Customer 360

CHAPTER 20Summing Up

Every company wants to deliver a great experience to its customers, but very few can do it.

So we said at the beginning of our adventure together—and we hope we’ve brought you a bit closer to being one of those happy few. We know it’s entirely possible to deliver great end-to-end experiences if you follow the principles of Data + AI + Trust:

• Data: Combining and organizing customer data is a critical first step to delivering a superior Customer 360.
• AI: AI has unlimited potential but needs a careful approach and the right internal processes.
• Trust: Customers (and legislators) require the security, availability, and privacy of data, and your teams need to be able to trust automated decisions.

TO RECAP

In the Introduction, we started with Gucci, an Italian luxury brand that developed a way to automate service responses in a Guccified tone using AI. Yet we saw that most customer experiences, across the globe, fall short of this ideal—and in fact appear to be deteriorating, in part due to rising expectations. Another challenge is the obvious acceleration of the rate of change: most dramatically, ChatGPT took only 2 months to reach 100 million users, introducing the era of GenAI.

We described three levels of the AI experience (for consumers and companies): data, model, and UI. Thriving in the AI-enabled future requires a solid data foundation based on some version of a Customer Data Platform, internal (and external) models, and a useful front end. And particularly ...