The Practical Leader's Guide to Making the Most of GenAI in Your CX and EX

GenAI: Let’s Get Real

While it may feel like hype, GenAI is one of the most disruptive technologies of our time—and it’s on the path to becoming one of the most transformative, too. 

GenAI has captured everyone’s attention—and spending is set to reach a whopping $143 billion by 2027. Every CIO, product development, CX, and EX leader across every industry (financial services, retail, communications, QSR, logistics, telco, and healthcare) has it at the top of their agenda.

It’s not just another buzzword and it’s far more than mere technology. It is a potent platform for transformation—especially when applied to CX and EX.

Over half (55%) of business leaders are currently "very interested" in implementing AI to address customer experience, while 84% say that GenAI will be relevant within the next 12 months when it comes to addressing experience gaps.

The excitement surrounding GenAI, however, should not lead to hasty decisions. Nick Vrana, our Global Director of AI Experiences, emphasizes the importance of having a plan before diving into GenAI implementation:

When applied strategically, GenAI paves the way to loyal customers and a devoted employee base. But it is about being grounded in intelligence, propelled by innovation, and elevating your company above the ordinary.

The Stellar Take

GenAI's impact can be profound—it can shape the foundation of connected, customer-centric businesses and foster powerful, ownable experiences. By harnessing the capabilities of GenAI, companies are rewriting the rules of customer and employee engagement. 

However, applying GenAI indiscriminately is not the way to go. Success lies in taking a mindful approach and identifying targeted GenAI applications that align with your organization's unique goals.

A mindful approach needs to take into account factors like resource limitations, which cause the growing uncertainty in whether to adopt AI—what we like to call the “AI Readiness Gap.” This is a new era of technology, and with new eras come new hesitations.

Understanding where GenAI can be applied to improve your employee or customer experience requires an honest, objective review of the entire customer and employee journeys. This is a process that will uncover opportunities that are true to the core of your business.

The Path to Success: The AI-Powered Customer Journey

As Taylor Standlee, Stellar Elements’ CMO, puts it:

Customer experiences vary widely––from buying habits, to budget, to post-sales service needs. Businesses must adapt to these experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints. Leaders from four out of 10 industries rank this “Integration Gap” as a top five challenge, with 43% seeing it as a growing issue.

First, start with customer journey analytics that visualize behavior across various channels and product interactions. Leverage GenAI to create real-time customer journey analytics that will reduce churn, increase lifetime value, and inform a better experience. Then, embark on quantitative customer journey mapping to pinpoint specific instances in customers’ interactions that can elevate an average experience to a remarkable one. 

Analytics and mapping only scratch the surface. The real magic happens when you transition from mapping to orchestrating real-time customer experiences with the help of GenAI.

Adding GenAI into the mix lets you connect the dots across all customer interactions, shifting from guessing customer needs to intelligently predicting and informing those needs in the moments that matter.

This real-time customer assistance makes the customer journey effortless and delightful while building strong customer loyalty.

The Stellar Take

The key to applying GenAI to the customer experience starts with an outside-in approach. By combining customer journey analytics with the capabilities of GenAI, you’ll not only understand but also optimize the customer experience.

Look at the journey through a business-savvy, customer and employee-centric lens (as opposed to marketing, financial, or operational). Make customer needs and intentions the propeller of your product innovation initiatives. That is how you will uncover areas where GenAI will be most impactful. When done right, customers will be better serviced and engaged—and become loyal advocates for your business.

Building the Right Foundation: Unified Data & Intelligence

Equipped with intelligence from customer journey analytics and mapping, you and your CX team have a solid handle on how customers interact with your products and where they need extra help. You’re ready to use GenAI to orchestrate adaptive, contextual customer interactions.

Truly harnessing the power of GenAI to transform the CX hinges on access to underlying, robust customer data. This data should provide a detailed view of the customer journey, capturing when, where, how, and why customers interact with a brand and support systems—and identifying friction points along the way.

Leveraging this data involves applying GenAI models to automatically trigger appropriate assistance based on the context of the customer. The result is a seamless, responsive interaction that caters to a customer's needs in that specific moment.

The Stellar Take

There’s no wand-waving magic with GenAI; the technology is fundamentally tied to the depth, breadth, and integrity of the underlying data. As one respondent to our recent CX20 Global Study aptly put: “While I’m excited about AI, I think we must be cautious. Without the right data, no AI will provide the right outcome—or customers aren’t going to believe the outcome it provides.”

But, meaningful customer journey insights is about more than how much data you have, it’s having the right data: comprehensive, well-organized, reliable, and easily accessible. 

We refer to it as unified customer intelligence, and it’s the linchpin in using GenAI to facilitate instantaneous, tailored interactions.

The potential of GenAI is limitless if propelled by unified customer intelligence. It opens the door to fascinating CX opportunities and transforms your CX from a lackluster, one-size-fits-all interaction to a customized, in-the-moment experience.

Winning with GenAI: Top CX & EX Use Cases Every Leader Should Consider

Generative AI is remarkable in its ability to resurface existing data in consumable ways. It is only limited by what you feed it and how you build it. 

When driven by intelligent data (and built with proper restrictions in place to prevent hallucinations), GenAI is a versatile tool with the potential to reshape both CX and EX. It powers new digital and physical product and service experiences, turbocharges your chatbots, turns your support agents into customer advocates, and transforms your employee onboarding and training experience.

Is AI ready for CX, and is CX ready for AI? Riley says, "The answer to both is yes; but, because the technology is constantly evolving, the way these disciplines interact will be critical in understanding our customers’ future CX expectations."

Here are four compelling use cases that showcase GenAI's power for re-imagining the customer experience and re-invigorating employee interactions:

Powering New Digital and Physical Product and Service Experiences

GenAI analyzes customer data and feedback to identify unmet customer needs and preferences. This information can be used to create innovative products or services tailored to unique customer expectations and aligned with brand values.

These interactions feel natural, friendly, and trustworthy, which make customers happier and more satisfied. A number of retailers have embraced AI to offer virtual try-on assistants and create personalized product lines, even going as far as enabling autonomous locations.

Example

An early adopter of AI, Sephora’s virtual makeup tool lets users experiment with recommended products and new makeup trends, share to their social networks, and earn rewards and promotions.

Turbocharging Chatbots

GenAI significantly enhances chatbot capabilities for both CX and EX. In customer support, GenAI equips chatbots with the context and understanding to respond to complex customer queries, providing immediate and accurate solutions.

For EX, GenAI-powered chatbots serve as virtual employee coaches, assisting with onboarding, training, and answering HR-related questions. This results in quicker issue resolution and improved employee satisfaction.

Example

Bank of America’s chatbot, Erica, uses natural language processing (NLP) and predictive algorithms to anticipate why a consumer is reaching out. It then acts as a personal assistant, checking balances, managing cards, scheduling payments, checking FICO scores, and even monitoring spending habits and subscriptions. When a customer needs additional help, customer service agents can pick up right where Erica left off.

Turning Support Agents into Customer Advocates

The impact of AI in customer service is undeniable. A resounding 83% of customer service professionals acknowledge that AI empowers them to assist more people effectively and 60% agree that AI is a time-saving miracle.

GenAI assists agents by providing real-time, contextual information, suggesting solutions, and offering insights to resolve customer issues more effectively. With GenAI tools, agents become more efficient and capable of offering top-notch assistance, turning them into customer advocates instead of a customer’s last-ditch effort.

Example

Walmart’s GenAI tool, My Assistant, is designed to free corporate workers from monotonous and repetitive tasks to ensure more time is carved out for enhancing customer experiences. Salesforce’s Einstein GPT creates personalized responses for customer service representatives.

Streamlining Employee Collaboration

In the realm of employee experience, GenAI breaks down organizational silos and enhances cross-departmental collaboration. It surfaces knowledge from various departments, expediting decision-making and communication.

Organizations that embrace GenAI for collaboration witness increased productivity and efficiency, resulting in a more engaged and committed workforce. 

Example

AT&T recently rolled out its own generative AI tool for corporate employees, Ask AT&T. Coders and software developers across the company are using it to collaborate and become more productive. It’s also being used to translate customer and employee documentation from English to other languages. The company has plans to extend its use across other departments, including customer care, IT, and HR.

Your Playbook to GenAI Success

Unlocking the potential of GenAI for transformative CX and EX demands a strategic approach.

Follow this playbook to successfully navigate your journey and find the hidden opportunities unique to your brand and business.

Don’t just jump in. 

Prioritize areas within your organization where GenAI can make the most impact, and be selective about where you focus this new tool. Start with small, manageable projects to demonstrate value and build confidence. Monitor and measure the impact, continuously assessing and adapting based on feedback and results.

Assess your needs and evaluate the right GenAI tools. 

Will it scale with your organization? Is it easy to use? Will it integrate with your other systems? Do you need to build your own or can you use a publicly available tool? These are all questions to consider before investing in GenAI. Test drive free open-source tools like OpenAI’s LLMs (from the creator of ChatGPT).  Once you’ve uncovered any constraints or limitations, then consider building your own model if resources allow.

Get your (data) house in order. 

Make sure your data is well-organized and your intelligence is unified. There’s no need to build yet another data warehouse and accrue more “data debt.” Your most valuable source is your internal customer event data collected across all your customer systems and interaction points. This data is the foundation for training GenAI models to predict and respond to customers and employees in real time and is critical in providing real-time context for applications like Chatbots.  

Foster a culture that embraces AI. 

Generative AI is still uncharted territory for many. It’s unrealistic to expect innovative uses from tools we are unfamiliar with. Encourage knowledge sharing and provide necessary training to effectively use GenAI tools. Enable your teams to experiment and explore their potential. 

Consider data privacy, security, and compliance measures. 

Though data privacy and compliance is not the job of CX teams, you still need to play a part in ensuring sensitive customer data is kept safe. Don’t feed sensitive information into your GenAI tools. Work with your data or security teams to embed data security protocols into your customer intelligence repository and keep sensitive data safe.

Understand and build processes to reduce the risks. 

GenAI tools sometimes suggest incorrect recommendations or introduce errors. GenAI can also “hallucinate” when it uses training data, constructing entirely new data based on the patterns it has learned. This can be alleviated by making sure the underlying data used to train the tool is complete and accurate. 

Beware of the human-tech balance gap.

The most common GenAI mistake is focusing on automating—rather than augmenting—human decision-making and improving customer interactions. In fact, only 45% of customers desire fully digitized (automated) interactions, signaling that the slight majority of customers still have a preference for a human touch. So, focus on critical business points where human interaction or expertise adds value. 

Innovate with Stellar Elements, Your Experience Partner

Your customers want what they want when, where, and how they want it. Your employees want to be appreciated and empowered. You want growth, customer loyalty, and differentiation. Stellar Elements can help you bring it all together. 

Stellar Elements has been at the forefront of helping organizations achieve digital transformation and exceed expectations for over two decades. 

Partner with us to turn your GenAI vision into extraordinary experiences, seamlessly blending human and GenAI capabilities for a future where customer and employee expectations are not just met, but exceeded.

We deliver outcomes in 3 key areas

A leading telco provider in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) tapped Amdocs and Stellar Elements to build a fully autonomous in-store retail experience for its customers.

• This autonomous store offers an entirely AI-driven retail experience with zero human intervention, a first-of-its-kind for a global telco service provider.

• What sets this autonomous store apart is its ability to empower customers with full control over their shopping journey. Through the use of GenAI, customers enter the store via QR code or facial recognition, select items or services, and make payments instantly using a mobile app or at the exit gates––all at their own pace. 

• This level of autonomy not only provides a unique and personalized experience but also significantly reduces the average customer handling time, increasing margins. 


• GenAI plays a pivotal role in this transformation, enabling facial recognition, real-time tracking, and a virtual agent that understands and fulfills customer needs. 


• This innovative approach shifts the brick-and-mortar retail experience from one-size-fits-all to tailored, efficient, and technologically advanced.