AI and Brand Trust: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ll have seen the buzzword AI floating around.

Utilising AI by incorporating chatbots, personalised customer experiences and data analysis are all great ways to build your brand trust and improve the customer experience.

But what does this really mean?

The Power of Brand Trust

Established brand trust is one of the most powerful tools for successful businesses to build upon.

It might sound a little complicated, but brand trust is simply comes down to the amount of respect and loyalty customers have for your brand, how much they believe in it and how strongly they trust that you can deliver on your promises. 

So, why is this important?

Once brand trust is established through elements such as positive customer reviews, word of mouth and a larger online presence, it leads customers to your site or social channels and increases the likelihood of a conversion. This process is like a loop – the more sales and customers you get through (that have a positive experience!) the more reviews, the more your presence grows and the process repeats itself. 

Obviously this is great when done correctly, but it works both ways and a bad perception of your company, or a lack of brand trust, can have detrimental effects.

How Can You Use AI to Increase Brand Trust?

Data Analysis

One of the amazing things about AI is the capabilities it has when it comes to data analysis. Able to search out patterns and put it into reports, documents, and formats that humans can easily understand, it’s a really useful tool to save marketers time sifting through large amounts of complex data, with the peace of mind knowing that there’s no risk of human error. 

It’s great for understanding audiences too, as you can very easily and quickly analyse customer data and behavior which you can then use to influence marketing decisions. By understanding your audience in such a way, you can target them more effectively and increase brand trust by being more relatable and personal to your potential customers.

24/7 Customer Support

Another fantastic way to utilise AI to better your customer’s experience is to implement features such as chatbots on your site to provide 24/7 support.

AI enables you to set up automated responses to customer requests—meaning instant replies where possible. This in turn increases brand trust as your customers will feel like you’re more available and like they are being supported in their purchasing journey. 

Chatbots are great for solving easier, more straightforward issues that your audience may have, but they can’t solve everything. This is where another AI tool, augmented messaging, could be implemented.

AM identifies situations where human agents should step in and help the customer for added personalisation.

It should be noted that as great as these tools can be, nothing can beat human interaction. It’s far easier and far more personal for a customer to speak to a human who can answer all of their questions without an automated response – although we know this isn’t always possible and automated customer service tools are a great way to answer the simpler questions at any time of the day.

Great Examples of AI in Marketing

Netflix Algorithms 

If you have Netflix, you’ve experienced personalised marketing. Netflix uses AI to compile data on what type of shows/movies you’ve watched in the past, compares this to other user’s data and what they also watched and then puts these suggestions into a ‘you may like’ category… but it doesn’t stop there!

Impressively, Netflix uses previous watch history to learn more about what type of thumbnail is most likely to make you hit play. 

The technology examines a large number of video frames from existing movies to determine the most appealing image for its thumbnail and, based on the clicking rates of other users with similar interests, picks which one is most likely to entice you into watching! So if you’ve ever noticed the thumbnails of the same show or films changing, Netflix is trying to see which image works best for you and similar users!

Sephora

The global beauty brand has been ahead of the curve with AI, first launching a chatbot on their site in 2017.

The chatbot was a bit different to the regular kind. Instead of just answering basic questions, the bot helped customers narrow down cosmetic choices, including a quiz which allowed them to better understand their customer’s product preferences. In more recent years, they’ve come even further and introduced technology which allows customers to enjoy an in-store experience from the comfort of their own home, including a virtual makeup artist feature which allows shoppers to see designs on their own facial avatars before they buy the product.

The Pitfalls of Using AI

Lack of Inclusivity 

Data driven, a lot of AI algorithms are trained on bias data and are not designed to account for diversity. Examples of this include image recognition services making offensive conclusions, facial recognition not recognising darker skin tones and chatbots adopting hate speech.

One of the most recent examples is the Microsoft chatbot, ‘Tay’, which was implemented in 2016 to engage in “casual and playful conversation” on Twitter. The chatbot used machine learning and AI to learn conversational habits, so the more that people talked with Tay, the more the chatbot learnt how to write more naturally and hold better conversations. 

Unfortunately – the internet is a crazy place and less than 24 hours after Tay launched, internet trolls had corrupted the chatbot’s personality. They flooded the bot with racist, misogynistic and anti-semitic tweets, turning Tay, a chatbot that the Verge described as a “robot parrot with an internet connection” into a mouthpiece for hateful language and it subsequently got taken down.

Lack of Human Touch

We’ve all heard the saying ‘people buy from people’. It’s true – one of the largest concerns from the greater public are about AI replacing humans and customers losing the human touch during their buying journeys.

If relied on too heavily, AI can become robotic and less personal, which will decrease brand trust as your audience don’t see the people behind the business and can’t connect and relate to a robot as much as they can a human.

SImilarly to this, another concern is about the lack of originality from the content that AI produces. All content generated by AI has to come from somewhere, meaning that it’s essentially stolen from other people’s content and ideas. When relied on too heavily, your content will begin to sound the same as everyone else’s who’s using the same AI tools, decreasing your brand trust as your message won’t be personal to the customer and they won’t feel as if they can connect with you.

It’s important to remember that regardless of what you’re using, all AI tools require a human to input the data/request in the first place. It can be a fantastic tool to enhance your work, especially when being used to process data, but it shouldn’t be relied on too heavily as it can ruin your brand image if it goes wrong – which Microsoft learnt the hard way!

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