Generative AI, digital customer service, and conversational user interfaces (CUIs) will transform customer service and support by 2028, according to a Gartner report.
But how did they come to these results?
With the current dearth of both fortunetellers and crystal balls, Gartner developed their own ‘Hype Cycle’ to provide them with a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time.
The Hype Cycle tracks a number of maturing customer service and support technologies – varying from embryonic (Customer Technology Platform), to highly-hyped (Generative AI), to mature yet with significant adoption opportunities still remaining (Contact Center as a Service).
It also allows clients to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.
However, despite the plethora of technological advances within the customer service space, a worrying number fail to deliver on their potential – with more than half of the innovation profiles falling into what Gartner terms, “The Trough of Disillusionment”.
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Source: Gartner[/caption]
But what about the technologies that Gartner has tipped to succeed? What makes them stand out? And how can businesses begin implementing them?
Generative AI
Unsurprisingly, given its explosive surge in popularity in recent times, Gartner considers generative AI to currently be at its ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’.
Yet, they do not see this as a flash in the pan, but rather as a major player in the future of customer service, predicting that by 2025, 80% of customer service and support organisations will be applying generative AI technology in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience.
By 2025, 80% of customer service and support organisations will be applying generative AI technology.
It is within the CX sector specifically that Gartner believes AI will have the biggest impact, with a recent poll that they ran revealing that 38% of leaders see improving customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of initiatives to deploy applications trained on large language models.
Conversational User Interfaces
Another emerging technology that makes use of AI is Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs): human-computer interfaces that enable natural language interactions for the purpose of fulfilling a request, such as answering a question or completing a task.
CUIs are used to provide customer service agents with direct control over the applications they are operating. They are most commonly used to automate support via chatbots, helping to improve customer experience and self-service adoption.