Generative AI’s Role in Transforming Customer Experience

Published 19/11/24 under:

AI is changing the way businesses connect with customers, making experiences faster and more personalised. With tools like chatbots, personalised recommendations, and predictive analytics, companies can better understand and anticipate what customers want, often before they ask. This not only helps resolve issues quickly but also creates smoother, more enjoyable interactions that build loyalty and keep customers coming back.

So let’s explore the transformative impact of generative AI on customer service, drawing insights from Rufus Grig, CTO of Kerv, Sean Lindsay, Principal Solution Architect at Kerv’s CX Practice, and Paul Cox, Principal CX Consultant at Kerv’s CX Practice, who sat down to discuss gen AI in CX on our new podcast, Learning Kerv!

Key AI Capabilities in Customer Service

Generative AI leverages advanced language models to understand and generate human-like text. This capability is pivotal in customer service, where understanding and responding to customer queries accurately and efficiently is crucial. The technology excels in several key areas:

• Language Understanding and Generation: Generative AI can comprehend customer inquiries and generate appropriate responses. This includes translating languages, understanding intent, and creating personalised replies, making interactions more natural and effective.
• Speech-to-Text Analytics: By analysing historical conversations, AI can identify common topics and phrases, helping businesses automate responses and improve efficiency.
• Summarisation: AI can condense lengthy customer interactions into concise summaries, helping agents to quickly grasp the context of previous conversations and provide the correct response and service.

So, how has Generative AI transformed CX? Let’s go through the different customer touchpoints.

Pre-Interaction with Customers using AI

One of the primary goals of AI led customer service is to resolve issues before they escalate to human agents. Generative AI plays a crucial role in this pre-interaction phase:

• Triage and Intent Recognition: AI can accurately identify the nature of a customer’s problem and provide relevant solutions, reducing the need for human intervention. This improves self-service capabilities and decreases the volume of incoming queries.
• Personalised Responses: By analysing multiple knowledge base articles, AI can generate tailored responses that address specific customer issues, enhancing the effectiveness of self-service platforms. Paul adds, “Generative AI can read those articles and then generate a new response that’s personalised just for them to answer that question.”

As Paul Cox explains,

“The first thing that generative AI can really help us with is understanding what it is that went wrong.”

Live Interaction with Customers using AI

Even when customers do need to interact with human agents, generative AI continues to provide valuable support:

• Predictive Routing: AI can analyse the reason for contact and route the customer to the most suitable agent, ensuring that queries are handled by the right person with the right skills. Sean Lindsay comments, “The system will analyse that conversation, leverage AI, and distribute that interaction to the right team with the right skills.”
• Real-Time Assistance: During live interactions, AI can surface relevant knowledge articles and information to agents in real-time, reducing the time spent searching for answers and improving response accuracy. Sean highlights, “Generative AI plays a huge role in assisting the agent either on a digital channel or a voice channel with the articles, so the knowledge-based articles that are present within the system.”
• Language Translation: AI’s translation capabilities enable seamless communication between agents and customers who speak different languages, broadening the reach of customer service teams. Sean explains, “We can leverage a text-based translation, meaning customer will type a message. It’ll automatically translate to the agent’s native language.”

Post-Interaction with Customers using AI

After a customer interaction concludes, generative AI continues to add value:

• Automated Summarisation: AI can generate concise summaries of interactions, which are then stored in CRM systems. This reduces the time agents spend on wrap-up tasks and ensures that future interactions are informed by accurate summaries.
• Outcome Coding: AI can also automatically categorise interactions based on their content, providing more detailed and accurate data for analysis and reporting. Paul states, “With AI, the AI can look at that transcription, understand the key topics from the interaction, and then automatically code what that interaction was about.”

Paul also highlights this, commenting,

“Summarisation allows us to condense that transcription into a short passage that’s easy for the next agent to understand.”

Compliance and Regulations

Generative AI also plays a vital role in maintaining quality and compliance in customer service:

• Automated Quality Assessment: AI can evaluate interactions based on predefined criteria, scoring them for quality and compliance. This reduces the workload on supervisors and ensures consistent evaluation standards. Sean explains, “We can now look at automating that quality assessment scorecard.”
• Fraud Detection: By analysing conversation patterns, AI can identify potentially fraudulent activities, enhancing the security and integrity of customer interactions. Sean adds, “Based on the phrasing used during a conversation, we can flag up key elements.”

Generative AI is not just a futuristic concept; it is a practical tool that is already transforming customer service. By enhancing pre-interaction capabilities, supporting live interactions, and providing post-interaction benefits, gen AI is helping businesses deliver more efficient, personalised, and high-quality customer service without spending more on agents. As this technology continues to evolve, its role in customer service will only become more integral, driving innovation and improving customer experiences across the board.

Interested in learning more about how generative AI is revolutionising customer service? Listen to Episode 3 of The Learning Kerv podcast for an in-depth discussion with our resident CX experts. Don’t miss out on valuable insights and practical applications of AI in customer experience!

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