Listening

It used to be popular to say “Data is the new oil.”

While the saying has lost its luster (and the analogy has ended up fairly criticized), the end portion of the original quote is awfully good: “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”

Nowhere, I think, has more data gone unused than DTC.

And while I expect some to argue against that claim, I think everyone would agree that, when data is used, it’s often used by data vendors on a brand’s behalf. In other words, brands are really good at simply collecting data. They don’t have the resources to use it or listen to it.

This, I think, is one of the biggest opportunities for DTC with AI.

While many in the industry will be talking about how AI can replace humans and make brands leaner, AI’s biggest opportunity is to help brands become more human.

With all the data we’ve been trained to collect (and gets collected automatically), it’s easy to forget that the surveys our customers take, the reviews they leave, and the purchase patterns they display are forms of communication. And, really, we’ve been just OK as an industry at listening to our customers when they communicate with us in that way.

This is what changes first.

While you can certainly reduce the amount of human intervention needed to answer certain types of support tickets, what will deliver more long-term value to brands is finding ways to listen to and, then, interpret all the ways your customers are communicating with you.

The outputs of that become more personalized experiences for customers in a 1:1 fashion, yes, but it also means more specific brand positioning in the global sense. Whether that means one, singular brand experience or dozens of niched-down brand experiences, I don’t know (and is probably brand dependent), but one of the the byproducts of a stronger brand is more emotional connection with the consumer.

And emotional connection is about as human as it gets.