AI, Personalized Pricing, Dark Patterns, and the Case for Business Fluency in CX
Knowing your customer is Business 101. But what happens when companies use what they learn about customers to manipulate rather than legitimately persuade customers to buy?
Dark patterns are a manifestation of that: tactics, designs, and practices companies use to steer customers toward choices that benefit the business, sometimes without customers fully realizing it, and sometimes with monetary, time, stress, or cognitive exhaustion costs to the customer.
Dark Patterns Are Not New
But what should matter, especially to customer experience enthusiasts right now, is that, with all the good AI can do, it can also be used to make dark patterns more targeted, more hidden and more manipulative toward customers.
AI Changes the Game, and Maybe Not the Way You’d Like
That’s because AI can learn, based on a customer’s location, demographics, browsing behavior, keystrokes, mouse movements, and shopping history the price customers may be likely to pay and then algorithmically adjust prices in real time.
Enter Personalized Pricing
Some call this personalized pricing. You’ll also hear it called dynamic pricing, algorithmic pricing, surveillance pricing, and predatory pricing.
It’s been described as misleading, unfair, deceptive, and potentially harmful to customers.
How the Rules Are Changing
In the U.S., court complaints, new laws, and proposed enforcement mechanisms are saying “no deal” to any type of customer deception, including personalized pricing, at least not without letting customers know their data is being used to set a price, anyway.
For example, Maryland's new Protection From Predatory Pricing Act went into effect yesterday.
But industry groups and individual businesses are pushing back in court and through public comment, citing First Amendment protections.
Capturing Business Fluency
So now, customer experience enthusiasts have new issues to think about. What happens when knowing your customer stops being good business and starts becoming a way to manipulate what they see, pay, or choose?
If practitioners want to have influence inside the business, they have to understand the landscape their businesses are operating in.
That means looking beyond familiar CX technical competences, mission statements, and surveys to fully understand contemporary customer experience beyond AI marketing hype. Otherwise, CX risks becoming the function that may know the customer best but has too little influence over the experience customers are being led to.
