How data and large language models are revolutionising business interactions

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are presenting opportunities for organisations in all sectors to drive efficiencies and innovation. As business leaders consider an AI strategy, they must ensure these investments deliver the right value to realize its true impact and potential. When businesses team up with generative AI-powered large language models (LLMs), they stand ready to transform their customer and employee experiences by tapping into this revolutionary new technology.

We live in a world of heightened consumer expectations where anything other than providing a seamless experience leaves companies exposed. In fact, our recent research revealed some of the major consumer pain points, emphasizing just how drastically consumer expectations have increased. For example, most customers making online purchases are already anticipating a poor experience.

As customers engage with brands across multiple channels like web, mobile, social, voice and more, it’s crucial for businesses to seamlessly connect their individual journeys. Failure to do so results in disjointed interactions and customer needs that are not met with authenticity and understanding. Tailoring this type of holistic, “channel-less” experience to every customer is how businesses should always approach customer care.

In today’s experience economy, organizations face increasing challenges to scale empathy and personalization across mounting service channels. Luckily, this is an area where AI and large language models (LLMs) can help.

With rich conversational intelligence, LLMs hold the key to better experiences that feel more human and less like a transaction. In addition to introducing a more human element to self-service options, LLMs allow organizations to mine insights and analyse patterns within every conversation and equip employees with the most valuable information to build deeper relationships with customers.

Breaking bad bot cycles

Bots are often the starting point for many customer service interactions. Since businesses commonly use flow-driven bots, consumers often find themselves in the middle of a robotic interaction repeating information multiple times and struggling to get the answers they need. This is because if a customer steps out of the flow, the bot becomes lost and cannot follow the conversation.

Flows powered by generative AI can be much more conversational, can distinguish context with greater comprehension and rapidly analyse the customer’s conversation. The result for customers is greater human-level engagements as these LLM-powered bots can permit more complex actions to be automated — moving us closer to virtual agents and freeing up employees to support the most intricate customer requests and needs.

With LLMs, we can move the needle on contextual understanding and break the cycle of bad experiences.

Utilising LLMs to display the best agent behaviours

LLMs understand human language at a more intuitive level than all other AI technologies. Their superior conversational capabilities will not only evolve self-service options, but also ensure human

agents are equipped with the right information and context needed to deliver seamless, connected experiences.

LLMs can sort through conversations between customers and a business' most capable agents to derive flows and guidance for how all agents should operate in complicated situations. These powerful assistants will even confirm if agents have completed all the required steps to deliver the best customer outcomes and ensure business and compliance requirements are met. To save an agent precious minutes in post-call processing, LLMs can also enable the automation of many back-office updates as the conversation progresses.

As software service providers give businesses and IT decision-makers the tools to trust AI and LLMs with essential data, by fine-tuning LLMs to the needs and knowledge of the business, this shift will save companies and their customers significant time and resources throughout the entire customer experience.

Capitalising on the AI revolution

LLMs and AI will increasingly help businesses make sense of where to begin innovating their customer journeys. The AI revolution is now, and organisations need to support all their employees to embrace it.

While many organisations may feel daunted by the prospect of AI, failure to adopt AI best practices will ultimately impact the customer experience and business outcomes. The needs and demands of customers today will continue to change and grow; by teaming up with AI, organizations will be ready and equipped for this evolution.