Your carefully crafted customer journey has been disrupted. Permanently.
GenAI is now in the hands of mainstream consumers, and this means you need to reset your thinking on how you acquire and keep customers.
November 30th, 2022 was a big day for humanity, but we probably didn’t notice much at the time. This was the day ChatGPT 1 launched and less than 18 months later it’s had a profound impact on business to the point that now according to recent US research 45% of CEO’s are saying that they expect GenAI to grow their profits over the next 24 months.
Marketers have been quick to look at improving internal marketing productivity by ‘hiring’ a GenAI employee to take on the mundane marketing process tasks, freeing up marketers to focus on strategy and growth.
However, if marketers only focus on the productivity benefits of GenAI they miss out on the real opportunity and are ignoring a real threat.
Our research shows that 51% of Australians are using GenAI in some way, evenly distributed across age cohorts, mostly at this point in the adoption curve for content creation.
However, our research is clearly showing that AI content creation is a ‘gateway drug’ training consumers for more advanced uses of GenAI. Product discovery, product comparison, price comparison, reviews summarisation and product queries are all examples of how GenAI is rapidly changing the way we buy.
In our research 30% of Australian consumers are planning to integrate GenAI into their shopping habits and 18% have already used it to decide on what they want to buy from big ticket items like a car through to smaller tasks like choosing a credit card.
One of the biggest disruptions is in discovery phase of customer journeys with half of ChatGPT users no longer using traditional Google search for their shopping research.
We have been running a research program on the differences between traditional search optimization and GenAI search optimization. And the news is not good for many brands that are not surfacing in GenAI answers.
What’s clear is that a well-crafted ChatGPT style answer to a question is fast becoming the norm and a traditional search result with links and perhaps a snippet just doesn’t cut it anymore. Same with post sale customer service, consumers expect high quality instant answers to the questions they ask of brands.
We have used our ongoing research to develop a new product to help clients find growth through understanding and managing the threats and opportunities of consumers using AI, it’s called Journey GAINS and we’d love to tell you more, information can be found here.
*Australian research from Capgemini Research Institute conducted between April and November 2023 n=800.