Building Brand Trust In Gigged Markets

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Trust is the currency of economic activity. Trust is the magic that humans bring to relationships. Trust is essential to the success of direct sellers and brands alike in the era of e-commerce and on-demand work. Are you building your company around the human interactions that complete the digital connection with customers who discover your business online? Is your sales team equipped with the information that will make each pitch unique to the individual customer?

Rapid changes in work and marketing have placed trust back at the center of the brand success equation after three decades of declining trust among customers. It shows that increasingly virtual businesses must support one-to-one human interaction when it is critical to the sale, retaining an existing customer, or supporting referral and social marketing activities. Human representatives are the most important interface for trusted relationships, but they must be prepared with the right information at the right time to make a compelling case for consumers’ confidence.

A history of trust in English publications

For decades, from the 1840s until the dawn of mass communication in the 1960s, “trust” was a dull topic, mentioned with declining frequency in English-language publications for decades. Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which analyzes the incidence of words in published books, it’s simple to conclude that as the world grew closer together through physical networks, trust was of little concern as a topic of discussion. In the chart to the right, the lowest level of discussion of trust represents the highest degree of trust achieved in society since 1800.

Authors talked about “trust” less because, we surmise, it was easier than any time in history to reach out and touch someone personally. For the first time, almost every customer in the developed world was within an easy drive or a plane trip of the salesperson who closed the deal. In the 1960s, relationships were physical and deals still involved a handshake. How the times have changed in 50 years.

Trust began to collapse in the early 1970s as we became more connected to the world through virtual information, starting when microwave transmission, which enabled news networks to “go live” with breaking news, and cable television appeared.

The introduction of industrial production, cinema, and radio, along with growing networks of physical retail and company presence in communities did not shake personal trust. But when television enabled by intercontinental microwave and cable connections that allowed real-time knowledge of far-off events, people tended to find more cause to question information and to distrust reflexively.

Why trust now?

In the 1990s, when the commercial internet was rolled out, followed quickly by wireless mobile data connectivity and, ultimately, the iPhone, “trust” became an important issue that rose to the highest levels of discussion volume since the 1840s. Not since the onset of modern production has trust been more discussed in literature and non-fiction. Understanding how to build trust through digital channels using personalization and, at critical moments in the customer journey, through one-to-one human interaction, is the content marketer’s primary challenge. Each trust relationship is flavored by the brand’s message and the dynamics of the salesperson-customer interaction.

During the 1990s, a lack of broadband network capacity prevented rich media from flowing to most internet users. It was described as the “last-mile” problem. It was widely assumed that broadband would introduce an extraordinary era of one-to-one communication, that when data was flowing at broadband speeds over the last mile of cable between publisher and audience, the world would be transformed. In fact, the world was transformed, but we know now that solving the last-mile data challenge broke interpersonal trust.

Today, trust in almost all institutions is faltering. Banks, business leaders, elected officeholders, and the media all fall well below 50 percent levels, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew argued in 2017 that over the next decade, the “fate of online trust” will be decided. Brands must put themselves at the forefront of rebuilding trust because “the internet was not designed with security protections or trust problems in mind.”

Vint Cerf, a co-creator of the internet, told Pew: “We didn’t focus on how you could wreck this system intentionally.”

The keystone of renewed trust will come from the combination of people and information presented skillfully when technology cannot be humane enough to convince a customer or a citizen that the facts and promises they receive are valid. As powerful as the combination of networks and data are, the person-to-person connection, including the confidence expressed through eye-to-eye conversation and the reassurance of a handshake, must be recreated for the gig era.

As workers transition from permanent employment in lifelong careers to rapid, often daily, switching between work on behalf of multiple brands, artificial intelligence and What’s Next coaching will enable sales and service to bring deep background information to every customer conversation. They will know everything necessary to capture the objections and unstated requirements that customers share with them, and their soft skills will determine whether the facts translate into a completed transaction.

Trusted processes can be engineered into systems that act without human intervention, but actually being trusted is the ultimate human ingredient in successful sales and marketing organizations.

The tools of trust

As we’ve explored in other postings, confidence in the information provided to salespeople during their onboarding process is essential to retaining new recruits. The same principle applies to consumers, whose expectations have changed dramatically in the wake of broadband connectivity.

Today, a would-be customer may conduct hours of research before contacting a brand or filling out a form on a website. People demand information early in their product/service consideration process, and the most successful online marketers now concentrate on effective pre-sales communication to lift conversion rates.

Direct selling companies are uniquely placed to combine the reach of digital networks with the intimacy of local personal interaction. By planning a content marketing and sales process that anticipates when enhanced interaction — a meeting or a phone call, as well as video conferencing — will turn the abstract information offered in content assets into concrete promises made by one person to another. Companies’ existing content libraries are the raw material of the responsive intimate sales process described here, but it must be combined with mobile tools that help sales representatives collect additional qualitative and quantitative information through conversation with the customer.

Based on the sales process and the unique characteristics of the customer-salesperson relationship, content can be reshaped on the fly to address customer concerns, as well as coach the sales rep to ask for the business at the right time. Using this roadmap, even negative results can be integrated into the sales process to refine the message and improve conversion rates. Artificial intelligence, such as Gig Economy Group’s machine learning techniques, can spot effective or ineffective messages long before human managers would discover trends in quarterly or annual sales reports.

Trust-building interactions are the engine of improved efficiency for business. Bringing the entire company’s resources in the form of data and contextually relevant content to each customer interaction provides feedback to improve products, reposition resources, and evolve messaging. It all begins with trust, but every transaction ultimately leads to a human connection or trust begins to falter. Have you prepared your sales and customer service teams to be magically aware of customer concerns, ready to send the right message at the right moment with a personal touch?

Salespeople: The Ultimate Magical Interface

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Salespeople will become treasured assets as personalization sweeps the B2C world, from medical tools that can detect dementia from the changing tones of patient’s voice to banking services targetted to individual financial goals. Since we first wrote Gig Economy Group’s approach to personalization for direct selling, the announcement of big data-driven marketing tools to provide personalized experience has accelerated.

Companies are racing to collect and analyze as much information as possible using artificial intelligence. This transition is occurring along with, and enabled by, several other technical and cultural revolutions. The Internet-of-Things (IoT), which include wearables, embedded sensors at every step of the supply chain, next-generation 5G wireless connectivity that will deliver at least 100 Mbps data service that connects billions of devices simultaneously, along with the evolution of work known as the gig economy, place a new premium informed compassionate human interaction.

These massive, converging transformations of the infrastructure could be oppressive — many people worry about data analysis and surveillance stripping away our individuality and privacy — but by keeping people’s needs at the center of the equation the customer experience could also be liberating and far more sustainable, allowing more people to enjoy better lives. People, not machines, experience a sense of magic when the world changes.

Direct selling’s emphasis on the interpersonal connections that weave marketplaces into local communities is an important value to preserve. As brands struggle to move from attention-interrupting advertising and marketing strategies to one-to-one engagements with consumers, the preparation a human representative brings to the customer conversation will become more central to sales and support success. More data collected through web, IoT, and mobile devices, will amplify the role of the salesperson in conversion and retention. Equipped with more quantitative data, sales teams can focus on qualitative feedback from customers to deliver precisely personalized products and services. The advantage for company and customer will be dramatically improved efficiency in the economy, contributing to sustainability and customer satisfaction by using fewer resources to deliver more value.

The salesperson is the essential sensor for brand engagement, one with far more capability and empathy than an automated system. Let’s explore the four transformations, personalization, IoT, 5G wireless, and the gig economy to understand the brand opportunity.

No one enjoys being a target

Targeting of customers through traditional and digital advertising channels has led to a marketing environment built around the concept of personas. But personas are too general for personalized experience; they are a starting point when design products for large audiences. At the customer level, targeting feels like be shoe-horned into a relationship that is not entirely comfortable. Think of the use of retargeting in web advertising, which chases a user from one website to the next displaying the same ads, often for something they’ve already purchased.

Persona-based targeting is aging out as a strategy. Personalization breaks the persona model because real people experience amalgamations of preferences that do not tolerate ill-fitted offers. As the waves of change break over the persona seawall, individual preferences will erode monolithic marketing categories.

Satisfying personalization will collect features and value propositions from persona-based models, combining them in unique ways to satisfy customer requirements.  All Millennials are not the same, nor are all Boomers, women, and persons earning between $75,000 and $100,000 annually.

As new mores and modes of behavior evolve in response to ubiquitous connectivity and post-industrial manufacturing, and work becomes more local and gig-oriented, forcing workers to diversify their skills to remain competitive, every customer interaction will require a trusted human representative be available at critical decision points in the buying journey.

When everything is listening

IoT networks allow constant collection of feedback. In winery fields, grapes are watered and fertilized using IoT data to respond to environmental factors to produce the ideal juice for winemaking. Factories and supply chains are increasingly connected using IoT to bring in raw materials and finished components when they are needed and no sooner. In marketing, IoT will provide direct feedback about how products are used, including what customers try to do with a product that causes it to fail — personalization of products, post-sales support, and product development will be transformed by the tsumani of data.

The challenge for brands in this environment is novel: Human presence — online or in-person — at the appropriate moment in the customer journey becomes essential to building and maintaining trust. An IoT-enabled product in an IoT-enabled home could summon a sales rep when an upgrade is needed or a service representative to provide repairs or customer support. These representatives will be local and often won’t necessarily be an employee of the brand. They may be an independent skilled worker specializing in the required service.

Brands must be prepared to speak through these IoT-enabled support people using consistent language based on established policies.

The What’s Next approach to one-to-one engagement the Gig Economy Group delivers allows rapid training during initial sales rep or service rep onboarding. Data generated by an IoT-enabled product or sensor can be combined on-the-fly by a machine learning system to present the brand rep exactly the right content to share with a customer or the instructions to deliver the needed support. Roaming workers carrying mobile devices will tap into multiple brands’ content resources during their day, moving from one brand’s customer to the next brand’s customers. Easy-to-understand sales and support steps and rich media resources served with the appropriate contextual guidance to make it relevant to the customer will make workers into brand experts who confidently deliver on product or service promises.

Wirelessly connected collaboration

Work is poised for historic changes. Today’s organization has become permeable. Companies now bring in expertise, soft skills, and labor as needed to fulfill brand promises. Workers, however, have more options to use their labor in different ways because of the growing mesh of data connectivity that connects them to many more opportunities to work. In a 5G world, high-speed data services can move vast amounts of data back and forth between the customer and the company with which they are doing business. When a human representative is dispatched, they will have extensive information about the customer’s problem and their preferences in the palm of their hand.

Smart tools scale intimacy, driving far more valuable human interactions when necessary to brand success.

A CEO today may jump on a plane to fly halfway around the world to save a multi-million-dollar deal, but a $500 customer may get very little attention. Wireless, data-enabled platforms will let the brand deploy a human locally when that $500 sale is on the line. Where today’s marketing and sales funnel have conversion events, the 5G IoT sales and service experience will include pre- and post-sales in-person engagements at moments when a customer may abandon the brand because of a problem, when they are most ready to buy again, or when a competitor has presented a compelling alternative.

Where will the funding for all this human contact come from? Today’s marketing systems are so wasteful that savings created by moving away from traffic-centric interruptive advertising and carpet-bombing marketing strategies will free up resources for efficient intimate engagement.

Everyone is flexible, because people crave variety

The gig economy is a transitional description of the future of work. As the labor contract is renegotiated over the next decade, work will be supported by social safety net systems that ensure flexible work arrangements do not lead to poverty. After all, if workers are not earning enough to be middle-class consumers, there will be no market for business to sell into.

Direct Selling News this week reported that women who choose “side hustles” like direct selling do so because they value work flexibility, higher incomes, and the entrepreneurial control owning a small business provides. Millennials and Gen Z value flexibility and want work that matters, imbuing everything they do with a sense of mission. The difference between this lifestyle and the old nine-to-five approach means more than giving up full-time employment for a “gig,” it’s a decision to work when it fits with the workers’ life responsibilities.

A gig salesperson may represent multiple brands, moving from one to the next with each meeting and using the brand’s digital tools to become intimately aware of the customer’s needs. Service people and other labor will certainly work for several different companies. In addition to changing their clothing to wear a branded shirt when entering the customer’s home or business, they will seamlessly move from one set of service guidelines to another, coached by mobile apps that deliver content and training on-site. Autonomous vehicles will give the mobile worker plenty of time between calls to change and prepare because they will not be stuck driving.

To excel in this environment, workers will bring skills that can be combined with brand practices to deliver the most intimate customer engagement in business history. Mobile tools and brand values learned through apps that train and even coach salespeople when selling must be combined with hands-on skills and empathy to establish a human connection. The gig economy gives companies the ability to put a skilled person in front of the customer with the right information at exactly the right moment.

Design for magical experience

Every engagement should feel to the customer as significant as meeting the CEO when a $50 million deal is on the line. That’s the experience content-plus-human-representative will deliver at scale. Each customer will feel the importance of their spending to their own success and that of the values the product/service they purchase represent.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As brands and direct selling companies adopt personalization, ubiquitous data and sensor connectivity, and the mix-and-match gig economy model that connects customers to exactly what they need when they need it, business has the opportunity to craft magical customer experience. The human face and the sensitivity a sales rep has to the feelings and needs of the customer is the essential bridge from anonymous sales experiences to committed long-term customer engagement based on empathy and the clever use of technology to create human connections.

 

How AI-enabled content is different from traditional content management

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We are often asked what is the difference between an AI-enabled content platform and the content management systems used by marketers today.

Briefly, artificial intelligence (AI) adds the ability to learn and adjust content programs based on the success or failure of a change to influence conversion rates. Traditional content management systems (CMS) can be scripted to perform feats of personalization but lack the capability to learn from changes. In the one-to-one sales setting of the home or direct-selling meeting, AI can track any changes in representatives’ sales messages and understand if they help improve revenue.

That’s a pretty dense and, we believe, concise explanation. Here is what it means to your organization:

  • Traditional CMS systems provide effective scripted customer experience, but they cannot learn and improve without human intervention;
  • AI-enabled content platforms can learn and even test changes to customer experience without human intervention;
  • The in-home and one-to-one selling environment requires rapid testing and dissemination of novel messaging that converts to desired actions at each step in the customer journey;
  • AI-enabled content platforms give distributors active coaching that captures customer input and improves sales messaging by personalizing each interaction, and;
  • AI-enabled content platforms reduce management overhead by automatically testing and reporting results to sales and marketing leadership, who can make better-informed decisions about the brand message based on more customer feedback than a CMS can collect.

Content marketing does an excellent job of delivering programmatic content, but it fails to understand the changing context of the selling relationship. As selling moves from retail to online, as well as into intimate contact with the customer in their home using mobile services, contextual changes in sales content will be the key to satisfying personalized experience.

Fixed versus Evolving Content

Now, let’s dig into the details of the different approaches to optimization of marketing and sales messaging made possible by AI. The advantage with AI is simply this: It can measure everything going on in the funnel rather than just those actions your team chooses to experiment with and track.

Traditional CMS systems have achieved high levels of personalization based on extensive scripting that uses conditions, such as the customer’s most recent action or demographic data, to direct them down a pre-fabricated sales path. The customer experience can often feel rigid since the workflow can be changed only by a content manager. Decisions to try a new word in a campaign or a novel order of message delivery, for example, are driven from the top down and involve A/B Testing and other methods of measuring changes in business outcomes.

Gig Economy Group’s AI-enabled content platform watches all the actions of all the sellers in the field. Our action-card interface suggests messaging text, allowing the seller to change the email text they use to, for example, share a media asset with a customer. Each of these changes is an experiment at the edge of the network based on the seller’s insight into customer responses to earlier steps in the funnel. They would be impossible in the fixed-content structure of scripted content workflows that don’t allow unanticipated deviation at any step in the customer engagement.

From the traditional CMS perspective, changes made in the field to selling materials and order of delivery are unexpected and consequently unmeasurable. A machine learning service may be able to assess responses from customers using natural language processing, however, the CMS will simply report the new condition to a human user, who must decide whether it is significant and worthy of an investment in testing changes to the content delivery scripts.

From Content Marketing to Contextual Selling

Machine learning, the form of AI used by Gig Economy Group, can ingest any changes and, by tracking changes in known conversion events in the sales process, determine whether a reps’ use of a new salutation in their email communications, such “Hey, Friend!” or “I’ve got a secret to share with you,” translated into improved conversion.

AI-enabled content listens and responds to the rep, acting like a coach to help them present the best story that sells possible. If a unique twist on the selling process is successful with one distributor over a dozen interactions, the AI will test the change in other distributors’ suggested messaging, literally inserting the new language or re-ordering the presentation of media to determine whether it will work generally. These small experiments quickly prove or disprove the value of many changes while constantly refining the brand sales experience.

Sales representatives should be able to adjust every element of their communication to address the person they know more intimately than the platform suggesting messages. This provides bottom-up and widely distributed experimentation that can surface not just better next steps, but also the potential for a new market segmentation strategy. For instance, if in selling a business opportunity a distributor finds that her business-interested contacts consistently want to try the product before enrolling, she can start a trial purchase workflow that the AI recognizes and tracks as a new path to a known conversion event. The result is many sales process improvements with less management overhead required.

With well-defined sales processes established during onboarding to an AI-enabled content platform, the tools will surface productive changes in individual representatives’ workflows, as well as signal to management when a rogue distributor is failing to generate sales because they’ve deviated too far from the brand message.

Are you learning everything your market is telling you? If your CMS is not able to understand new sales paths, you will be blind to the improvements that customers and representatives invent. And in a resource-constrained market, those lessons are the hardest to embrace if your content platform isn’t looking for unanticipated improvement.

If you’d like to learn more, sign up for a demo of the GEG platform now!