Customer Excellence in 2024: Top Leaders Unveil Strategies and Success with Gen-AI

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Michael Hinshaw profile picKristi Faltorusso profile pic
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Meet the CX Pioneers

Get to know the contributors who graciously shared their expertise for this E-book.
Diego Tjen-A-Tak profile pic

Diego Tjen-A-Tak

Customer Success Manager @Linkedin
Irit Eizips  profile pic

Irit Eizips

Chief Customer Officer & CEO@CSM Practice
Kristi Faltorusso profile pic

Kristi Faltorusso

Chief Customer Officer @ClientSuccess
Michael Hinshaw profile pic

Michael Hinshaw

Founder and President @MCorpCX
Valeriya Titlinova profile pic

Valeriya Titlinova

Faculty at SAP Academy for Customer Success & Senior Customer Success Partner
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Stephen Pappas

Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) @Cobalt Speech & Language

Introduction

Gen-AI is emerging as a powerful tool for enhancing customer experience. It’s being embedded into workflows and customer touchpoints - enabling personalized interactions at scale, automating routine queries, and offering 24/7 personalized support, all while reducing resolution time and cutting costs.

This e-book is essential for Customer Success and Support professionals aiming to harness Gen-AI's potential to elevate their customer service strategies. It features insights from leading CX pioneers from companies, including LinkedIn, ClientSuccess, McorpCX, and CSM Practice, on how to serve customers with a better value proposition at scale.

Learn About
01
Practical Applications of Gen-AI in CX
Discover the real-world uses of Gen-AI and essential tools that are setting new standards in customer engagement and service.
02
Navigating Gen-AI Adoption Challenge
Explore the complexities of integrating Gen-AI into daily CX operations and strategies for success.
03
Future Trends and Advancements
Get ahead with insights into the emerging trends shaping the future of CX, powered by Gen-AI.

Embracing Gen-AI in Customer Experience: Practical Applications and Success Strategies

Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, once quipped, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Before diving into the ocean of Gen-AI's potential, it's crucial for CX professionals to identify the specific customer pain points that need addressing. The question shouldn't merely be, “What can this technology do?” but rather, “How can this technology alleviate customer challenges and elevate their experience?”

This section delves into the practical applications and success strategies of Gen-AI in customer experience.

Automating Knowledge Curation for Enhanced Self-Service

“AI is enabling us to convert chat rooms with years of knowledge into FAQs quickly and using these to answer new questions. Tedious steps of transcribing discussions and merging duplicates is eliminated,”

Joydeep Sen Sarma

CEO & Co-founder at Clearfeed
Joydeep Sen Sarma profile pic

The traditional process of creating customer-facing resources is often time-consuming and resource-intensive. It involves multiple steps from conceptualization to writing, editing, and finally publishing, which usually take days or even weeks.

Gen-AI tools are revolutionizing the creation of dynamic, informative customer-facing content, enabling businesses to automate the production of FAQs, support articles, and tutorial videos. With their advanced algorithms, these tools can sift through customer-facing support conversations and produce drafts in a fraction of the time it would take a human, allowing CX professionals to focus on refining and personalizing the output.

For instance:

  • ChatGPT can quickly draft detailed support articles or FAQs based on a brief input, capturing the nuances of language and tone that resonate with your audience.
  • Similarly, Synthesia can create engaging onboarding videos without the need for a physical video production setup, using AI avatars and text-to-speech technology to convey complex information in an easily digestible format.
ChatGPT, Synthesia, HeyGen, AI Course Creator

Custom Chatbots and Virtual Assistants for Personalized, Real-Time Customer Assistance

“Creating a dedicated GPT, that knows everything about your product, which your customers can interact with at any given moment is in my opinion a great use case for customer support,"

Diego Tjen-A-Tak

Customer Success Manager at LinkedIn
Diego Tjen-A-Tak profile pic

As customers seek real-time responses, many businesses have implemented chatbots to meet the demands for round-the-clock service. Gen-AI technologies, especially GPT-4, are transforming chatbots and virtual assistants. These advanced models grasp natural language, context, sentiment, and the nuances of customer queries far beyond their predecessors.

  • Learning from Knowledge Bases
    GPT-4's integration with existing knowledge bases (KBs) allows for personalized, accurate responses aligned with company standards. Its ability to learn from support conversations and KBs without extensive custom data reduces bot development costs and time, making this technology accessible to all.
  • Customizable, Intelligent Support
    AI chatbots provide support tailored to individual customer needs. They can integrate with CRM and helpdesk systems for:
  • Delivering personalized advice
  • Troubleshooting with multi-turn conversations
  • Guiding users based on their interaction history
  • For instance, a chatbot can identify a returning customer, bringing up their last purchase to offer relevant support or recommendations, showcasing the personalized approach Gen-AI enables.
Virtual Agent by ClearFeed, Rasa, Google Dialogflow

Enhancing Customer Service with Predictive Analysis

“This predictive insight has allowed us to focus on emulating success and doubling down to engage customers to drive different strategies across our team. For example, if we find that successful customers have actively engaged Exec Sponsors and have 90% of their users leveraging the platform daily, we would want to focus on those two activities.”

Kristi Faltorusso

Chief Customer Officer at Client Success
Kristi Faltorusso profile pic

As the competition increases manifold, staying ahead in CX means anticipating customer needs before they even arise. CX leaders are leveraging predictive analytics to identify patterns in customer behavior, predict potential issues or questions, and enable proactive support. The integration of Gen-AI into predictive analytics can enable businesses to:

  • Tailor their engagement strategies based on actionable insights.
  • Analyze customer data to identify trends in satisfaction, confusion, or churn, enabling targeted interventions.

Personalized email outreach, customized support resources, and preemptive service adjustments can all be deployed to effectively address customer needs, often before the customer is even aware of them.

DataRobot, IBM Watson, H2O.ai

Transforming CX Insights with AI-Powered VoC

“A B2B technology company we work with leverages its Voice-of-Analytics (VoA) program, powered by AI and machine learning, to detect early churn indicators such as decreased login frequency and reduced feature usage. This proactive approach allows them to address and resolve issues before customers express dissatisfaction, enhancing retention,”

Michael Hinshaw

Founder and President at MCorpCX
Michael Hinshaw profile pic

As customers seek real-time responses, many businesses have implemented chatbots to meet the demands for round-the-clock service. Gen-AI technologies, especially GPT-4, are transforming chatbots and virtual assistants. These advanced models grasp natural language, context, sentiment, and the nuances of customer queries far beyond their predecessors.

  • Identify Patterns and Trends: AI algorithms excel at sifting through vast amounts of data to uncover patterns and trends that might not be visible to the human eye. This capability allows businesses to anticipate customer needs and tailor their offerings accordingly.
  • Detect Silent Signals: Often, the most valuable customer feedback is not what is explicitly stated but what is implied through behavior. AI-powered VoC programs can detect these silent signals, such as changes in purchase behavior or product usage, providing early warnings of potential issues or churn risk.
  • Automate and Personalize Responses: With insights derived from AI analysis, companies can automate personalized responses to common queries or concerns, enhancing the efficiency of customer support.
Qualtrics XM, Medallia

As businesses look to implement these strategies, the focus should be on selecting the right tools, integrating them seamlessly with existing systems, and continuously refining approaches based on customer feedback and behavior.

Impact of Gen-AI Features on Business Metrics

The graph, based on a Bain & Company survey, showcases the deployment percentages of Gen-AI features in customer experience (CX) and their corresponding impact on business metrics.

Challenges in Adopting Gen-AI in Everyday CX Operations

Generative AI (Gen-AI) is rapidly advancing, however, adopting Gen-AI comes with its set of challenges, including data inaccuracies, biases, and transparency issues.

1. Maintaining Brand Voice Consistency with Gen-AI

A key challenge is ensuring Gen-AI accurately reflects your brand's unique voice and emotional nuances. Unlike human agents, Gen-AI lacks an inherent understanding of your brand’s communication style. To overcome this, it's crucial to:

  • Develop a detailed guideline that captures your brand’s tone, style, and values.
  • Train your team on effective prompting techniques that can help tailor Gen-AI outputs to better align with your brand’s identity.
  • Implement a process for routinely assessing AI-generated content and providing feedback to refine its outputs.
“Integrating Gen-AI into our operations presents the challenge of ensuring it reflects our unified voice and approach to customer success. It’s essential for these tools to understand and adopt the language and tone that resonate with our customer-centric philosophy, “

Irit Eizips

Chief Customer Officer & CEO at CSM Practice
Irit Eizips profile pic

2. Seamless Integration of Gen-AI with Existing Systems

The effectiveness of Gen-AI in enhancing CX relies heavily on its ability to work harmoniously with existing platforms and databases, ensuring data integrity and streamlined operations. To achieve seamless integration, it's essential to:

  • Choose Gen-AI tools that offer robust integration capabilities.
  • Conduct comprehensive pre-implementation testing.
  • Monitor and optimize post-integration to ensure efficiency.

3. Balancing Automated Efficiency of AI with Human Empathy

While AI has made significant strides in natural language processing (both in understanding (NLU and generation (NLG) as well as sentiment analysis, it still struggles to grasp the complexities of human emotions and context. To maintain a balance:

  • Deploy Gen-AI for handling routine queries, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues.
  • Incorporate emotion detection AI to improve response empathy.
  • Set clear protocols for escalating complex issues from AI to human agents.
“AI enhances efficiency, but genuine connections come from understanding and sharing customer emotions. Embracing emotion detection AI helps bridge this gap, ensuring our digital advancements never lose the human touch that makes customer interactions truly memorable.”

Steve Pappas

Founder at Science of CX.
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4. Addressing Ethical Considerations

The prominence of Gen-AI in CX raises ethical concerns around data use, privacy, and bias. Customers are rightly concerned about how their data is used and the fairness of AI-driven decisions. To uphold ethical standards in Gen-AI deployment:

  • Be transparent with customers about AI’s role and data handling practices.
  • Regularly audit AI systems to identify and mitigate biases.
  • Ensure compliance with data privacy laws to protect customer information.

By proactively addressing these challenges through strategic planning, businesses are well-positioned to harness the full potential of Gen-AI, paving the way for a future where AI and human intelligence work in harmony to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

ClearFeed's GPT-Powered Virtual Agent: Revolutionizing Slack-Based Customer Support

"It's interesting to have a combination of a previous set of canned responses by the support engineering team for customer requests, and the official Kubernetes documentation as input to the large language model to form a hybrid approach and be able to help our customers with automatic responses. "

Shravan Ashok

Staff Program technical Manager at Cast AI
Shravan Ashok profile pic

At ClearFeed, our mission is centered on harnessing AI to empower service teams, enhancing their efficiency and effectiveness. We’ve developed the Virtual Agent that enables teams to deflect common customer queries with GPT-powered answers without any agent intervention.

The Virtual Agent operates within Slack request channels, acting as the first point of contact for customer queries to provide immediate, relevant responses.

Integration with Private and Public Knowledge Sources
It leverages your existing documentation, FAQs, and wikis, ensuring that answers are instant, relevant, and accurate. ClearFeed supports various knowledge sources including Zendesk Guides, Notion, Freshdesk, Confluence, and more.
Configurable Answering Modes
You can tailor the Virtual Agent to either provide full GPT-generated answers with documentation references or to limit responses to search results, accommodating varying levels of AI trust among organizations.
Automatic Ticket Creation for Unresolved Queries
When queries cannot be resolved through automated responses, the Virtual Agent works with your ticketing platform like Freshdesk, Intercom, etc. to direct these cases to human support by creating support tickets.
Search and Answer Quality
Enhanced search and answer precision with advanced RAG technology for relevant results and a verification system to minimize hallucinations.