Navigating AI’s role to shape the future of customer service and experience orchestration
By Jarryd Tuyau (pictured), Principal Solutions Consultant at Genesys
Advanced AI-powered virtual agents are rapidly transforming the way brands approach customer experience, enabling them to orchestrate personalised, end-to-end journeys for every individual. AI has evolved to become more dynamic, conversational, and capable of understanding the natural flow of human dialogue—handling complex requests with greater ease. Today’s sophisticated systems go far beyond the limitations of early chatbots, offering a more seamless and intelligent customer interaction.
I expect more Australian businesses will seek to integrate AI into their strategies or they risk losing business progress. A 2024 survey we commissioned found that 97% of Australian decision makers surveyed said their organisations have already adopted or plan to adopt AI to enhance customer experience. While it is easy to get caught up in AI hype, it is important to ask these critical questions: How should businesses consider advanced AI adoption within their overall strategy to meet evolving consumer needs? And how should they be leveraging AI to orchestrate a remarkable customer experience while keeping human empathy intact?
Understanding the generational divide
According to our 2024 Generational Dynamics Report, there is an overall sentiment of greater customer acceptance toward AI globally. Gen X through Gen Z are largely cautiously optimistic about the benefits of AI and its adoption by businesses.
The generational divide is particularly evident in service channel preferences. It is no surprise that our Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) survey found that Boomer respondents favour in-person interactions (82%), compared to 60% of Millennial and Gen Z respondents. Meanwhile, about half of younger ANZ respondents prefer digital options like in-app support (44%) or self-service chat (45%), while older consumers remain less enthusiastic about automated service agents (13% of ANZ Boomer respondents favour these options). When it came to service expectations, all generations highlighted the need for clarity, completeness, and open communication as the key standards for exceptional service.
The AI-human partnership
AI is quickly streamlining self-service and offering more opportunities for channel-less experiences. But humans should always be available if an issue needs to be escalated beyond AI’s capacity to help. For example, in industries such as healthcare and elder care—where the primary audience consists of older generations and requires a higher degree of empathy—one needs to consider if AI truly is the best option as the first point of contact. However, in high-traffic environments such as banks or insurance companies that receive hundreds of inquiries daily, AI can significantly reduce response times and allow human agents to focus on more complex issues.
It’s also important to consider the agent’s side of the interaction. With AI-powered assistants and customer insights, agents can direct their attention to those who prefer human-to-human interaction while leaving routine, easily resolvable inquiries to intelligently automated virtual agents.
As AI evolves, the future of personalisation lies in harmonising AI-driven interactions with human expertise. AI shouldn’t replace people. It should augment the employee experience to reduce agent workload, eliminate inefficiencies, and provide in-the-moment support. This type of AI-human partnership enables employees to focus on high-value tasks and interactions, driving increased job satisfaction and better customer outcomes.
The path to universal orchestration
Experience Orchestration is powered by conversational, predictive, and generative AI. These technologies automate, enhance, and continuously optimise what were once static experiences. As innovation accelerates, we’re moving toward universal orchestration — connecting front- and back-office functions to reimagine contact centres, customer and employee experiences, and the business as a whole.
Most Australian businesses have a growing appetite to provide connected customer experiences, with 97% of decision makers citing that they would adopt AI to enhance customer experience. A majority of customer service interactions begin with an automated voice assistant that gathers preliminary information before handing the case off to a human agent. This places most businesses at Level 2 of Experience Orchestration on the path toward universal orchestration at Level 5—which is a solid start.
Level 2 brings natural language automation to routine interactions across digital and voice channels — voice, text, chat, and social apps. Typical use cases include order management, scheduling, handling returns, and updating address information. However, there is still room to refine AI’s strategic role across the customer journey, to utilise it beyond generic assistance. Instead, it can be harnessed to enhance the insights available to human agents for more personalised and effective support, thereby moving to the next stage in Experience Orchestration evolution, by reshaping their systems, policies and processes.
What does AI-Powered Experience Orchestration look like in action? On the frontlines, AI virtual agents handle routine inquiries, analyse customer sentiment, and build a complete picture of the customer.
Through predictive routing, this information is then passed to a human agent, who steps in to resolve complex or emotionally charged issues. Equipped with an easily accessible overview of the customer, combined with an AI copilot that provides recommendations, human agents can resolve issues more efficiently, seamlessly, and accurately. This approach places the customer experience in the joint hands of both human and virtual agents, driving improved customer satisfaction at different points in the process while lowering average handle time (AHT).
The future of customer experience
By striking the right balance between AI automation and human expertise, businesses can deliver smarter, more seamless customer experiences—while laying the groundwork for a future where AI plays an even greater role in CX innovation. The sooner businesses determine their approach to orchestration and the technologies needed to enable it, the better they will be at adapting to ever-changing customer preferences and expectations.
As they do so, businesses should also remember that the human element is irreplaceable. AI-Powered Experience Orchestration serves to bring human agents and employees closer to the customer and their journey—by providing the tools, data, and context needed for more seamless and empathetic resolutions.
