Generative artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way we work and the way we engage with our customers, and customer service operations are at the forefront of this wave. Last year we saw companies starting to use copilots to summarize cases and customer histories, generate service replies, uncover insights from reports, and translate customer interactions in real time. Many companies reported increased agent productivity and effectiveness, which fueled even more interest in genAI.
Yet, this head-long rush has highlighted significant gaps stemming from a historical underinvestment in technology foundations. There is now a compelling reason to prioritize investment in these long-neglected areas. The following two areas are currently being prioritized:
Solidifying the foundations of a knowledge management practice.
Knowledge management has long suffered from poor strategic investment. It's hard to justify ongoing funding because executives can't directly link investments to business outcomes. It's also a technology that]s not well adopted as it is often disconnected from the agent desktop. Organizations also struggle to keep up with the ballooning volume of content that's needed, and maintaining content is primarily a manual process. But without answers, there is no customer service.
GenAI will fundamentally impact knowledge operations. It will enable content to be created directly from customer interactions. Answers (not just content) will be readily accessible in the normal flow of work, in a conversational way instead of searching through a long list of answers. Expect organizations to double down on investing in knowledge management practices.
Creating unified agent workspaces that actually work.
Forrester's research shows that a significant amount of agents' time is spent researching issues in other systems and reaching out to subject matter experts. Today's agent workspaces don't support these tasks. They are also cluttered with a lot of data that is not needed for a particular step. Agents also complain that even though customer data across channels is well unified, insights and recommendations are often too generic.&
Gen AI will fundamentally reshape agent desktops. The agent desktop will contain less data and fewer options for the user. The workspace will dynamically assemble customer-specific recommendations and actionable insights, and will suggest automated workflows, eliminating the need to toggle to other systems Eventually, they will evolve to conform to the agent work style, skill, and task at hand. Training, onboarding, and application usage will collapse into one and users will learn by doing. Initial application experiences for a novice user will be simpler, and experiences will unfold to offer more actions and functions as users gain competency. Expect organizations to double down on evolving agent desktops.
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.