How Generative AI Is Transforming Customer Engagement

In recent years, customer interactions have undergone a dramatic transformation due to the rise of digital channels, social media and mobile devices. This shift has empowered customers with unprecedented control over their interactions with businesses, allowing them to navigate between online and offline touchpoints seamlessly. In this content-driven business landscape, customers expect seamless experiences with immediate, personalised and accurate responses to their inquiries.

This heightened demand places enormous pressure on contact centres to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences across multiple channels. However, meeting these customer expectations amid the rapidly evolving digital landscape poses a significant challenge for many. To do this, they need sophisticated data processing capabilities and the ability to deliver personalised interactions at scale.

Generative AI: A Game-Changer for Modern Contact Centres

Generative AI has emerged as a crucial solution to address the need for personalisation at scale. When integrated into the customer engagement ecosystem, it revolutionises the way businesses interact with their clients.

Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, generative AI can create new content, including text, images and even audio, based on the data it’s been trained on. It uses machine learning models with deep learning neural networks to analyse and learn from vast datasets, then generates outputs that mimic the original data in a realistic and coherent manner.

Using advanced language models, generative AI can profoundly enhance customer interactions by extracting the “who” and the “what” from conversations, effectively identifying key subjects and topics. It can also detect emotions and analyse sentiment, pinpointing specific elements within a sentence that determine whether an interaction is perceived positively or negatively.

Beyond these capabilities, it can automatically summarise conversations and even translate languages for smoother multinational interactions. Additionally, generative AI can use existing content patterns to expand its knowledge base and improve its contextual understanding.

By harnessing the power of generative AI, businesses can seamlessly automate complex customer service processes, offer real-time personalised engagement and scale responses to meet customer demand — without compromising on quality or efficiency.

Connecting the World with AI-Powered Experience Orchestration

Experience orchestration is the seamless coordination of technology, interactions and engagements within a single cloud platform that connects to all the relevant data sources across the enterprises IT landscape to deliver superior end-to-end experience in real-time. The AI-powered Genesys Cloud™ platform provides brands with the right tools to deliver personalised self-service, gain deeper customer insights, efficiently plan their workforce needs, and improve employee motivation and performance.

Understanding Predictive, Generative and Conversational AI

Predictive AI focuses on predictive outcomes and making decisions based on data patterns, using machine learning algorithms to calculate probabilities. It also uses automated decision-making processes based on training algorithms to learn from data and improve performance over time.

Generative AI is being used to create new content, summarise conversations and extract information from content based on patterns learned from existing data sets.

Conversational AI, which sits at the intersection of these AI categories, leverages the capabilities of predictive AI, machine learning and generative AI to enable seamless human-machine interactions through language. It uses predictive models to anticipate user intent and behaviour, while machine learning techniques enhance its ability to understand and respond to natural language input. Generative AI further enhances conversation AI by dynamically generating conversational content, summarising discussions and extracting relevant information from user interactions.

Genesys Cloud AI: Fine-Tuned for Innovation

The Genesys approach to generative AI and machine learning is to harmonise innovation with security, compliance and data sovereignty. Genesys has been using generative AI in a wide range of application areas for some time now.

The large language models (LLMs) used for this are based on open-source models, hosted in the same geographical region and data centre as the Genesys instance. They’re fine-tuned by Genesys for the respective use case and area of application. This ensures that we have all the accreditations and certifications of the Genesys Cloud and a single data-processing agreement document.

In addition to the LLMs, Genesys uses the models available via Amazon Bedrock on Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as Anthropic, Cohere and AI21 Labs, depending on the requirements and complexity of the processes. These high-performing foundation models also meet Genesys data security policies and are hosted in the same geographic region as each customer’s core Genesys services and platform.

Genesys has two general use cases for volume and complexity. It processes approximately 1.5 billion conversations per month, so it’s critical that responses can be generated in near-real time (less than one second) to apply this technology to each conversation. In contrast, for low volume and high complexity, Genesys uses the Amazon Bedrock base models and advanced voice coverage, including bot authoring capabilities and conversation mining.

Amazon Bedrock on AWS: A Powerful Foundation for CX Excellence

Amazon Bedrock offers a robust foundation for building, managing and optimising cloud-based customer engagement strategies using generative AI. When integrated into Genesys contact centre solutions, Amazon Bedrock allows businesses to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations and foster greater innovation.

With Amazon Bedrock, Genesys customers can:

• Generate AI-powered customer insights: AWS Bedrock has advanced AI models that provide real-time insights into customer behaviour and sentiment, allowing businesses to tailor their responses and offerings with unmatched precision.
• Scale seamlessly: The cloud-based infrastructure of Amazon Bedrock ensures that businesses can scale their CX operations rapidly to meet growing demands while maintaining optimal performance.
• Cut costs: By paying only for the resources they consume, businesses can optimise their CX investments and maximise cost efficiency.
• Accelerate innovation: Amazon Bedrock AI models empower businesses to innovate and iterate on their CX strategies with unprecedented speed, adapting to ever-evolving customer expectations.

Amazon Bedrock serves as a catalyst that propels CX from a static, reactive model to a dynamic, proactive one. This allows businesses to anticipate customer needs, elevate customer interactions, streamline operations and provide service excellence that meets customers where they are. It represents a seismic shift away from traditional, labor-intensive customer engagement strategies toward a future where AI-driven automation and intelligence take centre stage.

Amazon Bedrock: Powering Generative AI Across Industries

As generative AI continues to revolutionise business operations, Amazon Bedrock stands as a driving force behind transformative innovation, empowering businesses to deliver exceptional CX across multiple industries:

Retail: Retailers are using generative AI to analyse customer preferences and shopping behaviour to create personalised recommendations and enhance the shopping journey. When customers call in with product inquiries or issues, AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants can provide real-time support, answer questions and assist in resolving problems for an overall better customer experience.

Financial services: In finance and banking, generative AI streamlines transactions and provides quick, accurate financial advice through chatbots and virtual assistants. This technology reduces wait times and enhances customer satisfaction by offering immediate assistance with accounts and transactions. With the ability to process and analyse vast amounts of financial data, generative AI powers more accurate financial interactions, ensuring customers’ needs are met promptly and with a high degree of personalisation.

Healthcare: Generative AI streamlines patient interactions and optimises the overall healthcare journey. For example, patients can easily schedule appointments, access medical records, and receive information about medications and treatment plans through AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. With the ability to deliver more timely and personalised healthcare support, healthcare providers are radically improving patient outcomes and satisfaction.

Insurance: Insurance providers are using generative AI to expedite claims processing for a smoother customer journey. By generating standardised claim reports and assisting in damage assessment, generative AI ensures that customers get prompt and accurate support during the often stressful process of filing and processing insurance claims.

Redefining the Customer Experience

In a digital landscape that seemingly evolves at the speed of light, staying ahead is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about leveraging them to create meaningful customer interactions. Generative AI is transforming contact centres in response to the growing demand for instant, personalised, and high-quality customer interactions.

With a heightened level of responsiveness and personalisation previously unattainable, contact centres can deliver a customer experience grounded in a proactive, anticipatory approach that’s tailored to individual needs. This means moving beyond simply responding to queries and issues as they arise to using predictive analytics and nuanced customer insights to address potential concerns before they even manifest for the customer. In doing so, businesses don’t just exceed customer expectations but also make customers feel understood and valued on a more personal level.

AWS and Genesys Help Strengthen CX and EX

Genesys and AWS are helping organisations continuously evolve and strengthen their customer and employee experiences. By leveraging the power of AWS foundation models through a unified interface, Genesys makes it easy for customers to seamlessly integrate advanced AI capabilities into their solutions to boost efficiency, personalisation and customer engagement — without the complexities of managing AI infrastructure. With the capabilities of Amazon Bedrock, Genesys can fine-tune AI models to cater to specific industries, ensuring that customer interactions are relevant and insightful.

Because Genesys Cloud is built on AWS, you get support from global leaders in Contact Centre as a Service, customer experience, cloud infrastructure and generative AI. By working together to deliver the flexibility of Amazon Bedrock in Genesys Cloud solutions, companies can take advantage of this transformative approach to customer engagement. This empowers them to drive outcomes with greater levels of speed, insight and accuracy.

Meeting the Future of Customer Engagement with Generative AI

As businesses look to the future, the role of generative AI in customer engagement is poised for even greater expansion and sophistication. We are on the cusp of a new era where virtual assistants will not only handle routine inquiries, but also predict customer needs and initiate support proactively.

With advancements in natural language understanding, these AI systems will provide even more nuanced and contextually aware interactions, essentially becoming indistinguishable from human customer service representatives in many scenarios. The potential for hyper-personalisation means that every customer can look forward to service that feels uniquely tailored to them, not just in the moment, but continuously adapting over time as AI learns from each interaction.

This isn’t just an incremental improvement, but a comprehensive overhaul of the customer service paradigm, leading to stronger relationships between businesses and their customers. In this rapidly approaching future, the integration of generative AI within the customer service ecosystem promises to unlock new levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction — opening up unprecedented opportunities for personalisation at scale.

Learn more about how you can leverage generative AI to transform your customer experience strategy with Genesys and Amazon Bedrock.