Empowering customer service with generative AI: enhancing agent performance while navigating challenges

Introduction. As large language models (LLMs), such as GPTs, become more intelligent, a key area of exploration is how these technologies can improve the customer experience. Contrary to common belief, many consumers, including Gen Z, prefer human-provided customer service, illustrating the importance of human-AI collaboration in the space. Method. By leveraging the author’s real-world knowledge of enterprise knowledge management and customer service delivery, we reviewed numerous literature about AI, knowledge management, and service design and synthesised practical insights for industry professionals to build a successful AI strategy. Analysis. We examined the gap between academic research on generative AI and how such solutions can be deployed in real-world enterprise contact centers. Results. We outline how companies are adopting generative AI, offer strategies for training AI models to assist with customer issues, discuss AI-powered localization, and share tips for facilitating human-AI collaboration. Conclusions. This research found that companies will require humans for effective customer service delivery because there is no complete substitute for human judgment in mission-critical settings. Despite this, companies can still see significant performance and customer satisfaction improvements by focusing on human-AI collaboration, and empowering human agents to focus on specialized tasks while the AI addresses rudimentary ones.