Amit Gandhi, CEO of NovelVox, an AI-enabled contact center solution provider, helps organizations deliver impeccable customer experience.
Imagine a world where you reach out to customer support and receive immediate help. You don’t have to wait on hold or repeat your problem to multiple agents. Not only this, you receive an apology and a refund notification for a delayed order before you’ve had a chance to ask for it. This is becoming possible due to agentic AI.
Agentic AI is a more advanced version of artificial intelligence that not only listens but also takes actions on its own to significantly enhance the user’s experience. According to Gartner, by 2029, agentic AI will be set to handle 80% of routine customer service tasks, potentially reducing operational costs by up to 30%.
Let’s explore what it is and how CX leaders can leverage its potential.
Changing The Customer Experience Scenario For Companies
Agentic AI is much more efficient in meeting the demands of customers in comparison to traditional chatbots. It offers a hyper-personalized experience.
Hyper-Personalized Experiences
Agentic AI can pull insights from your past preferences, purchases and even from the way you interact with a website. It uses the information to create experiences that feel personalized.
Have you ever clicked a button on a website in frustration? Agentic AI can recognize that you are upset and offer help before you even open a support ticket.
Autonomous Problem Solving
Agentic AI can anticipate problems such as payment failures and delivery delays, intervening and fixing the issues. According to a McKinsey report, companies utilizing AI are witnessing tangible results, achieving a 40% reduction in call volumes and a 50% decrease in resolution time.
Smarter Conversations
Chatbots only respond to customers’ simple questions. Agentic AI can perform complex tasks such as starting returns, scheduling appointments and processing refunds—all in the background. Shopify uses artificial intelligence that understands complex support requests and handles them without bouncing customers from one agent to another.
Unified Omnichannel Experiences
Agentic AI doesn’t just remember your last ticket number. It retains the entire context of your interactions across email, chat, social media and phone. If customers no longer need to repeat themselves, they can experience a frictionless, consistent journey across every touchpoint.
Boost In ROI And Revenue
When customers receive personalized recommendations that meet their needs and find services proactive, they tend to return to the same service to make repeat purchases. This results in better customer retention rates, driving stronger ROI. According to Broadvoice, companies can boost their business efficiency by up to 40% and reduce costs by up to 30% by automating routine tasks.
Efficiency In Business Operations
Agentic AI helps human agents focus on real, complex problems that require a human touch. When an agent is busy solving their customers’ problems, AI takes care of predictable and repetitive issues in the background.
Challenges To Watch Out For
Despite its numerous advantages, agentic AI has several challenges that must be addressed.
Trust And Transparency
When an AI system starts making decisions, such as denying a request and issuing refunds on behalf of customers, users may question it and try to understand why these decisions are being made. It can create a trust issue, and companies need to be ready to explain.
Privacy And Biasness
AI is completely dependent on the quality of data we feed to it. If the data is biased, outdated or flawed, AI can make inconsistent or unfair decisions.
AI And Human Collaboration
AI can handle repetitive and predictable problems, but handling complex issues like dealing with an upset customer is not easy. Therefore, it needs to “know” when to step back and transfer the things to a human.
Tech Integration
For agentic AI to perform to its fullest, it needs to access your business’s existing systems like order management, CRMs, billing and inventory. This integration can be tricky as it requires resources, time and coordination across departments and operations to make everything function smoothly.
What Can Customer Experience Leaders Do Today?
If you are a leader driving customer experience efforts, deploying agentic AI can be both exciting and overwhelming. You should start with small efforts and scale them wisely.
Begin with focused and high-impact use cases.
Implement agentic AI in routine tasks like answering common FAQs, recovering abandoned shopping carts or processing refunds. It delivers quick wins and reduces agent workload in this area.
Maintain transparency.
Your AI’s actions should be easy to understand for both agents and customers. This builds trust and confidence in the system.
Encourage strong collaboration between your human agents and AI.
Your AI system should be trained to understand when it needs to participate in a conversation and when it should transfer the conversation to the human agent. Agentic AI is there to support your team, not replace it.
Expand gradually to support across multiple channels.
Your AI should support customers coming through multiple channels, regardless of whether it is email, chat, social media or phone.
Leading The Way For The Future
Businesses focus on results, and agentic AI can have a big impact on the bottom line. When a significant share of repetitive tasks are autonomously handled, companies can cut support costs substantially and reallocate resources to more strategic initiatives.
From providing hyper-personalized service and reducing operational costs to boosting ROI, the impact of agentic AI is already visible across organizations. However, the success of this technology depends on how thoughtfully businesses deploy it. Leaders need to balance automation with empathy by investing in both talent and technology.
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