The human element

Here is a new marketing principle for our times. In any AI-enhanced customer experience setup, one element in the mix will be vastly more sophisticated and complex than all the others.

As a corollary of that, this single element, being a multifaceted macro system in its own right, will be the source of virtually all the unpredictability and unintended consequences the enhanced new experience will throw up.

Why should this be? How come it’s always there? And how can customer experience designers find ways to sidestep it?

They can’t. Because this complex, mercurial element in the setup is the person at the centre of things – the human doing the experiencing. And no matter how seamless, how frictionless, how seemingly intuitive the enhanced customer experience might be, it will be confounded, at some point, in some way, by the very customer for which it was designed. There’s nowt so perverse as people.

Spotify was reminded of that with the 2023 rollout of its AI DJ personalised radio host feature, which had been 10 years and numerous AI capability acquisitions in the making. It didn’t just suggest music the user might like, but gave brief reasons why – using a form of explainable AI (XAI) to precede each song with contextual background information.

It was able to do this at scale, for a library of over 100 million tracks, with a silkily intimate touch – talking to the user by name, integrating the day of the week, using an AI-enabled ‘anthropomorphic’ voice with the rhythms and cadences of natural speech, to take away the jarring dissonance that normal script-to-voice systems impose.

All the user had to do was sit back and enjoy a seamless mix of music they already knew, plenty more that they probably would like to try, and some slickly informed commentary to link the two.

Turned out that was making it way too passive. Users wanted more agency, wanted ways to give live feedback to the system, wanted – in the end – a bit more friction in there. Spotify duly spent the next two years working out how to give them that and the new version was launched earlier this year. The brand has put in a bit of extra effort – and now the customer will, too.

Not all frictions are bad

The human impulse to want life to be easier but then to react against it when all the lumps and bumps are taken out is not new. It has its antecedents in the analogue world. The most famous example – the one every marketer knows, or should – dates back to the 1950s, when Betty Crocker launched its complete cake mixes. With just the ingredients in the pack, and some added water, you could do it all, and end up with a nice cake. Consumers baulked; it seemed indecently easy, inducing feelings of guilt. But when the brand changed the formula so that the cakemaker needed to add an egg, sales took off.

Recently, academics have begun to take an interest in frictions within the overall customer experience, and have reached some interesting, ‘Crocker-style’ conclusions. In a 2024 study, the advice for managers whose brands met certain criteria was to “add friction”, as this could create “additional delight and engagement”.

That still leaves those tiresome frictions that get known as pain points, and the academic counsel there is to work with AI to eliminate them. As indeed many brands now are. Whether they should be in a rush to cull every last one, though, is challenged by a 2014 study from behavioural psychology.

In the Harvard experiment, volunteers were required to remain in a bare laboratory room for 15 minutes, alone and with no distractions. While there, they had the option to self-administer a mild electric shock using a device on the table. There were no privileges for hitting the pain button – no early release from the experiment. It was just an option.

Bizarrely, almost half of the respondents, after a period of nothingness in the featureless room, out of curiosity or boredom, hit the button and got the shock. In stimulus-free blandness, maybe even pain is preferable to monotony. In that paradigm, the challenge to streamers like Spotify could come not from competitors who make things even smoother and slicker but from vinyl – with its myriad frictions, both figurative and literal, and its stylus-care pain points inherited from an earlier era.

What marketers know that AI can’t

Few things in business are as seminal as the customer experience – because if that does not go well, or if competitors get to do it better, all other bets are off.

And it is no longer just the province of tech companies like Spotify to enhance customer experience with the help of AI. Increasingly, it will be a resource used in even the most humdrum categories, necessarily involving multidisciplinary teams.

Here’s what will happen. AI will reveal new ways to improve, streamline and personalise brand experiences for customers. But that in turn will reveal new ways in which the capriciousness, the cussedness, the sheer perversity of people come to the fore. Or remind us of pre-existing ones.

Within the corporate firmament, marketers will be the ones least surprised, least fazed, by this customer-derived complexity – because we see it close up, every day.

We’re the ones who hear consumers say one thing in research groups then do another when it comes to putting their money down.

We’re the ones who seek to understand them when, straight faced, they ask for two conflicting things at once.

And we’re the ones who know that consumers are unreliable witnesses, even to their own innermost cravings and desires. So, when we read – as reported in a recent Times survey – that Gen Z wants AI to smooth out every consumption pain point from trying on clothes to accessing art, we’re the ones who will be ready to react when they inevitably, but in some non-obvious way, renege.

The diamond-tipped drill of AI will bore with ever greater ease through the rock of obdurate commercial processes and challenges – but it will be of less use when it hits the molten layer of human emotions, passions, proclivities and contradictions.

It is in that volatile, liquid layer that marketing expertise and experience uniquely reside. In principle, at least, that should give marketers a lot more influence in the boardroom in these new and interesting times.