Introduction

Known for its meticulous Italian craftsmanship, imaginative design and attention to detail, Gucci is one of the most influential luxury brands in the world. Founded in 1921, it is currently redefining luxury for a new generation of customers, building experiences that extend from its retail outlets to its websites and apps and its global client service network, called Gucci 9-a reference to the historic Gucci headquarters campus in Florence.

One of Gucci's goals was to enable its 600 client advisors across seven global hubs to communicate in a clear brand voice, elevating the service experience beyond the realm of daily conversation.

It wasn't easy. Customers engage on multiple channels-inbound calls coming from the website and from stores, WhatsApp, live chat, etc.-and on a wide range of topics, from learning about upcoming collections to making reservations at a Michelin-star Gucci Osteria. To meet the challenge and maintain consistency, Gucci was able to use organized internal data about products as well as previous examples of Gucci communications in its authentic brand voice.

The latter was applied to AI models, which were trained to recommend replies provided to customer care reps. The magic of these AI-generated replies, grounded in product and brand data, was that they were in a "Guccified" tone of voice. The advisors could adapt them for the human touch, but they provided a conversation framework that amplified the interaction-elevating advisors above traditional templates and providing customers with an experience entirely consistent with what they'd expect from the brand.

Gucci is known for infusing beauty into everything it does, including its unique customer experiences. New technologies such as AI help the fashion house practice its mantra, "the human touch, powered by technology," by scaling the capabilities of its advisors with brand-ready messages. As we've said, all companies want to deliver superior experiences from end-to-end to their customers. We all want the Gucci 360, tailored to our own situation. We know as consumers that the brands we feel good about are more likely to get more of our business. It's simple logic.

In one comprehensive survey of 14,300 consumers around the globe, 80% of respondents said that the experience a company provides is as important as their products or services. Take a moment to think about that. Most companies might reasonably assume their customer satisfaction is tied to the quality and price (or the value) of the items and services they sell. But consumers themselves see things differently: they value their interactions with companies just as much.

Moreover, consumers increasingly expect a level of relevance or personalization from companies they trust with their data and consent. The same global survey revealed that 65% of consumers expect companies to adapt the experiences they provide to customers' changing needs. In other words, we expect companies to know when we're complaining or just want to get a price quote or the hours the store is open, or when we're in the market for a deal.

Yet the evidence shows most companies fall far short of the ideal. In fact, 61% of consumers said that they felt like the average company treated them "like a number." Forget Guccified or Customer 360, these consumers are saying, just treat me like I'm a human being.

Among business-to-business (B2B) buyers, the situation isn't any better. According to a recent study, 63% of B2B buyers said their customer experience was worse than it could be, and almost as many said that their sales reps didn't really try to understand their needs. These customers, often making big-ticket decisions that can have career-affecting consequences, too often feel like their reps treat them transactionally when what they want is an advisor they can trust.

And there's evidence that as consumer expectations continue to rise, we're getting more demanding-and that companies are falling even further behind. Every few years, dating back to the early 2000s, the W. P. Carey School of Business at the University of Arizona has collaborated on a survey of 1,000 Americans on the topic of customer service. It's a fascinating study that puts a dollar estimate on revenue at risk due to poor complaint handling, among other things.

The study paints an alarming picture of the state of consumer-company interactions. According to the researchers, nearly three-quarters of respondents reported a product or service problem in the past year-more than double the level in earlier years. More than half said the problem wasted their time and one-third said they suffered "emotional distress."1

And they weren't keeping it to themselves, either: one-third posted negative information about their problems on social media, more than double the rate in 2020. In the end, the researchers estimated that about $887 billion of future revenue was put at risk due to poor service, also almost double the amount estimated in 2020. Put simply: people are getting angrier, are sharing their feelings, and are taking revenge where it hurts the most, with their wallets.

Granted that service is just one part of the Customer 360, the study is directionally concerning: either service levels are going down, people are expecting more, or both. Either way, only one of those levers can be pulled by the companies themselves: they need to improve customer experience. Real revenue is at risk in disappointing the people who keep us in business.

"It's not what happens to you but how you react that matters."

-Epictetus

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So consumer attitudes and behaviors are changing, as they always have and will. (We'll cover more about consumer trends in Chapter 5.) But they're only one part of the story. There's also the incredibly important role of technology-how it's changing, transforming businesses and work, and upending our assumptions about what it takes to deliver a Customer 360.

"Customer 360": What is Customer 360? We'll be using this term often, and so we want to describe what it means. It's not a particular technology, vendor, or established term of art. Customer 360 describes a constellation of technologies, processes, and people that are all directed at building a coherent, end-to-end customer experience. It encompasses Data + AI + Trust. The purpose of Customer 360 is to serve the total customer journey from the customers' point of view, regardless of internal departments, siloes, structures, or habits. So building a Customer 360 just means building a customer experience that makes sense.

We are all adapting to a changing technosphere. Most obviously, the generative AI revolution took most of us by surprise in November 2022, when OpenAI's ChatGPT began to talk to us in ways that seemed quite human, and image-generation tools like MidJourney and DALL-E blew our collective visual synapses.

As we slowly emerged from the economic shock of the pandemic, among other challenges, we faced a technology environment of careful budgeting, some vendor consolidation, reprioritization, and the need to improve our skills. Meanwhile, the pace at which new technologies infiltrate our lives is breathtaking. (See Figure 0.1.)

Believe it or not, it took mobile technologies 16 years to reach 100 million users. (That may be why "The Year of Mobile" kept happening again and again.) It took social networks like Facebook and Instagram only 2.5 years to reach the same milestone, and TikTok just 9 months. Yet ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months, ushering in the era of widespread generative AI (GenAI).

The AI opportunity itself is clear, even if we're not always sure how to proceed. One survey showed that 84% of business leaders agreed that GenAI would improve customer service (good news for the researchers at Arizona State), and two-thirds are hiring people to work in this area. The consulting firm McKinsey is sanguine about AI, forecasting that it will free up 30% of employee time by 2030, generate $4.4 trillion in annual GDP impact, and that three-quarters of companies will be using GenAI in some form by 2027.

FIGURE 0.1 Time to 100 Million Users

FIGURE 0.2 The Three Layers of AI Experience

Most of the companies we talk to seem to believe that their businesses can grow by becoming more connected to customers through the medium of AI and GenAI. At the same time, they believe (hope?) they can use AI to reduce costs, increase employee and process productivity, improve efficiency, and exceed customer expectations. Suddenly, every business transformation is an AI transformation, and companies know they need an AI strategy to be competitive in the near future.

None of the fundamental trends treated by AI and GenAI is new. What the new generation of AI tools and techniques has done is accelerate all timelines, teleport all transformations. We've been on the productivity journey for some time, enabled by technology. Workflow automation has improved, and infrastructure like storage, compute, and bandwidth only gets better. AI now means we can make almost every function more productive, in ways we haven't seen before.

When employees are more productive, businesses can grow...