Managing the customer journey is complex. To tackle the challenges that arise when trying to deliver the best possible customer experience, many turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks. That works, but a better approach is to combine AI with the human touch. At Genesys, we call this Blended AI.

AI already helps companies improve customer journeys in some surprising ways. And, thanks to the recent Altocloud acquisition, Genesys has exciting news about improvements for the future.

Three Things Blended AI Can Do for You Right Now

Kate, the personification of Genesys AI, automation and machine learning, helps customers and live agents solve problems faster and more efficiently. Kate not only helps you serve your customers better, she also makes life better for your agents.

1. Maximize Self-Service and Automation

The chatbot space is competitive; Genesys blends humans with AI in a way that’s seamless for consumers, improves the quality of the conversation and reduces costs. For example, when a prospect or customer browses your website, it makes sense to reach out at key interaction points.Kate automates this interaction—creating efficiencies in marketing and sales moments and increasing sales.

For example, imagine that John browses the web for information about solar panels. Kate proactively starts a conversation—capturing John’s interest by asking a few relevant questions. She can make a personalized offer and even transitions him seamlessly to speak with an advisor who has visibility into the full conversation between John and Kate on a desktop. So, John doesn’t experience any delays and doesn’t need to repeat himself.

By using proactive chatbots and Blended AI by Genesys, the customer has a satisfying experience and the company is likely to close more business—with lower effort.

2. Optimize Human Interactions

Blending AI with human agents enables you to take advantage of the strengths of both. According to the recent Forrester paper, “Artificial Intelligence with the Human Touch,” enterprises who have taken this step report that their customer service efforts are more effective at improving customer satisfaction (61%) and agent satisfaction (69%).

Agent satisfaction is important. Without the tools they need to meet your customers’ needs, agents likely feel frustrated and stressed. AI enables your agents to answer customer questions better and faster. AI can continuously assess agent skills and appropriate training needs, which means you can strengthen your contact center operations with optimally skilled agents. AI also optimizes workforce planning and workload distribution, enabling agents to focus on the work that needs a human touch.

3. Unlock the Value of Interactions and Analytics Across Your Company

You can use analytics to support a broad range of business scenarios. It helps with sales and marketing—for interaction tracking, campaign attribution, lead scoring and lead engagement, for example.

It can be difficult for reps to recognize meaningful conversations with prospects that will result in qualified leads or sales—and then take appropriate actions. And that negatively affects conversion rates. Bringing together online and offline engagement data and making it available in real-time, at critical moments, solves this. You can use that data to match the right lead to the right rep to make informed conversations on any channel.

When reps have the relevant information and guidance they need, they’re empowered to manage every interaction to the best possible outcome. Better equipped sales teams can target and act on opportunities, for more leads, more sales conversions and correctly attributed sales.

The Future: The Altocloud Acquisition

Genesys acquired privately held Altocloud Ltd., a leading provider of cloud-based customer journey analytics, this week. This move strengthens our offer in AI and machine learning while optimizing the end-to-end customer journey.

Together, our AI-driven systems will improve your ability to find the next best step in the customer journey. Let’s look at a couple examples of how it affects sales and marketing.

Imagine that a prospect is in the middle of a sales journey and expects a response from you—but not in real-time. Using AI, your system determines the best way to follow up with that prospect, such as sending an SMS the next morning and then an email later that day if the SMS goes unanswered. In a marketing journey, the system determines the best information or offer to push to your customer in your next interaction.

At Genesys, we believe that Blended AI is the approach of the future—merging chatbots, predictive routing, orchestration and human agents to automate interactions in self-service and with augmented agent experiences. Leveraging bots to handle common issues frees up live agents to deal with complex and nuanced issues that require a human touch.

To learn more about how to blend AI with human agents to improve customer and agent satisfaction, read the Forrester paper, “Artificial Intelligence with the Human Touch”.