[Exclusive Interview] Zendesk Explains How ChatGPT Enabled Customer Experience Can Trigger More ROI For Businesses

Recently, we interacted with Mr. Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP India & SAARC, Zendesk – world’s leading SaaS based customer support, sales and customer communications platform.

Here are the interview highlights:

What should Indian businesses keep in mind while investing in AI-powered CX solutions?

My biggest advice to businesses thinking of investing in AI-powered CX is to be thoughtful in their approach. Moving quickly is important, especially when technology like generative AI holds much promise for businesses, but it is not without its limitations. Human oversight is still vital in ensuring the right steps are taken to ensure the best experience for customers, agents and admins.

Imagine a scenario where generative AI is the new employee, organisations wouldn’t push it to work on its own without training it and ensuring it has the right information and data to do its job properly. Establishing trust in AI is paramount in deepening customer loyalty, especially when it might cost you customers – in India, two thirds of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. That’s why businesses need to place emphasis on transparency and accuracy such that the solution is able to provide information on the quality of AI predictions along with confidence scores.

Businesses should also understand that when it comes to CX, having AI trained with CX-specific data models is crucial to success. AI is only as good as the intelligence it’s fed. Doing so allows agents and admins to have access to accurate context and domain specific knowledge that helps them quickly provide the customer with the appropriate resolution.

As a whole, AI is a game-changer, but blindly implementing it for all customer interactions and workflows does not always end well. Acknowledging that there are some scenarios that simply should not be handled entirely by AI is a starting point. Businesses need to identify areas in which the solution can cause a lot of pain to customers, take the right measures to safeguard and test the integration and ensure that the technology can be trusted. This can mitigate issues that may negatively impact CX.

Given the budget cuts businesses are witnessing, how can they do more with less using low-to-no-code CX solutions?

Customer expectations are at an all-time high: 80% of consumers in India say their customer service standards have risen over the past year. And CX will benefit from data and a deep understanding of what the customer wants. Today, AI is widely adopted and plays a major role in CX solutions and they are helping businesses reduce costs during an economic downturn and a climate of budget cuts.

When companies use the right AI strategically to improve customer experience, it’s a powerful tool to create meaningful connections with customers, particularly in a time where businesses are under pressure to innovate with smaller budgets. Unfortunately, many of the AI solutions in the market today are slow and expensive, requiring heavy IT spend, lengthy implementation processes, and highly specialised resources. They are often designed to work in silos, which means customers have to deal with bots that just get in their way more than solve their problems.

That is why low-to-no-code solutions are fast gaining popularity – because it’s making AI accessible for businesses of all sizes. The common use case for low and no code tools within the CX industry is currently a lot of classic, reactive support needs like automation, recommendation and prediction. In the future, we anticipate low and no code working effectively across the entire customer journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion, retention and finally, advocacy. Low and no code tools will eventually improve significant aspects of any support task across every support use case. And this would all be done with just a few clicks and without needing any coding skills whatsoever.

Can Immersive CX deliver positive ROI? If so, how?

Immersive CX represents a significant shift towards more natural, fluid and uninterrupted interactions. Consumers expect brands to meet them where they are, and under their terms through seamless and engaging interactions. Over the last several years, business leaders in India have recognized how digital transformation has expanded the role of CX, prompting them to increase investments to meet the elevated customer expectation.

In fact, 92% of Indian business leaders believe that the optimal customer experience is immersive and integrates naturally into what customers are doing. This is because of the positive outcomes that CX investments have garnered: 94% of leaders in India said their organisation has seen a positive ROI on CX in the past year. And roughly three in four of them say CX is an important priority in the next 12 months.

Immersive CX is fueled by new standards that rely on mature AI-driven solutions. Businesses can reap positive ROI if AI experiences are more evolved and conversational, offer deeper personalisation and are able to ensure customer wellbeing. This is what customers want — 77% of customers in India expect all experiences — in-store and online — to be personalised and 80% of them are willing to spend more on brands that offer deeper personalization.

Immersive CX solutions present a great opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. For example, an e-commerce company that adopts immersive CX solutions can use the power of AI to action abandoned carts, support active carts, share feature promotions in the moment and create personalised buying journeys. They can also accelerate sales by identifying new revenue opportunities as CX solutions provide a holistic view of the shopper’s complete purchase history, merchandise preferences and browsing journey to drive better product recommendations for cross-sell and upsell, increasing overall order value. It’s indisputable that immersive CX is critical for business success.

Why is analyzing customer sentiment and intent important? And how can businesses go about it?

Poor customer service interactions can significantly impact customer retention and loyalty. This is because dissatisfied customers tend to share their negative experiences with their family, friends and acquaintances, potentially discouraging them from doing business with the brand. In the APAC region, 71% of consumers said that a bad interaction with a business can actually ruin their day. And nearly half feel that brands don’t care about their wellbeing. Customers want to be understood and valued — 71% of customers in India are more likely to purchase from brands that care about their emotional state.

When businesses don’t actively track customer wellbeing, intent and sentiment, it can be a daunting task to anticipate and fix the most critical problems, leading to more disgruntled customers. In India, 91% of businesses say their approach to analysing customer sentiment has been ad hoc. Businesses that fail to recognize the effects of negative experiences stand to lose more than a few disgruntled customers – their brand image may suffer hugely.

Generative AI has made it possible for businesses to track intent and sentiment analysis. When CX solutions are integrated with large language models like ChatGPT and work out of the box, businesses can create highly personalised and valuable customer conversations. For example, when a customer raises an issue about a broken product, CX solutions integrated with generative AI can detect the customer’s specific intent to make a return which can be routed to the correct customer service representative, without costly training or expensive integrations. This increases time to value and ensures a positive return on investment in AI. It ultimately means that businesses win by increasing revenue while pleasing customers — a true measure of exceptional CX.

Why is CX-driven growth important for businesses in India?

Businesses in India are faced with the reality where 4 in 5 customers in India will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences. And 80% of customers make purchase decisions based on the quality of customer experience. This goes to say that CX is the key to customer retention, and ultimately growth. Amid fund crunch and inflation, CX has the potential to enable much needed growth — 91% of leaders in India say delivering great customer experience is critical to meeting business goals, making it extremely important to future-proof any organisation’s customer base. Going forward, providing great customer service will become even more important to build resilience amidst uncertain times and brands that invest in CX technology to provide immersive experiences will see a boost in customer acquisition and loyalty, and ultimately witness growth.