Using AI at Every Step of the Customer Journey

In the same way that every company needed to become an “Internet company”, and then have a social media presence — now every company is going to need to become an “AI company”.

My first professional “AI win” was building a customer-support chatbot. But how about other stages of the customer journey?

This post is me “learning out loud”, to show y’all what I’ve been up to. I’m going to use the simple framework of Attract > Convert > Close > Delight.

Attract

AI can spell AI, that's a start.

  • Expertise in the market niche: “Meet Resina - Your Resin 3D Printing AI Agent” https://resin3d.ai/

Convert

  • For polySpectra’s engineering audience, AI answering questions about the documentation is arguably an important part of conversion, closing, and delighting customers. Here’s our support bot in action: https://docs.polyspectra.com/
  • Similarly, one of my goals with Resina is to freely educate people as much as possible about resin 3D printing. polySpectra was founded to solve the founding technical debt of stereolithography 3D printing (shitty materials) - so the faster people learn about the “gotchas” of resin printing, the faster they’ll realize that they need materials they can actually trust.

Close

  • This stage warrants extra precaution. Depending on the type of interaction that you are having, AI could be a surefire way to destroy any trust that you’ve built with the prospect. I’m not sure I have good advice for a true sales close, other than perhaps using AI to help word emails. I think the best approach is using AI to be so helpful and so informative (in the other stages) that the customer closes themselves.

Delight

  • Speed. I’m hooked on same-day shipping. I can’t wait 5 seconds for ChatGPT to respond, I need Claude-Instant instead. AI can help delight customers by accelerating customer engagement and customer support 100-1000x.
  • “Mass customization”. This is a term thrown around a lot in 3D printing. LLMs can be fine-tuned so quickly now (see How To Train ChatGPT On A Book In 5 Minutes) that you could imagine customizing the AI to be specific to an individual customer. I’m excited to explore this idea further.
  • Make it fun. As we start to build more and more AI tools at polySpectra, I’m trying to have fun with it. I’m also trying to build tools that I would legitimately want to use.