DENVER -- Artificial intelligence, including generative AI, will quickly become even more pervasive in contact centers, powering journey orchestration and increased agent capabilities, Genesys executives said today at the company's Xperience 2024 conference here.
As an example of the prevalence of AI, Genesys' technology has evolved beyond something to help companies with workflows and natural language capabilities to helping contact centers and their clients with journey orchestration, a capability that company CEO Tony Bates says will continue to evolve in the next few years. "We're not just going to help with the context. We believe that if you embrace [the Genesys] platform, it can also help you optimize business outcomes that will actually drive loyalty and drive revenue."
Bates added: "It's a new era. The world is going to look very, very different.
"We have an opportunity to transform customer experience for your business and employees. The good news is the next level is already starting to happen. There are going to be virtual agents, and they will be using genuine generated conversations to handle many, many more use cases."
As AI continues to evolve and become more ingrained in various elements of contact center operations, the technology will be able to deal with much more nuanced and complex case transitions, according to Bates. Interactions will be more seamless. Agents will also add much more efficiency to copilots.
AI will also help to power empathetic experience, Bates said. AI is being used in that area a little now. As the technology and the training evolves, it will be able to handle many more use cases, including some of those much more complex issues.
To maximize the benefits of the technology, companies will need to work with a partner that has a massive ecosystem, Bates added.
Last week, ServiceNow and Genesys announced a strategic partnership to elevate customer and employee experiences. The two companies plan to integrate Genesys Cloud platform with ServiceNow Customer Service Management to deliver an AI-powered solution, dubbed Unified Experience.
In the ultimate customer journey, customers won't be able to distinguish between the human and the virtual agent, Bates said. "Sytems will dynamically anticipate when there will be individual requirements for empathetic-like interfaces."
When that happens, companies will see a several-fold increase in customer and employee loyalty, according to Bates.
Additionally, AI-powered bots will be able to adapt to diverse tasks, with better understanding of emotional nuances, and organize and learn from the sentiment included in the response and respond accordingly with future interactions, according to Olivier Jouve, Genesys' chief product officer.
This merging of the capabilities of human and AI agents will help companies revolutionize their events, Jouve added.
The technology's not quite there yet, but the advancement of AI-powered virtual agent capabilities is continuing. Genesys, for example, has rolled out new features and capabilities, some of which were announced at the show, and others expected to debut later in the year.
Among the new capabilities, Genesys unveiled native journey management capabilities for the Genesys Cloud platform that works alongside Genesys Cloud AI to continuously optimize customer interactions. Called Journey Flows, the solution will enable organizations to build, monitor, and visualize customer interactions as they shop, buy, and get service. Companies can then use those insights to improve automation, prediction, and conversational intelligence.
"Our native journey management capabilities further deepen the AI-powered experience orchestration engine of Genesys Cloud," Jouve said. "With this release, every organization can now harness deeper insights about their customers' journeys, giving them new levels of visibility and control to continually deliver the personalized, end-to-end experiences that drive business growth."
The combination of Genesys Cloud AI and Genesys Cloud Journey Management provides the foundation to help organizations better understand the root causes of successful and unsuccessful experiences and receive timely alerts when there are unexpected changes in journey performance, according to Genesys.
Also new is Journey Analyzer, which, along with Journey Flows, is now embedded within Genesys Cloud, enabling organizations to start uncovering insights from their customer data with customer journey visualizations, analytics, and insights. This will help customers understand customer behavior, including where customers are switching channels, repeating actions, or successfully achieving their intended goals. Organizations can now use Journey Flows and Journey Analyzer to do the following:
- Visualize customer behavior to identify opportunities for improvement.
- Centralize customer and employee data processing through a single unified view of customers and employees.
- Enhance analytics by using the same dataset as routing, schedules, forecasting and machine learning
- Connect events together, such as identifying customers who call back a day after a digital interaction or customers who choose not to interact with bots.
Genesys also used the conference's opening day to introduce other AI-powered experience orchestration. With Agent Copilot, Virtual Agent, Empathy Detection, and Modern Agent Workspace for the Genesys Cloud platform, Genesys is empowering organizations to unleash the next era of customer experiences grounded in a strong AI-human partnership.
"In today's complex business environment, organizations need to strike the right balance between using AI and automation to drive efficiency while keeping their customers and employees engaged," Jouve said. "The revolutionary power of generative, conversational, and predictive AI throughout the Genesys Cloud platform helps organizations accelerate key business outcomes by tapping into trusted tools that allow them to interact with their customers and employees in new ways."
Genesys Copilots provide organizations with a suite of automated, large language model-powered assistants. Agent Copilot listens along to conversations, creates customized scripts, and surfaces knowledge information to agents in real time, working alongside their human counterparts to provide real-time transcription and auto-summarization.
Next-generation virtual agents for Genesys Cloud are designed to help organizations extend their reach by automating more complex customer interactions and work than what's possible with traditional bots through more natural and human-like conversations, the company said.