Exploring the role of AI in addressing the customer understanding challenge: insights from Plain Numbers' Director of Partnerships, Ben Perkins

Everyone is talking about AI. Unsurprisingly, across every business and every sector people are keen to harness the power of emerging technology to improve efficiency and meet their challenges at scale. Customer communications are no exception to that.  

Firms are right to be exploring how AI can help them, but customer understanding is a complex area and difficult to get right. Technology alone can’t yet meet this challenge, and this seems likely to be the case for some time. This leaves the best approach being to blend the power of human intelligence with the useful capabilities of technology.  

How AI can help with customer understanding 

There is no doubt that AI is incredibly efficient. GPTs and other tools can produce communications much faster than people can.  When the customer has a question there are tools that can respond to queries and provide answers for the consumer faster than traditional communication channels.  

AI also has the power to deliver insights on communications including sentiment analysis and finding common themes, which can give businesses a useful steer on how to make improvements. It’s very good at diagnosing certain issues with communications, whether that be identifying complicated language, checking for readability or other accessibility problems.  

Indeed, it's clear that providing a foundation and direction for communications is well within the current capabilities of AI when used well.  

Why AI is still limited and can’t solve things alone  

While AI can analyse and produce text easily, it still struggles with context. There are lots of communications where the context in which they exist makes a huge difference to the best way to present information to maximise understanding. Even communications with similar purposes have different audiences, are part of different customer journeys and are designed to drive different actions. The list of these nuances could go on. At Plain Numbers we call this “the Communication Environment” and we work with Plain Numbers Practitioners to understand the many nuances around their communications before making recommendations.  

The Plain Numbers Approach is much more than a list of rules that can be followed with boxes that should be ticked. It is a principles-based Approach which relies on the person implementing it to think carefully about the intent of the communication and take into account the nuances that make a difference to comprehension levels. This human judgement is essential to achieving the huge improvements in comprehension that our research has shown. Even when using AI, it is trained Plain Numbers Practitioners who are well equipped to make that judgement and ensure the Plain Numbers Approach is applied effectively.  

The human touch becomes even more important when you are communicating complex information in emotive situations. To improve customer understanding we also need to think carefully about how people will feel receiving it and therefore how they will behave. Just one example is understanding maths anxiety amongst customers. People are much better at understanding and managing potential emotion than technology.  

AI-supported communications will invariably require human oversight. People trained in the Plain Numbers Approach play a crucial role in this process. While AI lacks the capacity to employ the Approach or be directed to do so, even if it could, the effectiveness of its intervention would remain dubious without a significantly enhanced grasp of the context.  

The future role of AI  

It would take a brave person to say with confidence how this fast-emerging technology will impact our businesses in the long term, except saying that it will have an impact. Looking more short term, now is absolutely the time to be thinking about how AI can help improve levels of customer understanding, but only as a complimentary support to the all-important people who are best placed to get it right.  

In writing this article, I asked a GPT programme to answer the very question I am addressing here. Even AI tools themselves are cautious about seeing technology as the standalone solution. Here’s what the GPT concluded: 

“In conclusion, AI can contribute to improving understanding of customer communications, but its success depends on how well it is integrated into a broader strategy that includes human oversight.”  

On this occasion, I am happy to allow AI to conclude for us, but only because I have given it the oversight and input that it needs.