Generative AI essentials for CX leaders

Generative AI and CX: Companies Can Implement Generative AI to Address Evolving Customer Expectations and Become More Efficient

The advanced ability of gen AI chatbots to converse with humans in an easy, natural way means that using this technology in a customer-facing setting is a no-brainer. From enhancing the conversational experience to assisting agents with suggested replies, there are plenty of ways that generative AI and LLMs can help your brand to deliver faster, better support. With minimal human intervention, generative AI helps create personalized content across various categories, including text, images, and videos.

Whether responding to a message on social media, chatting on the website or answering questions through the company’s email ID, generative AI can help ensure correct grammar and on-brand messaging are used in every response. The current customer service environment is rigid and analogous to a scripted choose-your-own-adventure game. Traditional AI-powered chatbots don’t create new answers when engaging with a customer.

The world’s fascination with ChatGPT proves generative AI will continue to dominate CX strategy, but leaders must understand every AI tool requires a deep level of know-how and commitment to transformation for a meaningful impact. Improve technician productivity and optimize self-scheduling by surfacing AI-generated work activity recommendations to mobile workers. Accelerate and optimize marketing campaign asset creation with the help of generative AI to save time, increase engagement, and drive conversions. See how generative AI and conversation design can work together to make bot building more efficient.

Basically, every business wants to provide the correct answer fast for a better, cost-effective CX. But certain challenges can create slower processes, which often relate to technology, access to the correct answer, training and updating agents on the latest promotions and break-fix remedies. Enter generative AI to quickly understand a customer’s issue and help serve them at light speed. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. LLMs have the incredible power to elevate conversational experiences and boost productivity. Because of this, pretty much as soon as ChatGPT launched support leaders and automation providers started thinking about how this technology could be used in a customer service setting.

As 90% of customers say instant responses are important to them, in a support setting an immediate reply can make or break the customer experience. Today, I’m speaking with Amit Sood, chief technology officer at Simplr, a provider of AI-powered solutions for enterprise CX. Generative AI drives personalized experiences across every touchpoint, from dynamic website content and targeted marketing campaigns to proactive customer service and immersive product simulations.

Business leaders are taking stock and looking for opportunities to harness this groundbreaking tech, and that’s why we here at Ultimate are building generative AI technology into our product. In today’s competitive landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences (CX) is no longer optional, it’s expected. Businesses strive to build meaningful connections, anticipate needs, and personalize every interaction. However, traditional methods often fall short, struggling to meet the rising demand for dynamic, individual-centric experiences.

Without proper data integration, quality, and privacy checks, generative AI might misinterpret customer queries, produce inaccurate responses, and lead to data breaches and unauthorized access. Here, the role of customer data platforms such as Oracle (Unity), Adobe (Real-Time CDP), and Twilio (Segment) becomes crucial to collect real-time data across channels, third-party sources, and CRM systems to create a unified customer profile. These platforms also help secure customer data through enhanced authentication and encryption, such as TLS 1.2 and Advanced Encryption Standard, and compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act. Over the years AI tools have sharpened, and we see more sophisticated voice agents with better linguistic processing that can fully comprehend the customers’ common day-to-day requests.

Both those trends will catch the eye of the CEO and CFO at large companies, and it will result in renewed interest from the top down in the power of great customer service, to attract and retain customers. In turn, business leaders will allocate much larger investments in CX as a whole, opening up opportunities for customer service leaders to experiment and drive further innovation. Generative AI’s ability to unlock the customer’s voice isn’t solely about capturing data; it’s about understanding intent, emotions, and the deeper narratives behind customer behavior. This deeper understanding, gleaned from vast data sources, empowers CX leaders to make informed decisions, personalize experiences, and build lasting customer relationships. While it is great to hear how shiny, new AI-powered cloud solutions offer CX agents support, CX leaders must pay close attention to the onboarding process.

But when this happens you can use your LLM as a tool to aid creativity and ease writer’s block by crafting sample replies for your conversation designers. They can either copy and paste these verbatim, or use them as inspiration to brainstorm dialogue flows. Global marketing leader at HGS, CX professional, product promoter, outsourcing innovation fan – with a focus on what’s next. Quickly identify which leads and contacts are most engaged with your business and tailor your next communication or engagement based on their status. Give sales reps at-a-glance insight into their best leads and opportunities with predictive scoring and win probabilities. Achieve optimal open rates for a given email campaign by suggesting the most relevant subject lines and send times specific to each contact.

Being a part of this space, it will be incredibly exciting and fun to witness it unfold over the next few years. Aid sellers in future deals by automatically creating sales opportunity win stories that provide concrete evidence of the value, reliability, and effectiveness of product offerings. LLMs start making up facts when the data they’re trained on doesn’t contain information about the specific question asked, or when the dataset holds conflicting or irrelevant information. Which makes the solution to this challenge pretty simple — you need to create a system to constrain the AI model.

Explore AI capabilities for Customer Experience

Generative AI has emerged as a disruptive force in transforming customer-facing functions, including marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service, accelerating the shift toward personalized and intelligent customer experience (CX). This research byte covers how generative AI can transform CX by enhancing personalization, the potential of generative AI across the CX landscape, and the need to break down data silos to unlock the full potential of the technology. Research reveals that 80% of customers consider their experience with an organization as important as its products or services – specifically, consumers value a business’s ability to provide personalized interactions. By pairing generative AI with a communication automation platform, companies can gather insights into customer preferences, opinions and purchase behaviors, enhancing CX through better recommendations and tailored experiences. Not only do customers value personalization, but they also want interactions to be fast and convenient. To that end, generative AI can extract insights from big data much faster than a human agent, allowing it to deliver unique marketing promotions and relevant suggestions in real-time.

Chatbots also have the bad habit of wandering off-topic or coming to a “dead end,” ruining CX. By adding an LLM layer to automated chat conversations, your support bot will be able to greet customers in a friendly way, send natural-sounding replies, and engage in the most human-like small talk that you can imagine. This means that instead of building out dialogue flows for greetings, goodbyes, and any other chit-chat, the LLM layer will take care of this. In the age of the empowered customer, exceptional CX is a critical business imperative.

For this, a timeframe for experimentation must be defined, along with clear goals and metrics to measure the success of pilot projects. The goals could be to improve the conversion ratio, repurchase rate, mean time to resolution, or Chat PG customer churn rate. This can be extended to measure the impact on key customer service metrics such as net promoter score, customer effort score, and customer satisfaction score through customer feedback measurement and analysis.

To overcome these challenges, companies need to break down data silos, navigate complex vendor ecosystems, and develop a solid business case that focuses on desired outcomes. Collaborating with a strategic partner who can control costs, accelerate time to market, and bring in the right talent can help businesses adopt generative AI in CX more efficiently and reap the maximum benefits. Predictive analytics anticipate customer needs and address potential issues before they arise, optimizing resource allocation and preventing churn. Real-time feedback analysis fuels continuous improvement, ensuring strategies and experiences evolve alongside changing customer expectations.

The challenges around leveraging generative AI for customer support

A great example is chatbots, which are a true advantage for contact centers that face staff shortages. Chatbots can comprehend common customer requests and direct them to a webpage that addresses their concerns. Agents consistently act as the first line of strategy that decides the fate of customer-brand relationships. It is critical for each response to show comprehension abilities related to grammar and the topic at hand. Generative AI displays smart responses from a knowledge base that strengthens agents’ grammar and interpretation skills.

Ultimately, AI will make the analysis of customer service data near instantaneous, allowing companies to make changes to their strategy in a much more nimble and agile fashion than ever before. One example I am particularly excited about is the concept of proactive customer communications. Companies can use incoming customer service data to identify problems more quickly like product outages or downtime, and then immediately get messages out to their larger customer base…before most of them even knew there was an issue. As tools continue to rise in popularity, the capabilities of AI seem limitless—especially in the CX industry.

And CX leaders will continue to use AI to function more intelligently and lean into automation’s ability to augment human-based processes—not only saving cost and supporting excellent CX but also a remarkable brand reputation. Generative AI can be used as a knowledge repository and allow agents to turn to their “ChatGPT personal trainer” for answers to a range of scenarios. If an agent is consistently struggling to meet CX expectations, an analytic engine can help catch the issue and prompt the agent to leverage generative AI tools for more consistent outcomes. AI tools enable contact center agents to collect information faster and more intelligently, which decreases agents’ stress and customers’ hold times—offering a win-win situation for all parties involved. Generative AI creates concise, accurate summaries of service request details help service agents quickly come up to speed on customer issues—especially valuable in complex or long running service engagements. When combined with an authoritative source for accuracy, generative AI provides the correct tone, style and brevity that aligns with industry-specific CX principles.

Avoid customer disengagement with insights into the health of your contact database that help you adjust send frequency, messaging, or segmentation strategy. Dialogflow now provides a set of generative conversational features

built on Dialogflow and

Vertex AI. Putting these guardrails in place will help prevent the bot from sending out rogue answers or going off on a tangent about a completely unrelated topic. It’s time to embrace the generative AI imperative and embark on a journey of CX innovation, leaving behind the limitations of the past and crafting a future where customers truly feel understood, valued, and connected. Although onboarding generative AI tools can be a long process, leaders who follow these considerations alongside a strong CX partner can achieve superior results.

But using such a broad and unconstrained dataset to learn from can lead to accuracy issues with the responses LLMs generate. Depending on the prompt you provide, generative AI models will draw on the entirety of their training data to offer their best estimate of what you want to hear. Generative AI technology is very new (ChatGPT is currently free to use because it’s still in its research phase). Having said that, it is possible to unite the natural, conversational experience of gen AI bots like ChatGPT with the https://chat.openai.com/ control and efficiency needed in customer support AI automation. Oracle AI for CX is a collection of traditional and generative AI capabilities that help marketing, sales, and service teams enhance operational efficiency and revolutionize how they connect with their customers. Optimize your engagement strategies, anticipate customer needs, and deliver personalized support while allowing technology to perform low-value tasks—freeing your teams to focus on growing your business and delighting your customers.

Additionally, generative AI has the unique ability to “learn” as it gets exposed to new information. While its first few responses might be broad or slightly off-topic, it will eventually be more familiar with the individual customer and be able to right-size answers, increasing completion and conversation rates. Alternatively, businesses could infuse their customer service environment with generative AI. This technology, when augmented with an authoritative source, synthesizes data to create a curated response, and, in the case of a customer service interaction, it would provide a trustworthy answer to the person’s inquiry based on available information. Essentially, Generative AI enables customer service departments to interface with their customers in more life-like, dynamic and meaningful ways, massively expanding what customers can ask and expect to get in return, significantly improving CX.

The tool then saves the response based on successful resolution capability, making the AHT even faster. Deflect common customer inquiries by letting AI-powered conversational bots help provide support, answer questions, capture details, and resolve issues without human interaction. Support agents can prompt an LLM to transform factual replies to customer requests into a specific tone of voice. And another impressive power of LLMs is that these models can remember context from previous messages and regenerate responses based on new input. A rapid increase in customer interactions across multiple channels and touchpoints is leading to the creation of enormous amounts of customer data for enterprises.

Moreover, properly implementing generative AI into the customer service environment allows companies to boost agent productivity. This technology can better automate the repetitive customer requests that enter a call center, allowing human agents to focus on the more complex customer issues, value-added tasks and revenue-generating opportunities. And, since automation is at the core of AI-powered services, businesses can increase productivity with even lower staffing requirements. Generative AI increases the ability for customers to engage with various channels regardless of the time or day of the week. To support enterprise needs, the ecosystem is maturing fast, with large to small platform companies racing to offer generative AI-based tools and integrate the technology into their existing products.

By delving into the depths of customer data, analyzing nuances of language and behavior, and generating actionable insights, it empowers businesses to know their audience on a granular level. This deeper understanding transcends demographics and purchase history, revealing emotional drivers, hidden needs, and evolving preferences. Enter generative AI, a transformative technology poised to redefine the essence of customer experience. No longer relegated to simple automation, generative AI is rapidly maturing, offering CX leaders a treasure trove of possibilities, from unlocking the power of your customer’s voice to crafting personalized and immersive experiences.

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This means the upkeep of a generative AI solution is resource intensive and poses engineering challenges. Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that is able to process huge amounts of data to create entirely new output. Depending on the training data you use (and what you want the AI model to be able to do) this output might be text, images, videos, and even audio content. Thanks to accelerating interest and investment in gen AI companies, the market valuation for this sector is expected to reach $42.6 billion globally this year. Generative AI has the potential to create a high impact across key customer-facing functions, including marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service.

Improve sales and marketing alignment by using machine learning to predict which leads and accounts are most likely to engage and convert.

Instead, it searches for the best possible choice out of various ranked options and presents it to the caller. However, these answers don’t leave room for change, causing the customer journey to be nothing more than multiple static, inflexible decision trees. Anyone who has played around with ChatGPT will be aware of its ability to sell fabrications as fact — like the time it guaranteed one user that the world’s fastest marine mammal is a peregrine falcon. And while AI hallucinations are entertaining for recreational users, fibbing won’t fly in a customer service setting.

As such, brands need to put the proper guardrails, guidelines and authoritative data sources in place to ensure that generative AI, like any technology, enhances CX rather than degrades it. Don’t have the time to work out every single way a customer might ask about a return? No problem — instead of manually creating this training data for intent-based models, you can ask your LLM to generate this instead.

For instance, Adobe Firefly uses natural language processing for image generation and video editing. Through generative AI, Salesforce Einstein GPT enables the creation of personalized content across Salesforce cloud platforms, including Sales and Marketing. Enterprises must ensure that generative AI is well integrated into their existing CX and CRM systems to create real-time personalized experiences. With their diverse ecosystem partnerships in CX, service providers can support enterprises in identifying the right platforms and use cases and defining the implementation road map. They can accelerate adoption by leveraging prebuilt assets and workflows and selecting the right foundation models.

On top of this, while choosing an open-source LLM might seem like the most cost-effective option, the cost of single API requests can quickly add up. Previously, one of the most common reasons business leaders were resistant to implementing an automation solution was the worry that customers would find bot-to-human interactions frustrating. Generative AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics, and customer data, leading to the creation of dynamic customer segments that get updated in real time. This can be used to develop better predictive models for predicting customer churn and forecasting demand. For instance, predicting the next customer order and generating a personalized marketing email. There are industry and demographic considerations when it comes to achieving balance.

AI-generated email responses to service inquiries help improve service agent productivity and consistency while accelerating response times and time to resolution. But when it comes to support, the full power of LLMs aren’t really needed to see the benefits of generative AI. While the name isn’t quite as catchy, you’ll still be able to see impressive results with smaller, more reasonably sized language models — as long as you’ve got the right training data. The reason LLM-powered bots are so impressively human-like is because the datasets that feed large language models are (as the name suggests) pretty massive.

Customer Stories

For example, according to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, nearly 35% of Gen-Z consumers prefer to interact with AI-powered chatbots in ecommerce situations, compared to just 14% of Boomers. Similarly, consumers are more than twice as likely to be comfortable using an AI chat program in retail and shopping interactions as opposed to banking and financial services interactions. Therefore, customer service leaders need to have a keen understanding of their verticals and their specific customer base. NLP and 100% transcription of voice-to-text can allow contact centers to handle and auto-answer general complaints from various customers without the need for human intervention in some cases. Advanced AI tools will understand the request to answer it directly or help agents with a quick preview of the issue and response recommendation.

As data becomes the lifeblood of modern commerce, unlocking its insights and translating them into tangible value becomes paramount. Here’s where generative AI emerges as a powerful catalyst, fundamentally reshaping the customer experience landscape. Gone are the days when agents run around an office to find a manager with the expertise to handle an escalated call.

• But when this happens you can use your LLM as a tool to aid creativity and ease writer’s block by crafting sample replies for your conversation designers.
• AI-generated email responses to service inquiries help improve service agent productivity and consistency while accelerating response times and time to resolution.
• Over the years AI tools have sharpened, and we see more sophisticated voice agents with better linguistic processing that can fully comprehend the customers’ common day-to-day requests.
• This can be used to develop better predictive models for predicting customer churn and forecasting demand.

For example, generative AI can sometimes create a response to customer questions that might sound correct but are actually incorrect. Another bad habit companies must avoid is the desire to trick customers into thinking they are interfacing with a human when, in actuality, they are speaking with a machine. With these features,

you can now use large language models (LLMs) to parse and comprehend content,

generate agent responses, and control conversation flow. Generative AI is a powerful tool that has the capacity to revolutionize customer experience and the work carried out by support teams in a multitude of ways. But because this tech is still so new, and challenges around its implementation are very real, it’s important to be careful about using it in customer-facing tools. Rather than manually updating conversation flows or double-checking details in your knowledge base, you can let your generative AI bot instantly serve customers this information.

AI tools, along with NLP, can reduce customer wait times by analyzing the query and routing the case to the right agent at the outset. The tool can factor in internal success drivers, such as the agent’s performance, as well as intrinsic factors, such as customer demographics and historical customer satisfaction scores with similar profiles, to personalize matches. Automatically classify inbound service requests generative ai for cx by product, severity, or any criteria and route to the service agent best equipped to resolve the issue. Surface and link similar service requests to help agents quickly diagnose and troubleshoot customer problems. Improve sales productivity and meet revenue targets with AI-generated recommendations including contacts to add to an opportunity, additional products to sell, and look-a-like accounts to target.

Nevertheless, there are some pitfalls businesses need to avoid when implementing generative AI into their contact centers. People expect 24/7 availability, self-service options and seller-free experiences, not to mention personalization, convenience and speed. And although chatbots have gotten significantly better over the past several years, customers will still scream, “Speak with an agent! To avoid these issues, companies might choose to rely on an open-source model, like OpenAI’s GPT-4. This option might seem like the easiest solution, but it comes with its own challenges. So using an open-source third-party API is a risky move in customer service, where reliability is key.