Exceptional customer support has long been the linchpin of success for any business. If customer support falls short, no matter how superior a product or marketing strategy might be, it undermines everything. It’s true that the evolution of conversational AI over the past few years transformed customer service by automating interactions through smarter chatbots. However, recent strides in generative AI and specialized large language models have propelled the customer support landscape further. The next-gen dynamic AI agents, powered by generative and conversational AI, simulate human speech and drive goal-based conversations with remarkable accuracy, surpassing the capabilities of earlier chatbots.
By now, it’s clear that generative and conversational AI in combination are the future of customer support: The revolution is already well underway. The question now for businesses is not whether to deploy this technology—none can afford not to—but where this technology is going. What’s clear is that we are hurtling, right now, into an exciting new era: The era of Zero Touch customer support.
The Current State of Customer Support
As we’ll discuss shortly, developments in the world of customer support are moving at a rapid pace. Still, before delving into what the future holds in store, it’s worth pausing to examine how far we’ve already come. The fact is that in a very short period, the customer support power duo of generative plus conversational AI has completely changed the game for businesses.
Today’s generative AI-enhanced dynamic AI agents can effortlessly handle repetitive questions, and—through perpetual learning and training—are getting better by the day at handling more complex ones. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that these agents can be active 24 hours, 7 days a week; can drive conversations in multiple languages; and can offer high-level personalization through product recommendations, customized discounts and tailored push notifications. And that’s not to mention the sheer scale these AI agents are capable of operating on.
The Next Step: Zero Touch Customer Support
The benefits listed above are already well-known to countless businesses. Less commonly understood is precisely where all this technology is headed. The answer? Fully autonomous customer support.
In a fully autonomous customer support model, the human agent and the AI agent come to function as an airtight, mutually reinforcing system uniquely. In this model, also known as a zero touch model, a trained AI operator oversees, manages and fine-tunes the AI model—ensuring that the vast majority of customer service interactions can be safely automated with no human support required during runtime.
Crucially, the zero touch model also eliminates one of the major bottlenecks harming businesses today: Namely, CX fragmentation. Right now, many consumers seeking help from businesses are forced to navigate a confusing archipelago of mobile apps, social media pages and customer support helplines. Information-sharing between these channels can often be slow, or even non-existent. Meaning, that customers often have to start from scratch when engaging with a different channel—a major liability at a time when convenience and personalization are baseline expectations from most consumers. Furthermore, fragmentation also exists among the tools utilized by businesses for customer support, marketing, and sales.
The zero touch model puts an end to this confusing, disordered state of affairs. Previously siloed data streams are automatically channeled toward a unified hub, leveraging a full customer support stack that radically improves the accuracy and speed of decision-making. This is a solution to a very real problem: 55% of consumers don’t feel holistically engaged when interacting with customer services. A fully autonomous approach breaks down the barriers. On the consumer end, switching from one channel to another comes to feel like continuing a single, uninterrupted conversation. For businesses, investing in a full-stack integration of their CX tools and platforms streamlines the management of various CX components and reduces complexity to facilitate smoother data exchange.
What Does This Mean for Customer Support Agents?
Inevitably, the widespread adoption of the zero touch model is going to radically reshape the customer service operations of most businesses. As older roles vanish, new ones are going to proliferate: AI operators, trainers, system maintainers and many others. It would also create new opportunities for more specialized, analytical and strategic positions.
Training and specializing customer support agents for roles that include stepping in when customer queries may require more nuanced and empathetic responses, handling AI training and oversight to ensure overall quality while monitoring customer interactions, ensuring these interactions adhere to ethical standards and company policies, building and maintaining customer relationships such as personalized service for high-value clients, and analyzing AI-collected data to glean insights and inform business decisions will be important.
Furthermore, overseeing the seamless integration of various channels (chat, voice, email, etc.) to ensure consistency across these platforms will become a key role. Teams will need to shift into new roles with new training processes and systems, but that also means more opportunities for human agents to contribute to developing and innovating new AI tools and customer engagement strategies.
In the short term, human agents are still going to be important, although their nature of the job will change radically—and for the better. Right now, customer support roles can often feel numbing, as representatives handle the same simple, easily resolvable queries over and over and over again. With generative AI-enhanced dynamic AI agents filtering the vast majority of customer support interactions, the human agents can be much more efficient. They will handle only those queries that the AI can’t, and they will have the time they need to build the kind of memorable customer relationships essential to enhancing consumer satisfaction and trust.
How to Achieve Fully Autonomous Customer Support?
Achieving this model for your enterprise is a multi-step process. It requires identifying a scalable adoption strategy, surveying the current product landscape and finding the right fit for your business. It doesn’t end there; true autonomous transformation requires a much deeper change. Partnerships with AI vendors need to be complemented by a deep-seated commitment on the part of your organization to make your AI investment succeed. Some departments will have to be streamlined and consolidated to facilitate true autonomous AI, and many current employees will need to be retrained as AI operators and managers.
For any business that hopes to compete effectively today and in the future, proactively guiding your company’s zero touch transformation is an imperative, not a luxury. Consumers today are more fickle than ever: If they encounter a company that seems to forget who they are each time they switch from mobile to website, or find themselves wasting twenty minutes trying to resolve a simple query, they will not hesitate to jump ship to a competitor.
And it’s important to emphasize that what we’re talking about here isn’t remotely speculative. The wheels are already in motion; conversational plus generative AI is already reshaping the face of customer support and opening unparalleled wealth-building potential that may even surpass the internet. The autonomous zero touch model is the future—and we are already swiftly progressing towards that envisioned future.
