The efficiencies created by generative AI are helping CX leaders demonstrate the value of investing in customer experience.

More than 4 in 5 organizations using generative AI in CX say that it has improved ROI, according to a report released Wednesday by Zendesk. The customer experience software company surveyed 2,500 consumers across 20 countries as well as nearly 4,500 business respondents globally.

“It's been a long trend where CX teams have struggled to make that very direct connection to the bottom line in terms of their impact,” Jason Maynard, Zendesk’s CTO of North America and Asia, told CX Dive. “And I think when deploying things like a fully automated experience that's going to enable a customer to resolve an issue without needing that human touch, there's a much more direct tie to a return on investment in those types of interactions.”

As generative AI becomes more prevalent, it’s changing the CX game. Customers are expecting the technology they encounter elsewhere to be available with the businesses they engage with.

Retailers in particular are moving from using generative AI to conduct simple tasks, Ritu Bhargava, president and chief product officer of SAP Industries and CX, said. Instead they're asking, how can generative AI increase cart size and improve my bottom line? 

Retailers are now fine-tuning AI use cases to create efficiencies at scale, she said.

Two-thirds of consumers said chatbots should be just as apt to handle their queries as highly skilled human agents, the survey found. 

Those expectations are a rapid and massive shift from just a few years ago.

“I think there was always an assumption that a bot interaction was going to be subpar in some way less personalized, not able to do as many things,” Maynard said. 

But as more people use generative AI search, like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, or voice bots, such as Siri and Alexa, consumers come to expect other businesses to offer the same flexible, rich experience, Maynard said. “All of a sudden, all those expectations become sort of the minimum bar for what people expect.”

“I go on ChatGPT, and I get this highly personalized, flexible experience,” he said. “And they expect that experience when they go to a customer's website and they're trying to interact with a bot.”

Maynard compared it to how Google search became the predominant UX paradigm for how people accessed information on the web in the early 2000s. The bar for search increased for every business, and if a search function didn’t work as well as Google’s, it was considered a subpar experience, he said.

Rethinking customer journeys

With such changing customer demands, CX leaders are working to deploy generative AI. Zendesk found that emerging technology like generative AI is causing 70% of businesses to rethink the entire customer journey.  

But Jeff Mango, managing director of KPMG U.S. customer experience, warned that companies that rush to put AI in front of the customer to reduce costs could see a dip in customer experience quality. “It puts a lot of pressure on the customer to trust that that's gonna be right, and they don't necessarily trust,” he said.

“And so what we're going to see is the value being brought to customers by using AI is probably more likely in the back office or in the middle office versus actually being front [and] center with customers,” Mango said.

Maynard refers to that as the “crawl, walk, run approach” with CX. Most CX leaders aren’t getting to the run stage — in which generative AI is brought directly to the consumer — until they’ve mastered its use in the back end to analyze sentiment or to aid their agents with AI tools.

There's a disconnect with generative AI

Businesses are responding to customers' growing expectations and beginning to deploy generative AI, but not everyone is onboard.

For all their expectations from chatbots, customers still want humans; 4 in 5 consumers expect human agents to assist them with service, sales and support in chat-based interactions.

But Zendesk found a disconnect between CX leaders and agents when it came to generative AI. 

While 70% of CX leaders say they have seen positive outcomes from agents who have begun using generative AI tools, only 36% of agents report that the AI tools they’re currently using are making their job easier. 

Agents expressed feeling under-trained on how to use AI tools, especially generative AI-based tools. They're also unclear on how such tools will change their roles and are unaware of generative AI guidelines that CX leaders say exist.

Maynard says those fears make sense and that management needs to bring agents along.

“There's a true sort of fear right now of the technology and how it's going to impact people's day to day, workflow and what they've done,” Maynard said. “People are deeply tied to the work flows that have made them successful in the past, and so there's a lot of change management that has to happen within teams to utilize new technologies to change up some of those workflows.”

“We're very much in the infancy of how things like natural language interfaces will work alongside an agent in terms of a copilot that's going to help you with your interactions,” he said.

Maynard compares it to bringing in a new team member in which there’s a period of time where you have to grow to trust that team member, how they work and how to best interact with them.

“Interacting with AI is very similar,” he said. “You're going to have to figure out the new sort of division of labor and responsibilities in terms of what it's really good at and where you need that human touch.”