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.

Exporting a customer list

A Shopify customer profile

There are a few ways to approach getting a customer list. If you really want to do this at scale, you can export every last one of your customers. But consider a few targeted approaches:

• Customers who have spent over a certain threshold.

• Customers who are repeat purchasers.

• Customers who bought a specific product.

Targeting a specific segment reduces the risk of spam, and lowers costs (generating audio adds up over time). Identifying your highest-value customers is a great starting point.

Shopify makes it pretty easy to build specific customer/order segments. In this case, let's use an order export so we can personalize the message with a product name.

If you're not on Shopify, use your order/customer management tool of choice to export a CSV file.

Writing a custom thank you message

When in doubt, use ChatGPT:

ChatGPT writes a thank you note.

ChatGPT writes some decent thank-you notes, but let's make them a little bit more bespoke.

Record an audio voicemail thanking a customer for their recent purchase from my store. Use some variables like {Name} or {Product} to add more personalization.

This is a very basic template. Use something more custom for your brand!

ChatGPT is using a specific format here: [Your Store] (with square brackets) should be manually replaced, while {Name} (with curly brackets) should be automatically replaced.

So, if I edit the template, here's the output I want to use:

Hello {Name}, this is Charlie from Artificial Ignorance. I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your recent purchase of {Product} from our store. We truly appreciate your business and hope that you're enjoying your new {Product}. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thanks again for choosing Artificial Ignorance!

This is a good starting point, but it’s worth considering what makes the most sense for your business. Some things to consider:

• Including a discount code for a future order.

• Giving them access to a loyalty or VIP program.

• Mentioning their total spend or total number of orders.

There are a few ways of going about personalizing our template. One of my favorite tools is Zapier, which lets you string together multiple apps to build complex workflows. And Zapier could work well here, but the most straightforward option is to use a little bit of code.

Fortunately, we can ask ChatGPT for that, too:

This isn’t exactly right, but it’s straightforward to edit this to get what I want. Using ChatGPT's code, and the sample customer above, here's what the final message should look like:

Hello Charlie, this is Charlie from Artificial Ignorance. I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your recent purchase of Custom Item from our store. We truly appreciate your business and hope that you're enjoying your new Custom Item. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thanks again for choosing Artificial Ignorance!

Recording the message

If you've read my previous posts, you'll know I'm a fan of ElevenLabs for voice generation.

Using ElevenLabs, we can generate an audio recording of the thank you note:

I'm using one of their default voices here, but to really stand out you can clone your own voice instead.

The last piece is sending the messages out. The simplest way is via email, though SMS is also a very effective marketing channel. Every company uses different marketing tools, so I'm glossing over this a bit.

Takeaways

Working on this reinforced the idea that AI isn't (yet) a replacement for being thoughtful. Blindly using these tools at scale isn’t productivity, it’s just spam. But if you’ve taken the time to understand your business and understand your customers, it can create leverage. I’m excited for AI to extend the boundaries of “doing things that don’t scale.”

Of course, it’s easy to say this cheapens the customer’s experience. And when used robotically by faceless corporations, it probably does. But for an owner that wants to create a great customer experience, this is another tool in her toolkit. It’s not practical or possible for founders to leave a voicemail for every customer as their companies grow. With AI, a CEO can keep crafting unique experiences as the company scales. And a customer gets a custom token of gratitude that they wouldn't have otherwise.

Technically, each step was remarkably easy to put together. Overall though, the process seemed a bit clunky. It was a hassle copying and pasting each message into ElevenLabs to create a recording. So I built an app to do it in one step: https://vocalize.ignorance.ai/.

The app is free, but you’ll need your own ElevenLabs API key and customer CSV file to use it. Use it at your own risk!