AI Adoption and CX in 2024: Insights from Industry Leaders

What are organisations doing in terms of AI adoption in 2024? What challenges are they facing? How can these be tackled? And what is AI’s expected impact over the next several years? 

To answer these questions (and more), we partnered with Sabio and Genesys to host a focus group consisting of representatives from well-known brands across different industries. Together, they shared the successes and challenges they have experienced as well as what we should focus on to enhance CX in the long term.

“THERE ARE A LOT OF HURDLES TO HAVE TO JUMP OVER”

Our moderator Martin Hill-Wilson began the conversation by asking the participants to share their AI successes and challenges. While the group members shared some accomplishments (such as enhanced personalisation and the adoption of AI chatbots), they focused on the obstacles they encountered. The most commonly faced challenges included:

• Siloed data
• Not having a comprehensive view of the customer
• Lack of a business-wide, long-term view

WHAT DATA SHOULD YOU USE?

While we might initially think that providing agents with all the data we have will help them perform better and faster, the reality is rather different.

Considering that they only have a few seconds to respond to a query when a customer calls, overwhelming them with data that is not related to their case will only slow them down.

Thus, the data must be relevant and useful in order to be helpful.

DO YOU HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER?

The subject of data quickly led to a conversation about its integration and how that contributes to having a comprehensive view of the customer.

Today, many organisations have a record of what the customer does (e.g., order history, marketing campaigns they’ve received, etc.). In addition to this, they might ask for feedback and insights—but these are often stored in a separate system.

In turn, organisations are faced with a disconnect between what the customer does and how they actually feel about it. Therefore, they cannot take the necessary actions to transform and improve their experience.

WE NEED A BUSINESS-WIDE AND LONG-TERM FOCUS

Further exploring how a lack of integration and alignment can negatively impact our CX, we recalled how organisations and departments purchased various tech solutions during the COVID lockdowns in 2020-2021. While this was certainly a quick and efficient solution for the crisis at the time, it also had its consequences…

More specifically, departments found themselves with heaps of data but no business-wide view and the urgency to acquire solutions meant that nobody asked how they would use the tech in the future.

Considering that our group was primarily debating the adoption of AI and how CX might look like in the future, the importance of thinking a few steps ahead was highlighted multiple times.

Our participants agreed that leaders need to think about the customer first and then work their way backwards into the organisation. In this way, we can eliminate the adoption of tools that are not necessary and the collection of data we do not need. Exploring how we can create a seamless customer journey with the above points in mind, our group shared:

“Creating the actual journey on the tech is not that hard; the hardest bit is working out what you need to get from that journey. Figure out what data you need and why—because every bit of data needs to be justified.”

MAKING ROOM FOR HUMANS TO BE HUMAN

The discussion concluded with the group members sharing what they will be focusing on next to improve their CX with AI. They covered a wide range of tech solutions, from the rollout of chatbots to the categorisation of customer queries into different channels. Moreover, they discussed AI’s power to enhance CX not only by speeding up operations and facilitating self-service but also by making room for humans to be human.

“We do not need human beings to do large amounts of repetitive transactions. We need human beings when things go wrong. We need human beings when there's empathy that's required or some aspect of problem solving that we didn't expect to come across.”

Ultimately, it is the marriage of innovative AI solutions with human connection and empathy that results in truly exceptional CX.