By Emily Potosky, Senior Director, Research, Daniel O’Sullivan, Senior Director Analyst, and Kim Hedlin, Senior Principal, Research in the Gartner Customer Service and Support Practice
In the world of customer service, GenAI stands as a revolutionary force, reshaping how organisations engage with their customers. Since the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022, the pace of change has been astonishing. This article explores four GenAI trends shaping the future of customer service, offering strategic insights for leaders navigating this transformative landscape.
Trend 1: GenAI Catalyses the Value-Driven Organisation
GenAI has served as a powerful catalyst for a shift in the service function toward a more customer value-driven approach. It provides tools that allow organisations to move beyond mere issue resolution to proactively enabling customers to realise value. This shift has captured the attention of executive leaders, compelling service heads to reevaluate strategies and processes to align with value-focused delivery.
Why It’s Trending
GenAI’s potential to revolutionise service and support functions has sparked significant interest among executive leaders. This surge in attention and investment presents a unique opportunity. GenAI tools can effectively categorize customer intent, enabling the automation of identifying and classifying customer needs. This capability helps organisations redistribute low-value interactions to self-service, which allows assisted service functions to focus on delivering more valuable interactions. Additionally, GenAI-powered agent assistants boost frontline efficiency and empower agents to offer insightful recommendations and next-best actions in real time.
Key Actions:
- Develop a Value-Driven Service Strategy: Envision how your service function can help customers realise value from your products. Collaborate across departments to define customer success and plan how to support it throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Use GenAI to Understand Customer Intent: Leverage GenAI tools for interaction tagging and routing to identify low-value interactions, enabling their removal or redistribution.
Trend 2: Customers Delegate to AI Assistants
The rise of sophisticated AI assistants is transforming customer expectations for low-effort service experiences. Customers are increasingly comfortable delegating parts of their service journey to AI assistants with conversational capabilities, reshaping the landscape of customer interactions.
Why It’s Trending
GenAI capabilities are enhancing AI assistants’ ability to understand and generate natural language, offering new ways to resolve customer queries. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are integrating GenAI into their smart assistants, bringing this technology into millions of homes and cars.
Key Actions:
- Forecast AI Assistant Use: Identify repetitive, low-value steps in your service journey. Use scenario planning to assess the impact on your operations if AI assistants completed these steps on behalf of customers.
- Identify Automation Opportunities: Identify steps where communicating with customers’ AI assistants may introduce risk or cost, and determine what should remain human-driven for risk or compliance reasons.
- Cater to Bot Decision-Making: Understand how AI assistants differ from human customers and tailor service interactions accordingly.
Trend 3: GenAI Changes How Customers Get Information
GenAI-powered conversational interfaces and search tools are revolutionising how customers search for and access information. Instead of sifting through long lists of links, customers can now receive generated answers to their queries, transforming the traditional search landscape.
Why It’s Trending
Conversational interfaces powered by GenAI are changing how customers seek and digest information. Search engines are now serving AI-generated answers as “zero click” results, altering the way customers navigate online information.
Key Actions:
- Follow SEO Guidelines for AI Overviews: Ensure your content adheres to search engine guidelines to increase the likelihood of appearing in AI-generated overviews.
- Prioritise Knowledge Management: Invest in knowledge management to ensure accurate information is available, whether accessed through first-party or third-party channels.
Trend 4: Transformed Voice of the Customer
Traditional post-transaction surveys are evolving into transformed Voice of the Customer (VoC) capabilities powered by GenAI. These tools capture indirect and inferred feedback, providing insights beyond what surveys can offer.
Why It’s Trending
GenAI is transforming conversation analytics tools, increasing the accuracy of speech-to-text transcription and expanding multilingual capabilities. This evolution allows organisations to capture high-quality VoC data, enhancing their understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.
Key Actions
- Repurpose Surveys: Use survey results to validate inferred feedback or supplement data about customers’ observed preferences, rather than as the sole source of truth about customer experience.
- Stay Informed About New Vendor Offerings: Keep abreast of new VoC offerings to inform vendor negotiations and anticipate shifts in the market.
Generative AI is a transformative force in customer service, offering organisations unprecedented opportunities to enhance customer experiences and streamline operations. By focusing on key trends and implementing strategic actions, companies can harness the power of GenAI to drive growth and customer satisfaction. As the industry continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable will ensure long-term success in an increasingly automated world.