Using AI to create gratitude at scale
Scaling personalized customer interactions for growing businesses
Once upon a time, I wrote a book about startup founders “doing things that don’t scale.” A big lesson was to obsess over your first customers, because their feedback is critical. Founders would send custom thank you notes, or show up in person to ask questions to their users.
But as these companies scaled, they often lost the ability to obsess over each customer. The manual work involved was too difficult. Recently, I wondered whether that still holds true with AI. Could I create gratitude at scale?
The plan
A great way to build customer loyalty is to individually thank customers. But instead of an email, what if we could record personalized voicemails? Previously, that meant buying equipment, writing scripts, and spending hundreds of hours recording and editing.
But with AI, we can automate a lot of that process. Here's how it works at a high level:
Export a list of orders or customers. I'm very familiar with Shopify, so that's the example format I'll be using.
Write a thank you message. For bonus points, let's personalize it for each customer.
Generate the custom thank you messages.
Send them! This is left as an exercise for the reader.