Empowering Customer Experiences: Unleashing Generative AI for Personalized Engagement and Empathy

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aditya Garg, Head of Solutions Consulting, Genesys India

1. As the prominence of ChatGPT rises, what are the major benefits of investing in Generative AI for customer experience?

Generative AI is enabling organizations to unlock rich conversational language capabilities and the capacity to create and modify text, images, and more. When employees and generative AI work together, businesses can tap into superhuman performance resulting in more personalised, responsive customer interactions, higher productivity, and improved engagement.

Beyond basic customer support, Generative AI can transform both the customer and employee experience:

• It can provide relevant information for the search query in the users’ language of choice and minimise the effort for translation services.
• Agent-assist capabilities can auto-summarise customer conversations across voice and digital channels. Summaries are easy to refer to and use in their conversations to provide products, services, or recommendations.
• Generative AI can carry out the regular mundane duties required to collect the data required to improve the feedback loop inside a call centre.
• Generative AI considers a customer’s past interactions with the business, across platforms and support services, to give them more personalised information.
• It can create meaningful and intelligent responses to customer and agent queries, based on a large set of knowledge base articles, FAQ pages, and other large datasets.

2. Will generative AI replace contact centre agents in future? How will AI tools such as ChatGPT show value for agents?

The short answer is ‘no’. Automation and AI have crossed paths within the contact centre in the form of chatbots, interactive voice response, and other services. Businesses are already using generative AI:

• To support employees and enhance bots boosting their ability to orchestrate stronger customer experiences.
• To easily extract insights for more seamless self or assisted service experiences due to generative AI’s advanced natural language processing capabilities
• To quickly sort and prioritise knowledge content, enabling bots or agents to surface the most relevant responses for customer inquiries.

Generative AI holds the power to reinvent an agent’s role as we see it today. There is potential to improve customer service, even while it is evident that automation will never totally replace human touch and emotional intelligence (EQ).

• For onboarding and training new agents, Generative AI-based tools can assist and create content much more quickly. Additionally, content can be tailored for the agent and presented in a way that fits their preferred learning style. As a result, there is a huge opportunity for contact centres to use Generative AI-based tools to accelerate the development of content while maintaining its relevance, quality, and dynamic nature.
• To continually improve customer interactions, it can also make use of coaching interactions and consumer sentiment. Improved service experiences, history tracking, operational efficiency, and compliance adherence will result from more consistent and contextual conversation reporting.
• It would allow the agents to concentrate on the quality of empathetic conversations with customers, rather than concentrating on locating the correct response from a large dataset. This would be a huge transformation for a customer’s experience.

There is a massive opportunity for agents to use Generative AI-based tools to speed up the development of content while maintaining its relevance, freshness, and dynamic nature.

3. What are some of the biggest challenges enterprises must be aware of built into Gen AI solutions?

The explosive growth of generative AI has the potential to transform the way we work — provided we take the necessary steps to ensure a customer’s security and safety. While companies are jumping on the generative AI trend, business leaders are grappling with the challenge of implementing a strong AI strategy. It is crucial to remember that the data used to train conversational or generative AI technology determines any output they produce. When leaders adopt generative AI, they need to put proper safeguards in place to account for its limits while ensuring the content generated with LLMs is accurate, relevant, and suitable.

One of the risks brands should be cognizant of when considering an AI strategy is that models can be volatile/variable and biased. AI models should be trained to incorporate unbiased data and privacy design principles in the development process. Businesses should create clear ethical guidelines for their use of AI and ensure that their practices are in line with these guidelines.

4. How can we enable empathy at scale in Generative AI?

Proceeding with empathy is one of the core capabilities enterprises must develop to communicate and engage with their customers in an intelligent manner. This is an untapped opportunity for generative AI. With an essential human element of empathy, companies can define a truly engaging experience. To achieve this, companies need to train LLMs to incorporate customer context, e.g., sentiment, behaviour signals, and intent.

The current Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of any customer interactions has been around First Call Resolution, average handle time, talk time, etc, with a focus on quick closure of the call and increased productivity of the agent. In such a time-constrained scenario, the opportunity to exercise empathy becomes difficult. However, Generative AI allows us to empower agents with right information at the right time with tools such as agent assist, sentiment and behaviour analytics. This reduces the efforts of the agents and allows for the time to exercise empathy without impacting their productivity.

At Genesys, we continue to take a thoughtful approach — aiming to strike a balance between innovation and safety — as we explore more ways to enable you to deliver incredible experiences powered by transformative AI technologies. Businesses can utilise capabilities like Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify sentiment, intent, empathy, and effort across all interactions owing to the Genesys AI platform for customer and employee experience.

4. How will AI affect the life of users in the coming years?

As we look into the future, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on our lives is set to be transformative. AI, with its ability to offload tasks that do not require complex human intelligence, can unlock new dimensions of human potential. Furthermore, its capacity to handle and digest massive volumes of data dwarfs the capabilities of the human mind, ushering in an era of unparalleled data-driven insights and understanding.

The imminent influence of AI extends beyond personal capacity enhancement. It’s anticipated that organisations will harness AI to proactively anticipate and empathetically respond to the needs of their customers. This shift is poised to yield significant improvements in user experiences, offering services that cater to needs before they even become apparent. The ultimate goal is to seamlessly provide solutions, often before users themselves recognise the requirement.

In essence, the integration of AI into our daily lives stands to revolutionise how we operate. It allows us to channel our energies towards tasks that necessitate human creativity and cognition, while also offering a gateway to a data-rich future. Moreover, the symbiotic relationship between AI and human interaction will give rise to an environment where our needs are not only met but anticipated, fostering a realm of enhanced services and satisfaction.