The entrance of digitally savvy younger generations into the workforce is quickly reshaping today’s customer experience (CX) landscape. Now more than ever, consumers expect brands to meet their needs on their own terms. And companies need to support employees who expect an enhanced level of convenience with high-quality, digital toolsets to respond to these industry changes. The advent of generative AI, and the prolific rise of artificial intelligence within the workforce, is helping brands revolutionise their customer and employee experiences (EX) — and adapt to an evolving digital-first economy.

Engaging authentically with today’s consumer can seem daunting. Organisations must tie together the customer journey by coordinating technologies, connecting data and shifting to more proactive approaches to experience delivery. Businesses must intricately weave together AI-powered self- and assisted-service to deliver exceptional experiences.

Scaling personalisation isn’t simply a human task; bots should communicate with intent and identify when the conversation shifts beyond what a bot can seamlessly handle.

According to “The State of Customer Experience” report from Genesys, only 21% of consumers were highly satisfied with a chatbot, citing top frustrations as being unable to reach a live agent from a chatbot and having to repeat a conversation they had with a bot to an agent. To resolve these issues, most organisations recognise they need stronger capabilities to coordinate every consumer touchpoint.

The Right Architecture for the Experience Economy

Leading brands have transformed consumers’ expectations for engagement. People today want to be remembered, heard and understood across every interaction with a business. And if their expectations aren’t met, they won’t hesitate to switch to a different brand.

Companies can no longer afford to simply react to a consumer’s needs. They need to be agile and able to quickly turn on new capabilities that can improve experiences. They don’t have the time to shop for new products or features and then endure lengthy purchasing negotiations, deployment and migration times. They need a platform that does it all.

The all-in-one Genesys Cloud™ platform gives organisations a single roadmap that streamlines CX and EX to enable the fluid delivery of superior end-to-end experiences at scale. Experience orchestration uses multiple Genesys AI capabilities to equip businesses with real-time capabilities to listen, predict, act, learn and optimise experiences.

This unified approach will ultimately drive customer loyalty, increase employee engagement, and strengthen efficiency and operational improvements. Our customers have confidence this strategy will help advance them into the future of CX powered by AI, as demonstrated in the continued growth in adoption of our AI capabilities within Genesys Cloud. During fiscal year 2024 (Feb. 1, 2023 – Jan. 31, 2024), adoption of Genesys AI surged, with customer use for digital bots up more than 4X and voicebots up more than 3X year-over-year.

Genesys is consistently deepening the native AI capabilities of Genesys Cloud to help organisations unlock deeper customer and operational insights. In a significant move to accelerate our experience orchestration capabilities and bolster our existing AI offerings, we acquired Bold360 in 2021. With the acquisition, Genesys gained essential expertise with building self-service solutions on digital channels, accelerating the already rich Genesys Cloud roadmap.

Notably, the acquisition established our presence in Hungary, adding to our robust talent of back-end, front-end, data, QA, and product and technical support specialists; as well as DevOps engineers; UX design; and business operations. The addition of these new team members has helped us maintain a high pace of innovation on our platform. Now, Genesys Hungary is a major European R&D hub for the company, which is at the forefront of AI and cloud-based experience development.

Bold360-inspired capabilities are seamlessly integrated into Genesys Cloud, allowing organisations to effortlessly adopt and innovate. They include:

  • Digital Bot Flows: As part of our already existing Dialog Engine Bot Flows capability, Digital Bot Flows helps customers build bots with rich media on native digital channels that today’s consumers want to use.
  • Knowledge: Inspired by Bold360, Genesys Cloud Knowledge enables customers to use our Knowledge Workbench to compose, publish and organise articles. Knowledge Optimizer allows them to track the efficacy of self-service and agent knowledge. Having a searchable, centralised knowledge base, filled with rich media content and effective FAQs, is essential to helping customers quickly find the answers they need.
  • Agent Assist: Genesys Agent Assist suggests knowledge as conversations advance, saving agents valuable time hunting for answers to help customers. When calls or chats wrap up, our generative AI capabilities summarise the interaction for the agent, improving their efficiency and ensuring there are high-quality notes of the conversation.

Unifying the Customer Experience with AI Innovations

Many brands make the mistake of deploying isolated AI-based solutions that only solve a “specific” problem. This often results in customer frustrations, as unhelpful bots or employees are limited with insufficient information, training or silos.

Rather than multiple products all aimed at addressing individual pain points, a single platform with the AI capabilities that holistically connect experiences to improve customer and employee experiences creates opportunities to build loyalty — and drives business outcomes. A few examples of how AI-powered experience orchestration can scale personalisation for customers include:

  • Knowing what customers need before they tell you. Customers’ historic data, partnered with behavior patterns can trigger proactive intervention. For example, think about when an airline customer initiates a chat. The employee can instantly see they searched the company’s FAQs for information on flight change fees and then offer help with rebooking or navigating change fees without the customer asking.
  • Putting an end to broken records. Customers shouldn’t have to tell a bot their name, phone number, home address, account number and their issue only to then repeat themselves again to the next employee they’re transferred to. When experiences are connected, this information follows the customer wherever they go for a fluid, echo-free experience.
  • Matching customers with the right employees. AI can leverage information a customer provides to predict the next step in their journey. It then directs them to a human best suited to meet their needs. This means customers are more likely to receive the first-contact resolutions they want — and employees can focus on the areas they do best.

Delighting Customers at Every Step of the Journey

An all-in-one, AI-powered cloud platform is the only way to provide immediate synergy across every step of the customer journey. It equips organisations with a people-centric blueprint to listen and understand customers, apply AI with intention, shape journeys, predict actions and deliver meaningful outcomes.

Creating moments that are seamless across all touchpoints is a requirement to drive customer satisfaction and trust — leading a lifetime of loyalty. The best way to do this now is to unite experiences around a single platform with the power to easily integrate and coordinate AI, technologies, data and channels across the entire customer journey.

Want to learn more about what AI can do for your business? Read “How to build your business case for AI” ebook to get started. And you can learn more about Genesys Cloud here.