How do you show customers you love them this Valentine’s Day?
14 Feb 2025
6.5 min read
How do you show customers you love them this Valentine’s Day?
Roses are red, violets are blue,
My order is late, and I’m blaming you.
I clicked on the chat, but nobody’s there,
Just give me a bot – at least it would care.
Naturally, it’s always important to keep your customers satisfied with great customer service. But that becomes doubly important when they’re buying gifts for loved ones. After all it’s not just them you’re letting down, but the person they are giving the item to. On Valentine's Day the stakes could be even higher – this is someone’s love life we’re talking about!
So how do you ensure that you are doing everything possible to not only satisfy, but delight your customers? Here are 6 ways to use AI and automation to help show your customers you love them.
Provide product advice in the moment
It’s like a scene out of an old sitcom: the husband staring around the lingerie section of a department store wondering what on earth to get his wife. You can also picture the later scene of him presenting something wildly inappropriate at the big moment.
You can also imagine the reverse, where the wife is looking for the right gadget and getting bogged down in technical details that she doesn’t understand.
OK, it’s 2025, these caricatures are wildly dated, but how often have you been out of your depth trying to find the right thing for a loved one.
In a physical store, you hope that a helpful shopping assistant would pop up and offer to guide you to the right item. That role is now being filled in by AI-powered product recommendations.
For a brand, the process is relatively straightforward. Gather all the necessary product information, technical specifications, and any kind of training material that a shop assistant would have. Then feed that into a generative AI and now it can answer all the questions a customer might have!
Below is a real example from Honeylove, one of our customers.
Automatically amend orders
Hands up if you’ve ever ordered a gift to go straight to the person’s house but you accidentally put your own address in as the shipping address? I assume you probably have your hand up.
So you realise, and you fire off an email to the customer service team asking for the address to be changed. But… they don’t see your message for a couple of hours (or days in some cases), and by then the highly efficient warehouse has already packed and shipped the item. Are your Valentine’s Day plans ruined?
Fortunately, brands can prevent this problem with AI. If you use an AI Agent to automatically check each message and look for this request, then an AI Agent can update the order automatically in the OMS, or WMS, and any other system required.
Provided that the request comes in quickly enough, it means that many of these situations can be avoided. Take a look at our case study with Organic Basics to see it in a bit more detail.
Top tip: make sure you build a period of around an hour between receiving an order and processing it. Most of the time when people notice these things, it’s within the first hour, so you can catch most of the requests before it’s too late.
Provide empathetic responses
One of the advantages of generative AI over scripted chatbots is the ability to reflect the conversational context.
If a customer was complaining because a gift for their sweetheart was taking much longer to arrive, a human customer service agent would naturally be sympathetic to that customer. A traditional chatbot would be unlikely to understand the context, unless someone had trained it for every single possible situation.
Modern chatbots run on LLMs can instead invoke empathy and respond with something like “I am sorry to hear that the box of chocolates for your wife has been delayed, I understand how important it must be for you.”
It may be small, but it can have a cushioning effect. What’s even better is if you are able to follow up on those words with some actions…
Ship replacements, quickly
It’s inevitable that despite your best efforts, some packages will get stuck somewhere between your warehouse and the customer. So what do you do in this situation?
When you ask most automated customer service systems about a lost order, they might send you a tracking link, and then if you’re lucky bump you up to speak to a human, which if you’re lucky is a live chat, and if you’re unlikely is an email follow up in a few days.
But what if an AI Agent could check every step of the shipping journey, detect an anomaly – e.g. a package has not moved for 5 days – and take actions to resolve the situation.
That’s exactly what DigitalGenius’ AI Agents are built to do: follow the steps a customer service agent would take and apply the business’s rules to any situation. So if your agent would issue a replacement if an item had been stuck for 5 days, or if it was marked delivered, but had not arrived, then that’s what DigitalGenius can do.
So when your customer sees that the gift they’ve ordered is stuck, you can take action within minutes to help them avoid disappointment. This creates a better experience for the customer and means they’re more likely to shop with you again.
Be there for your customers, 24/7
If you want to show customers that you really care, then you need to be as available to them as possible. And nothing shows availability more than 24/7, round the clock, customer service.
Of course, this is expensive and unfeasible for most ecommerce brands. However, with AI agents, you can be available all the time. You can fully resolving customer queries when your customers need you to, but even if you are unable to fully resolve a query, you can still gather all the information that a human agent would need to resolve it quickly when they come online.
From your perspective, there are few things worse than customers contacting you repeatedly about the same issue. By answering them quickly, you can satisfy them that you are doing something about their issue, and stop them from starting another ticket and clogging up your helpdesk.
Be proactive
In the words of Massive Attack: “Love is a verb. Love is a doing word.” To put it another way, you have to take action in order to love.
The same is true with great customer service (bear with me!) – you can react to the questions customers throw at you, but to be truly great you have to anticipate questions you might receive.
AI can help you be proactive in your customer service by checking for any errors or anomalies before your customers even realise anything is wrong. Take a lost order: a daily check of your carriers’ delivery information would highlight any situations where the package has been stuck for too long.
Once those packages have been identified, you can then alert your customers to the situation, and tell them that their package has been delayed. If it has been delayed by too much, you can even offer a replacement or refund – all before they’ve realised anything is wrong.
Your customers will feel that extra degree of love. Just what you need to show them on Valentine's Day.
To find out how you can use AI to show your customers love, take a look at our customer stories, and book some time with our team today.
