Customer expectations for experiences that are seamless, highly personalised and immediate are at an all-time high. For businesses, this shift in customer behaviour is both a challenge and an opportunity. To stay competitive, companies must evolve their customer experience (CX) strategies to meet these rising expectations, providing not just service — but highly personalised engagements that resonate with customers on an individual level. This is where the power of conversational AI can come into play.

Conversational AI, powered by machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), allows businesses to scale their customer support and provide highly personalised engagements. And virtual agents, the next step in conversational AI, can handle end-to-end customer interactions, offering immediate, tailored support that can reduce friction, improve customer satisfaction, enhance the employee experience and help to build customer loyalty.

Meeting Rising Customer Expectations

Consumers now have instant access to information on various devices; they expect brands to meet them where they are — on their terms. Whether it’s making a purchase, seeking support or providing feedback, customers want an effortless, personalised experience. And they expect these levels of personalisation from every brand they interact with, regardless of industry.

Personalisation is no longer a differentiator — it’s a critical component of any successful customer experience strategy.

According to the Genesys “State of customer experience” report, about three quarters of consumers surveyed globally say they will buy more, more often from and recommend brands that consistently personalise their experiences. And 79% of consumers surveyed said they’d recommend the company to a friend or colleague if they were assured a personalised purchase experience every time they shop with a certain company.

Virtual Agents: Taking Conversational AI to the Next Level

At its core, conversational AI enables businesses to interact with customers in a more natural way, creating a more personalised and engaging experience. By harnessing advanced machine learning and NLP, AI-powered virtual agents can understand customer intent, respond in real time and deliver personalised solutions based on individual preferences and previous engagements.

Large language models (LLMs), such as the OpenAI GPT model, are the foundation of many advanced virtual agents. These models have been trained on vast datasets and can generate coherent and contextually appropriate text. This enhances the abilities of traditional conversational AI like chatbots.

Generative AI is used to create new content, such as texts, images or audio. In virtual agents, generative AI can craft human-like responses and engage users more effectively than traditional methods.

Because of these advancements, virtual agents transform conversational AI — and can greatly enhance various aspects of the customer experience. It can offer highly personalised support, allowing for always-on availability, reduce points of customer frustration and, ultimately, build long-term loyalty. Let’s look at each of these benefits in detail.

1. Personalise Customer Support

Traditional customer support channels can often involve long wait times, repetitive interactions and responses that don’t meet a customer’s specific and personalised needs. With AI-powered virtual agents, companies can track and analyse previous interactions, allowing virtual agents to personalise engagements and surface relevant insights.

And instead of responding only to specific inputs, virtual agents use AI and natural language understanding (NLU) to interpret customer needs in real time. They can go beyond the defined scope of traditional chatbots to easily address complex or multiple intents. And they can dynamically adjust responses based on the conversation and capture context and relevant information that can also be handed to human agents, if needed.

For example, if a customer has an issue with an order, an AI-powered virtual agent can access the customer’s order history and instantly provide status updates, refund options or troubleshooting steps — without requiring the customer to repeat themselves. This level of personalisation reduces friction and enhances the overall customer experience.

Moreover, these virtual agents can learn from each interaction. Using AI-powered intent and sentiment analysis allows the virtual agents to continuously improve, further enhancing the customer experience. Data can reveal common steps taken, where customers become frustrated or exit the interaction, and other efficiencies. Virtual agents then can refine responses, better anticipate customer needs and improve customer journeys.

2. Contain Unexpected Surges in Support Calls

Customers don’t only need help during “normal” business hours. Conversational AI can provide customer support around the clock — no matter when a customer reaches out. Unlike human agents, who often only work during specific hours, AI-powered virtual agents are available 24/7. This ensures that customers can get the support they need at any time of day or night.

Virtual agents can also handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously, ensuring that businesses can scale their customer support without having to hire and train an ever-growing team of agents. This capability is crucial for handling surges in demand, such as during peak shopping seasons or product launches, while maintaining high-quality service.

When you create a seamless customer experience in which a virtual agent is the first point of contact for customers, your contact centre agents have more time to focus on more sensitive or high-touch interactions. In addition, if a virtual agent does handle the entire end-to-end interaction — without a human intervening — that virtual agent can write a summary and tag a predefined wrap-up code to the conversation. This post-interaction is the same a human agent would perform and is another way to alleviate the human agent from having to complete rote, time-consuming tasks.

3. Reduce Friction and Build Loyalty

Disjointed customer experiences can be detrimental to the bottom line. Friction in customer interactions can lead to frustration, dissatisfaction, lost sales and diminished customer loyalty. In fact, about 30% of consumers surveyed in the “State of customer experience” report say they stopped using a company after a negative interaction in the past year.

AI-powered virtual agents can provide fast, accurate and efficient responses to customer queries. Whether a customer is asking about product availability, trying to troubleshoot an issue or seeking a refund, conversational AI can quickly guide them to a resolution without the need for unnecessary steps or transfers to human agents.

A personalised, frictionless experience has a lasting impact on customer loyalty. When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to purchase more, more often, from a brand. They’re also more likely to recommend the brand to friends or family — and buy from that brand again.

By providing personalised recommendations, anticipating customer needs and offering tailored solutions, AI-powered virtual agents can help create a sense of connection with the customer. This creates an emotional bond between the brand and the customer, which is essential for fostering loyalty.

Understanding the Conversational AI Marketplace

As customer expectations continue to rise, businesses must find innovative ways to meet the demand for personalised, efficient and seamless customer experiences. It’s clear that conversational AI will be a game-changer for companies that want to stand out for their customer experience.

From 24/7 availability and personalised support to proactive engagement and frictionless interactions, conversational AI is helping businesses to deliver high-quality support that reduces friction, improves customer and employee satisfaction, and builds long-standing loyalty. And with advanced tools like virtual agents, businesses can create seamless and highly personalised end-to-end customer interactions — at scale.

Genesys was recently recognised as a Strong Performer in the Gartner® Voice of the Customer for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms report. To help businesses during the buying process, the report provides collective user feedback and individual reviews on seven enterprise conversational AI platforms. And, in this report, as of Aug 2024, 94% of peer reviewers would recommend Genesys Cloud™ AI.

Download the full Gartner report and see why 94% of peer reviewers would recommend Genesys solutions. You’ll also get insights on the value of a conversational AI platform, the Gartner Peer Insight evaluation of AI providers, and tips for navigating the market to choose the right AI solution.

And learn more about Genesys Cloud AI to see what you can accomplish with a Genesys Virtual Agent.

 

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms, 29 November 2024

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