Customer Experience Trends: AI and Multichannel Strategies Reshape Customer Service in 2024

Our recent article delved into the latest developments in customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience (CX), and e-commerce for 2024. The focus was on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into offerings, advancing marketing attribution, hyper-personalization, and the evolving technology landscape. These trends offer opportunities for enhanced customer engagement, better data handling, and smarter decision-making.
 
This article will concentrate on customer service and customer experience, both through human-operated call centers and other channels. Emphasizing total customer value and loyalty, we explore the perspectives of executives at vendors EvaluAgent and Genesys in the CX sphere, especially in enhancing agent performance.
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Jaime Scott, cofounder and CEO of EvaluAgent offers the following commentary:

AI Will Form an Essential Part of Great Customer Experiences

From conversation analytics to auto-scoring conversations, to real-time suggestions on complex queries, there is a massive amount of potential when it comes to AI in the contact center. With AI automating repetitive tasks and providing deeper insights, the human touch will be about managing complex queries and having more time to leverage data to create versatile, seamless customer experiences. We’re moving into an era where machines are working for us rather than the other way around.

Appetite for Multichannel Experiences Will Continue to Grow

Today’s customers want the option to contact businesses via their preferred channel, at a time that suits them. That means businesses will need to continue investing in a wide range of channels to be where their customers are and maintain an optimal level of customer service. At the same time, don’t abandon telephony—voice is still the gold standard for customers looking for quick support, particularly for issues with high complexity or emotion. 

Agent Engagement and Retention Will Be High Priority

It’s no secret that attrition is high in contact centers. But with intense customer demand, the continual cycle of staff leaving is hurting companies’ ability to elevate the customer experience. Contact centers will pivot to show how customer service can be a viable career—not just a stopgap or a job with no future. The growing desire among the talent pool for work-life balance will fuel this change, putting employee well-being, career development, and satisfaction at the top of priority lists. The good news is this investment pays dividends, with end customers reaping the rewards of happy, motivated employees.

It’s Time to Bridge the Insight Gap

Gone are the days when evaluating 2% to 5% of customer interactions was enough. With the volume of customer inquiries coming through, too many contact centers are missing not only vital insights but also potential compliance failures. A 100% analysis of conversations is possible with AI, spotting patterns and recurring topics that highlight where your path to improvement lies. In turn, evaluators can focus on digging deeper into interactions that can uncover invaluable qualitative information, improving agent knowledge, business intelligence, and customer experiences alike.
 
 
Brett Weigl, General Manager, Digital and AI of Genesys offers the following insights:

Jobs Will Take Center Stage in AI Regulation

As concerns grow around the potential for AI to displace people’s roles in the workforce, job protection and upskilling will take a front seat in government conversations around AI regulations. As demonstrated in President Biden’s Oct. 30 executive order, job protection and upskilling will take a front seat in government conversations.
 
Next, we’ll see bills developed specifically focused on ensuring AI is used as an aid to human roles and to be aided by human oversight. This will protect certain roles from displacement, create roles that previously haven’t existed before and, in areas where it’s more efficient and effective to deploy AI, ensure employees are upskilled to oversee the technology.
 
Additionally, conversations as to who is responsible for preparing the future workforce will heat up. From higher education curriculum to new guidelines around on-the-job training, as the potential grows for a skills gap between entry-level employees whose tasks have been replaced by AI and more senior-level employees, government leaders will debate where the responsibilities lie.

Organizations Will Need to Revise 5-Year Plans Amid Breakneck AI Advancements

The current AI boom is demanding that businesses not only start planning for how they drive value from this technology but also examining the broad impact AI will have on organizations' operations. Strategic business plans shouldn’t only be built around how the company will implement AI. Business leaders must consider the growing role intelligent technologies will have in their workplace operations else they risk an array of challenges, value losses, and talent drain. These strategies will become more urgent as AI shifts into more autonomous stages and expands toward the future of artificial general intelligence, where applications may be more independent of humans and pervasive.

Deepfakes Become a Security Concern in Customer Experience

While AI deepfakes have been causing waves due to their potential to spread disinformation or misrepresent recognizable faces, little attention has been paid to the potential risk they pose to the average person. With customer experiences increasingly becoming digital, the potential for deepfakes to be used by bad actors to overcome biometric verification and authentication methods increases exponentially. While this technology is in its infancy, the rapid advancements of AI will only accelerate the potential for customer trust and security to be disrupted. Fortunately, technology is also evolving to address these issues, and we’ll undoubtedly see major tech innovation in the year on both sides of the coin.
 
 
Mike Szilagyi, GM Product Management of Genesys offers the following predictions:

The Rise of the Virtual Agent Avatar

Contacting customer service via video chat is steadily increasing in popularity, with 24% of GenZ and 28% of Millennials using this service. With staffing shortages and increased demand for the channel, organizations will turn to virtual agent avatars to help manage incoming video service requests. Like digital and voice bots, these avatars will help automate the early stages of customer engagement.
 
From providing information, to solving simple issues, to connecting the customer with a human agent best equipped to handle their needs, these avatars will improve the level of service consumers experience via video. Additionally, many brands will take the opportunity to turn their avatars into even more of an experience for their customers, by making the avatars customizable, like Apple’s Memojis. 

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We concur with those views and believe that in the coming years Al will become integrated by default into the base of the CX tech stacks for contact center agent management, field service management (FSM), and marketing (analytics and lead scoring). It will be applied ever more in production as people begin to distrust AI less and less.

Contributing Authors

Brett Weigl

General Manager, Digital and AI at Genesys

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Jaime Scott

Co-Founder and CEO at EvaluAgent

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Mike Szilagyi

GM Product Managemen at Genesys

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