Generative AI is already changing how leading-edge companies design customer experience, but the technology is just the beginning of a radical change in CX quality and processes. Because emerging GenAI tools will be widely available and accessible, the customer-facing features they enable will quickly become commoditized.
For example, some companies are already using GenAI to create highly personalized content at scale, including visual content, and using it in conjunction with AI data analytics to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences.
So, let’s look at some of the most impactful areas where CX organizations can apply GenAI and then consider how to begin.
Getting data out of silos across an organization is a big challenge. So is the need to refine and automate processes to improve operational efficiency and meet customers’ expectations in real time. Using AI agents to handle orchestration tasks can reduce overhead and drive value while freeing human team members from time-consuming and often mentally draining orchestration busywork.
While the AI agents handle those orchestration tasks, CX team members can dig into high-value work like user journey research, experimentation, and messaging creativity. This shift will require CX team members to strengthen their skills in delegation, management, innovation, and collaboration with AI agents and their human coworkers.
When orchestration is handled by AI agents across easy-to-update composable martech elements, and team members can devote more time to creativity and deep insights, the pace of experience design can speed up dramatically. Already, the era of the 18-month-long website design is over for practical as well as strategic reasons. By the time a project that long has launched, its original end goal will be long out of date.
More than a third of companies are already using 11 specific GenAI CX use cases, across their contact centers, sales teams, and marketing operations. Companies using these tools can easily make CX adjustments and updates frequently (biweekly, for example), learn from the results, and use the findings in their next round of accelerating improvements.
Agentic AI has the potential to drive automation and efficiency breakthroughs for fast, convenient, and cost-effective CX. Find out how AI agents work and get examples.
For years, marketers have wanted to leverage their data and tech stacks to deliver real-time personalization at scale, aka hyper-personalization. It looks like GenAI may be the technology tool that makes individualized customer journeys a reality. GenAI hasn’t delivered fully individualized CX yet, but when it does, that will completely transform experience design yet again.
Getting there will require the kind of stepwise approach described above. Rethinking small portions of the customer journey for individualized experiences allows CX teams to take more risks with less downside. That might start by deploying an AI agent to follow users through their journey and analyze interactions for potential improvements.
The team can then select their initial and subsequent use cases, use AI agents to implement and test improvements, and then use agentic orchestration to incorporate those changes automatically into the overall customer journey.
AI offers companies the opportunity to easily personalize experiences for customers and unlock the potential of employees to be more creative and productive.
To get the most value from GenAI CX investments, start by evaluating your people, processes, and technology. You’ll need a benchmark to show you where to begin and to measure your progress.
With a clear picture of the resources you have and what you need, it’s time to envision and strategize. Encourage regular discussions with your CX team about how they might use GenAI. For example, if your development and design teams are struggling to keep pace with webpage updates, your organization’s first use case might be designing new pages.
An AI model trained on your brand style and design requirements, and then given notes for improvement from your dev and design teams, should quickly reach a point where it can generate new pages at scale that only require minor edits. That can free your developers and designers to work on more creative tasks.
Once you have successful use cases under way, it’s time to scale—again, with small sections of the customer journey where you see the most potential for improvement. Along the way, your team can start to devote more time to research and creatively addressing remaining CX challenges to drive continued innovation.
The ultimate result of all this work should be an amazing customer experience that flows from a drastically reshaped employee experience. Turning over the heavy analytics, automatable tasks, and process improvements to agentic AI has the potential to allow your CX team to unleash its creativity, build stronger customer loyalty, and drive value creation at scale.
