GenAI: Is it a game changer for customer relationship management?
TM Forum’s CEM collaboration team has been evaluating GenAI’s potential to radically change the way telcos interact with their customers, particularly when it comes to the delivery and support of hyper-personalized services.
Communications service providers (CSPs) are already harnessing rapid advancements in AI, Machine Learning, and real-time data processing to enhance customer experience through hyper-personalization, as well as to allow for a more systematic and objective evaluation of the outcomes of marketing campaigns. GenAI, however, opens the door to new capabilities.
One of the advantages of personalization is it supports the delivery of diverse modes of content exchange, contextualized across various channels. This is important given the development of multi-modal interactions (combining voice, image, video) along with the emergence of interfaces such as augmented/virtual reality which demand a quick and on-demand exchange of information.
The inherent capability of Generative AI can be applied to improve overall experience by feeding the right information and context more quickly to customer and business channels. In addition, generative AI based solutions can help CSPs to cater to the diverse requirements of hyper-personalization by enabling human-like rapid interactions, personalized multi-modal content generation, and contextual information exchange and many more.
The adoption of Gen AI helps CSP to progress towards hyper-personalization by leveraging the transformative abilities of large language models (LLM) and other Gen AI foundational models which are further enhanced with contextual insights extracted from business operations encompassing factors like demography, historical interactions, expressed preferences, and requirements, among others.
Example use cases:
2. Increased efficiency of self-care applications
3. Next Best Experience (NBx) and Decision Intelligence
Figure: a variety of GenAI applications for the customer context
CSPs and their customers are almost always very closely connected to each other, , which creates a high need for interaction, as well as a large opportunity to use data to manage the experience journey. CSPs use many mechanisms to connect and serve customer e.g., Online channel, call center, Chatbot, user education session and so on.
CSPs need to apply technology that fit to the choices made by customer for device, application, and lifestyle, through:
In summary, GenAI can help making the decisions based on the created knowledge through the AI for the distributed decisions in the journey engagement. To apply GenAI correctly, each (sub-) process asks for a deep understanding of the business process. The different aspects in the business process must be coherent designed across the engagements. Namely:
GenAI can be “generic” AI in terms of strategy, organization, technology, but in terms of the customer, business and operations, the gathered AI knowledge is very different and comes from very different data objects of the sub-business processes.
The study highlights the challenges of AI-data-driven innovation in the communication service provider environment and the key role of coherence in promoting new business processes & technologies. Please join us in creating effective GenAI - customer context - that drives our business forward! Join the project here to find out more or contact the CEM Team Chair, Arnold Buddenberg (arnold.buddenberg@orange.com).