Elevating Customer Experience with Generative AI | Publicis Sapient Solutions

Elevating Customer Experience with Generative AI

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling a new era in customer experience that will transform the way customers interact with brands. How? In the last decade, AI has evolved from simple rule-based systems to sophisticated neural networks that not only recognize patterns in language, visual and data, but also generate new text, images, audio, video and synthetic data. While conversational tools powered by generative AI garner the most attention, features like auto-complete, language translation, video transcription and auto-generated reports play a large role in shaping customer expectations around their everyday experiences.

A common mistake that many companies make with technological advancements is focusing on the technology rather than on the customer needs and pain points that it can solve. In this rapidly changing landscape, brands that act now to understand and leverage the transformational power of generative AI to improve their customer experience will have a competitive advantage.

Seizing the value of generative AI for customers

Recent advances in generative AI technology present an incredible opportunity to organize around customer outcomes. By prioritizing and delivering on use cases that address customers’ fundamental needs, brands can strengthen their customer relationships and accelerate growth. There are three main ways that generative AI can benefit the customer experience:

Generative AI is transforming the way businesses understand their customers. It can quickly analyze vast amounts of data to identify trends and patterns in customer behavior to inform experience enhancements. Using natural language processing, image recognition and predictive analytics, generative AI is improving feedback loops and expediting opportunity identification. For instance, CPG brands can use conversational AI to analyze retailer data and consumer sentiment across brands and channels. A key benefit of generative AI is that it can automate time-consuming tasks and even improve the accuracy of analysis and synthesis of large, disconnected sets of data. This frees up researchers’ time to validate the results, evaluate bias and define implications for the business. Used effectively, this technology can improve data-driven decision-making and empower businesses to respond more quickly to changing customer needs.
Generative AI is powering customer experience improvements, both frontstage and backstage. Today, experiences are often complex and inefficient due to years of patchwork incremental improvements across legacy systems. New AI-powered experiences can reduce friction and drive engagement by making it faster and easier for customers to move through their journey. For example, replacing complex mortgage application forms with a conversational user interface can reduce the cognitive load, save customers time and increase completion rates. Generative AI can also empower front-line employees to be more effective and efficient in servicing customers. By leveraging the technology to automate or streamline certain tasks, workers have the capacity to focus on more complex situations or provide a high-touch service where it matters most. For instance, hotel brands can provide their customer service agents with quickly digestible summaries of past customer interactions to help agents get up to speed on a customer’s case and reduce average call handling time. Operationally, generative AI is creating efficiencies by seamlessly integrating into experience design and development toolkits. By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows to enhance productivity, companies can expedite their test and learn cycles and release experience enhancements faster, increasing the value for customers.
Generative AI is driving top-line growth for businesses by activating customer data in new ways and transforming content creation. With this technology, businesses can enrich their experiences with a level of personalization and immersion that was previously unattainable. Customers will benefit from hyper-personalized campaigns and micro-interactions that have the power to shift brand perceptions and deepen relationships. For instance, retailers can generate personalized or contextualized product images for each customer by leveraging text descriptions, historical images and customer data. Generative AI is also becoming a powerful tool to amplify creativity as a source of invention and differentiation. Through their interaction with AI tools, teams can leverage new data-driven stimuli as a catalyst for ideation and concept development, helping to surface and refine relevant ideas. For example, brands can prompt AI models during product development, conversing with tools about development requirements and limitations. It also enables the creation of rich media and immersive storytelling which expedites the design of virtual worlds and 3D renderings to conceive, prototype and deliver new experiences for customers.

Transforming the customer journey using generative AI

Generative AI will be a disruptive force across industries and, as such, it offers both opportunities and risks. Success will require a thoughtful approach that combines both top-down enterprise strategy to guide investment and bottom-up customer-centered use cases to drive adoption.

Know the customer
Starting with deep human insight and an understanding of the holistic customer journey can inform ideal, frictionless and delightful customer and employee experiences and uncover new value pools for the business
Imagine the future
Design service and innovation methods play a pivotal role in identifying areas where generative AI can create a positive influence on customers. Beyond enhancing the frontstage customer experience, the re-evaluation of methods for facilitating backstage employee processes, policies, technology and data utilization can generate value for both customers and the business
Deliver on the promise
Crafting and executing the right strategy leveraging generative AI—taking existing business models and capabilities into consideration—is of paramount importance. This ensures the fulfillment of the customer experience promise, driving sustainable growth and competitiveness in today’s dynamic business landscape
Protect proactively
As with any new disruptive technology, generative AI has potential pitfalls, such as bias, inaccuracies and ethical concerns, so it is critical to establish governance frameworks and design safeguards to manage and mitigate the risks of using generative AI at scale

Generative AI offers a transformative opportunity for organizations to elevate their experiences and deliver unmatched value to customers, by accelerating customer insight, enabling operational efficiencies and catalyzing innovation. The result? Generative AI-enabled experience transformation that deepens customer relationships, drives satisfaction and unlocks top-line growth.

Are you ready to begin your generative AI journey? We can help. It’s an exciting time in customer experience, and you can be at the leading edge of it.

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Tara Flippin
Director, Customer Experience & Innovation
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