How is Generative AI Shaping the New Customer Experience?

Today, Generative AI is at the forefront of revolutionizing the customer experience landscape, prompting forward-thinking leaders to harness its potential to drive business value. Numbers agree as well. According to a recent report by Bloomberg Intelligence, the GenAI market is projected to reach a staggering $1.3 trillion by 2032, up from a modest $40 billion in 2021 . This growth could occur at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 42 percent.

However, its successful adoption requires a strategic approach, avoiding the shiny-object syndrome and overextension. While many executives/CTOs/CXOs are under pressure to be at the forefront of its adoption, the reality is that the technology is still in its infancy. The challenge lies in determining and implementing the most valuable applications with a competitive edge.

Leaders face a myriad of questions. How can GenAI transform customer experiences without losing the human touch? What strategies can effectively bridge automation and genuine human interaction? These pivotal queries underscore the need for a thoughtful and strategic approach as we embark on this transformative journey.

Empowering Marketers, Elating Customers

GenAI technology is already reshaping customer experiences by empowering businesses to automate routine tasks, deliver personalized recommendations, and provide round the clock support. However, the challenge is balancing automation with human interaction. How can leaders ensure that GenAI enhances, rather than lessens, the personal touch in customer engagement?

Leaders have the power to embrace strategic imperatives here. By fostering a hybrid model that seamlessly integrates GenAI with human touchpoints, organizations can ensure hyper-personalized and empathetic customer interactions. This approach lets the AI take care of routine inquiries while human agents address complex queries, assuring efficiency and personalized service.

Tech Mahindra has built assets leveraging Microsoft Open AI to enable GenAI-powered solutions and offerings. The new, GenAI Powered Enterprise Knowledge Search under Tech Mahindra’s TechM amplifAI0->∞ suite of AI offerings and solutions, helps enterprises increase effectiveness and personalization by using GenAI to unlock the full potential of enterprise data and present a multi-modal, multi-channel search experience.

Our GenAI powered Enterprise Knowledge Search integrates Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure Language Understanding to help enterprises unleash knowledge accessibility to improve the knowledge quotient within organizations. This brings multiple AI-led capabilities, like content summarization, knowledge graph-based structuring, and an innovative query interface.

It helps enterprises unleash new levels of productivity by optimizing business processes, empowering people, and creating high-quality customer and employee experiences. By facilitating faster information access and discovery, the solution leads to increased employee productivity and satisfaction. Users can also search for information from documents, images, audio, videos, and other types of content. Additionally, it offers an omnichannel experience by enabling searches across channels like voice assistants or conversational AI platforms.

Enhancing Personalization and Engagement

It becomes more critical for big organizations with a vast customer base, making one-on-one marketing costly. For instance, a beauty brand would need to handle extensive data to launch a hyper-personalized marketing campaign. Product recommendations are tailored to the customer's skin type and preferences, further refined by demographics such as age, lifestyle, and location. As a result, one-to-one personalization was challenging until now. GenAI makes personalizing messages faster and less complex. It pulls data from various sources to define personas, tags content to pair relevant images and text, builds pages, and uses A/B testing to enhance performance, thereby strengthening customer engagement and loyalty.

Today, most brands use chat tools to handle support and direct customers to the following actions. However, they can drive higher customer lifetime values. But how can organizations achieve this? Through deep data integration and real-time feedback, GenAI can help accomplish both. Unlike traditional chat with static scripts, GenAI-enabled chat interfaces pull real-time data from customer interactions and learn from past experiences, offering deeply contextual interaction. To achieve this, marketers must train the interface to serve as a concierge. Further, the data gained from these interactions becomes the fodder for further value addition and service personalization. On the other hand, organizations' contact centers can also leverage GenAI to provide customized services, enhancing agent efficiency, reducing operational costs, and boosting customer satisfaction.

Further, fostering emotional connections and brand loyalty is paramount as the world becomes increasingly digital. GenAI plays a pivotal role by analyzing emotional cues from customer interactions, delivering recommendations aligned with emotional preferences, and maintaining a consistent brand voice across all touchpoints. Prioritizing emotional intelligence in GenAI initiatives helps businesses cultivate deeper connections and foster long-term loyalty.

Navigating Data Privacy

For a customer, a global leader in providing hospitality services, Tech Mahindra implemented a Microsoft Azure Open AI-powered solution to improve customer experience by prioritizing security, health, and safety issues. Daily customer feedback from room stays, ranging from general complaints to serious safety concerns, required structured analysis and classification of each problem to address product issues, improve safety, study host behavior, and refine offerings and pricing.

However, as organizations delve deeper into AI-driven solutions, this extensive data handling naturally brings up privacy and security concerns. So, the question surfaces: how can enterprises navigate the above complexities while safeguarding customer trust and loyalty? Organizations must implement stringent data security measures, advanced encryption techniques, compliance with privacy regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and regular AI system audits and monitoring can mitigate potential security breaches while preserving customer confidence.

Another formidable challenge lies in facilitating employee adoption and training as GenAI permeates business operations. How can organizations equip their workforce with the necessary skills and knowledge to leverage these transformative tools?

Employees require practical training on using GenAI, but more than just traditional methods may be necessary to address individual learning needs. Leveraging GenAI itself for training can provide personalized learning paths, interactive simulations, and adaptive modules tailored to each employee's skill level and preferences, ensuring effective learning and mastery of GenAI usage. This approach fosters continuous improvement and empowers employees to maximize the benefits of GenAI in their roles.

Measuring the Impact

When measuring the ROI of GenAI investments, how can organizations effectively assess it? To gauge the success of GenAI initiatives, businesses should track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), net promoter scores (NPS), first response times, resolution times, automation rates, Customer Effort Scores (CES), and sentiment analysis. These metrics provide insights into GenAI's impact on customer interactions and overall business performance, extending beyond traditional methods of reducing workforce size for efficiency gains.

For example, tracking CSAT and NPS helps gauge customer satisfaction while monitoring first response and resolution times, which indicates GenAI's efficiency in handling inquiries. Automation rates reveal the workload managed by AI and sentiment analysis offers insights into the emotional tone of customer interactions.

For a leading Telco in the US, Tech Mahindra demonstrated how Microsoft Azure Open AI is leveraged to solve complex customer analytics, enabling better decision-making. Tech Mahindra also implemented Enterprise Cognitive Search and enabled Auto-summarization of agent notes and disposition intents through GenAI, expected to yield benefits. We also leveraged Knowledge Summarization for frontline Agent Knowledge Assist, Frontline Agents’ interaction, and lead scoring to improve conversion – towards better customer experience.

Outlook

The future of GenAI in customer engagement holds exciting possibilities, with trends such as conversational AI, multimodal AI, emotion AI, AI-powered personalization, and voice assistants set to redefine the customer experience landscape. Staying informed about these advancements allows businesses to leverage GenAI proactively and stay ahead in delivering exceptional customer experiences. Embracing GenAI strategically is crucial for driving meaningful connections and delivering unparalleled value to customers as the journey towards enhanced customer experiences continues. But are you ready to take the leap?