The Gen AI Horizon: Personalize the Full Customer Experience, From Sales to Support

[Note: This insight was originally published on CI&T on December 2nd, 2024.]

For years, customers have broadcast just how much they care about personalization. But many organizations don’t meet that expectation – and customer satisfaction suffers.

With Gen AI squarely in the picture, though, organizations now have the tools they need to personalize the full customer experience. Let’s take a look at three key use cases – and a helpful starting point for embracing “experience AI.”

1. Give Customers Personalized Experiences They’ll Actually Love

Many companies already give customers personalized experiences to handle common activities. But these tools are either too rigid or provided as traditional chatbots that have a penchant for frustrating customers.

A Gen AI personalized experience can engage with customers in a way that feels far more convincing and appreciated. The experience, either embedded in the solution or as personalized agents can adapt their messages or responses based on the specific context of each interaction, helping customers find what they need while making them feel seen and understood.

For example, consider a retail ecommerce setting. A customer using a Gen AI personalized experience could...

- Build a shopping list from scratch based on their preferences.
- Compare two products, highlighting the pros and cons of each either in a conversational style or as personalized product pages.
- Quickly digest customer reviews to better understand whether a product is right for them.

Amazon’s Rufus puts this kind of Gen AI into action as a chatbot. Rufus helps customers navigate product choices and make more informed purchasing decisions. What's more, the bot is integrated early into the shopping experience to guide customers when they're most likely to need support.

Walmart, on the other hand, is embedding personalized Gen AI experiences directly on Walmart.com to generate a unique homepage for every shopper.

The bottom line: by providing more natural, contextual, and personalized experiences with Gen AI can impress users and improve the customer experience.

2. Equip Customer Support Agents with Instant Customer Knowledge

Even with incredibly capable personalized experiences, there’s a high chance that customers will want to talk to a human for support. In these interactions, it’s crucial for teams to have the tools they need to provide tailored guidance.

Here, Gen AI can act as a knowledge explorer, allowing support agents to find specific answers to customer queries without defaulting to generic responses.

For instance, imagine an agent receiving a question about a product feature. Instead of manually searching through the company’s internal knowledge base, they could use a Gen AI tool trained on that knowledge to find an answer instantly. This kind of personalized support helps the agent resolve the issue faster, resulting in a more positive experience for the customer.

In experiments with CI&T clients, knowledge explorers powered by Gen AI have relied on curated private knowledge bases to...

- Generate contextually accurate answers that reference specific internal sources.
- Align answers to each user’s level of access, ensuring that they only receive the information they’re authorized to see.
- Offer step-by-step guidance to help resolve customer concerns.

The results? Faster issue resolution, reduced response times, and happier customers.

3. Make It Easy to Uncover New Sales Opportunities****

When it comes to personalization, sales teams also stand to benefit from Gen AI. Imagine having an AI sales assistant that can score leads, identify promising prospects, and generate personalized sales scripts – all in real-time. That’s exactly what Gen AI can deliver.

But there’s more. Gen AI can also support sales reps in finding cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Much like the knowledge explorer used in customer support, an AI assistant can quickly access the information a sales rep needs to recommend complementary products or services.

For instance, an AI assistant could help a sales rep at a financial services firm selling to a recent college graduate by suggesting a beginner-friendly investment account or a low-fee credit card designed to help them build credit. This means that sales reps can make smarter, data-driven recommendations on the spot – and boost customer loyalty in the process.

To Embrace Experience AI, Start Small

Many organizations see the potential of Gen AI and are eager to jump in by building custom models that do it all. However, the reality is that developing custom Gen AI models is resource-intensive and requires vast amounts of data, computational power, and time.

Fortunately, most organizations don’t need to reinvent the wheel to see results. Existing Gen AI models can be used to deliver real value quickly – and often at a fraction of the cost.
Here’s how to get started:

- Identify serious pain points: Do customers complain about a scattershot support experience? Do your sales reps struggle to make personalized recommendations? These are often the highest-impact areas for Gen AI. By identifying them at the start of your project, you can pinpoint use cases likely to deliver the greatest value.
- Establish curation intelligence: All the use cases we’ve discussed involve training models on internal knowledge, prompts, and content. This way, Gen AI can present the right information to the right user at the right time.
- Test third-party models: Existing third-party models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude can be a great way to start exploring the potential of Gen AI. Platforms like CI&T FLOW make it easy to test these models to see which one delivers the best results for your use case.

By starting small and focusing on targeted, impactful projects, organizations can unlock quick wins, build momentum, and demonstrate the value of Gen AI to stakeholders.

Personalization Doesn’t Have to Come at the Cost of Scale

Historically, personalization has always been seen as a tradeoff against scale. Personalizing a customer’s journey takes time, which means companies often have to choose between creating a personalized experience and reaching as many customers as possible.

Now, organizations can use Gen AI to personalize the customer experience at scale – without sacrificing efficiency. And the use cases we’ve discussed here are just the beginning.