

These AI-powered solutions include multi-speaker identification that can differentiate individual speakers in the transcripts, allowing researchers to easily summarize feedback from multiple individuals. Researchers can consolidate, share and collaborate using insights from these long form videos alongside other qualitative and quantitative research.

New Video Feedback by Qualtrics enhanced with generative AI might revolutionise qualitative research. This simplified, efficient, and precise analysis will create more space for human observations and connecting dots in a way we haven’t seen before.

Amazon is using generative AI to summarise product reviews    

Amazon first launched online product reviews in 1995, and since then, this has become one of the most important features on the platform. After years of updating this feature and engaging customers, and creating a powerful community, it is time for Amazon to leverage this function by applying generative AI.

The application of generative AI for product review means that thousands of Amazon reviews will be summarised in a few sentences. This will further make the decision-making process for customers easier and faster.

However, the question of how this language model was trained, what parameters it considers when summarising reviews, if it excludes bad reviews, etc., remains relevant and vital. The process behind training the language model must be transparent to be trusted. Otherwise, we can see this solution causing a backlash.

This is how the benefits of AI-powered product reviews were explained on the official Amazon website: ‘Now available to a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a broad selection of products, the AI-generated review highlights also feature key product insights and allow customers to more easily surface reviews that mention certain product attributes. For example, a customer looking to understand whether a product is easy to use can easily surface reviews mentioning “ease of use” by tapping on that product attribute under the review highlights.’

New Look set the gold standard when it comes to gift card strategy 

Blackhawk Network, along with NAPCO Research has released a report into the state of UK merchant’s gift card programmes. Despite economic uncertainty, the report interestingly found an encouraging year-over-year sales growth. It is thought that the growth is likely down to 62% of people believing that gift cards are a better alternative to physical gifts.

It was also found that New Look set the gold standard when it comes to gift card strategy with the brand scoring higher overall than any other retailer (85%), with a perfect score for in-store strategy!

Thanks for tuning into CXM’s weekly roundup of industry news. Check back next Friday for the latest updates of the week!

*Image source: Amazon improves the customer reviews experience with AI (aboutamazon.com)