Intro

AI Agents can transform your customer service processes to improve productivity, reduce costs and speed up positive resolutions – but only if they meet the needs and expectations of modern customers by providing great Customer Experience (CX). 

Great CX contributes to long-term loyalty, which offers a significantly higher return on investment when compared to attracting new customers. Retained customers spend 31% more than new ones and are integral to the long-term success of your business. Getting things wrong can be fatal – 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand after a single bad experience.2 

Considering how important CX is, it’s absolutely essential that any AI Agent can understand your customer’s needs and provide satisfying resolutions. But this is no easy task in a world where consumers are still mistrustful of automation. 

To ensure customers enjoy great experiences when interacting with an AI Agent, businesses must adopt Agentic AI – a new generation of AI Agents that can navigate complex customer needs, provide engaging support, and directly get things done, ultimately leading to better CX. 

What is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI represents the next evolution of AI Agents, capable of dynamic reasoning and independent decision-making. In a customer service environment, Agentic AI empowers autonomous customer service agents who interact directly with your customers to help them accomplish their goals. 

At its core, Agentic AI is a goal-orientated technology that breaks down a customer’s request into a series of actions. Using backend integrations and pre-trained knowledge, the AI Agent can then understand and resolve those actions and the customer’s problem within the autonomy you allow. 

This level of autonomous decision-making represents a significant change from prior generations of AI Agent, which could only address specific problems as part of predetermined workflows. 

For customers, interacting with an Agentic AI Agent will feel similar to speaking to a human. The AI Agent can easily tackle nonlinear conversations, adapting to small talk or unrelated divergences while still offering personalized responses that aim to redirect the customer back to their goal. 

Ultimately, Agentic AI represents a new standard of end-to-end automation that gives customers an incredibly fast, adaptable, and effective self-service option to help them solve challenges that range from basic queries to more complex needs like tracking down lost orders or processing returns. 

How Agentic AI Improves Customer Experience?

To improve overall CX within an organization, you need to prioritize customer needs. 80% of American consumers stated that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service3 were the most significant elements regarding positive customer experiences. 

Agentic AI Agents directly address each of these factors and improve them in every area:

Speeds up customer service interactions

An AI Agent that utilizes Agentic offers an incredibly responsive customer support option. Not only will customers be able to instantly connect with an AI Agent rather than waiting on hold for a human. 

When paired with NLU-driven Conversational AI and Generative AI, Agentic AI Agents can provide almost instant answers and can rapidly generate any required responses or content – further increasing the speed of any query. 

Additionally, with access to tools and backend systems, the Agent can automate tasks itself rather than having to route to a human or elevate the case. This once more speeds up the path towards a satisfactory outcome. 

Offers convenient interaction

Convenience is all about giving customers what they want in a way that suits them best. AI Agents can interact by voice or text, and customers can contact them over many different channels, at any time of day. When utilized within the Cognigy.AI platform, the AI Agent also provides live translation and can communicate in over 100 languages. 

All of these elements result in an incredibly convenient self-service solution that allows a customer to carry out tasks at whatever time they want, wherever they are in the world. 

Efficient goal completion

Knowledgeable help is a core part of good CX, but pre-Agentic Agents could sometimes fail to offer adequate levels of support. With a reliance on predefined conversational flows, some customer queries or inputs could lead to errors and dead-ends– something you can’t afford if you want to provide great CX. 

With Agentic AI, every customer query is broken down into a series of tasks and then actioned automatically whether that be informational or transactional. The AI Agent will talk a customer through the query and can adapt and flex to any variations in their conversation, replicating the experience of speaking to a human agent. With dynamic reasoning, the AI Agent will work its way through all of the quirks of natural language while remaining focused on accomplishing the customer’s goal. 

These capabilities, when combined with initial training using your internal knowledge base and LLMs, mean that your Agentic AI Agent will always aim to provide knowledgeable support. If the AI Agent recognizes that it can’t resolve the query alone, it can inform the customer and route to a human agent or even consult another AI Agent who may specialize in that area. 

Improves personalization

Personalization plays a core role in what customers refer to as ‘friendly service’. It's not just a ‘nice to have’ – it’s now a core expectation integral to good CX, with 81% of customers saying they prefer a personalized experience from brands4. 

Agentic AI can provide a sense of personalized, friendly support thanks to its access to short- and long-term memory in addition to CRM integration. Calling on this memory means the AI Agent can look up customer details and communicate based on previous conversations and preferences. 

When an Agentic AI Agent talks to a customer, what were once static interactions in a pre-AI world have become proactive engagement with an AI Agent. Customers aren’t just receiving flat responses to each query – they’re getting personalized solutions that make them feel valued. 

CX Use Cases For Agentic AI

Struggling to see how an AI Agent can transform your CX processes? Here are some use cases that demonstrate the utility of Agentic AI and how it improves customer interactions.

Customer Support Agent

The most obvious use case for Agentic AI is to create a customer-facing support AI Agent that can communicate directly with customers. They can answer calls instantly, process any necessary verification requests, and then quickly get to work identifying a customer’s problem and working to resolve it.

For specific scenarios such as order tracking, Agentic AI Agents provide an unprecedented layer of utility. The agent can take a customer’s details, fetch their order information, and then, if there are any issues or delays, take additional action such as calling the warehouse to expedite the order and further improve the chance of a satisfactory outcome. 

Agent Copilot

AI is not designed to replace existing human assets but to augment them. Your customer service team can use Agent Copilot features to improve the efficiency of every call. The AI Agent will pre-qualify the customer and provide detailed case information for the human agent, which means they’ll answer a call and be better equipped to provide a satisfactory solution.

By improving your human team’s efficiency, Agentic AI also benefits CX, since more productive and happier agents achieve better results for customers. 

Outbound customer service

Any type of outbound contact with a customer has traditionally been a challenge for automated agents, since it’s virtually impossible to predict what a customer may say or how they’ll react. Agentic AI makes outbound contact far more flexible, as the AI Agent will be able to detect sentiment and adapt to help pursue goals without sacrificing customer experience. 

Examples of Agentic AI 

The best way to understand how Agentic AI can be beneficial to CX is to see it in action. The team at Cognigy.AI has created a simple demonstration video that shows how Agentic AI facilitates a customer booking insurance for their trip. 

During this demonstration, the AI Agent maps out the steps involved in the process and takes care of important steps like verifying information, providing personalized offers, and processing the order. It can also switch languages freely to respond to customer requests. 

What Is The Future of Agentic AI For CX?

Agentic AI is a bold step forward in terms of AI Agents and how they can support customers. With the ability to reason and plan, Agentic AI Agents help offer rapid, personalized service journeys that prior generations of automated chatbots could only dream of. 

As enterprise businesses begin to embrace Agentic AI, the quality of customer service will rise, which will lead to a change in customer expectations. Once accustomed to the speed and utility of Agentic AI Agents as a self-service option, customers will have little patience for businesses that fail to offer similar experiences. 

Though it is still a relatively new technology, we expect that Agentic AI will drive record levels of AI adoption within customer service centers across all industries. Though human agents will always play a key role, Agentic AI will help better augment them and create more resource and cost efficiency within your team. 

Drive Better CX With Agentic AI For Contact Centers

Put customer experience at the heart of your automation with Cognigy.AI. We bring extensive experience in the customer service sector to every client, with bespoke training data and sector-specific experience that can be used to design the next generation of self-service AI Agents. 

Give your customers the most advanced Agentic AI customer experiences possible by booking a demo today, or visit our Agentic AI solutions page to learn more.

References

1: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2020/01/29/the-value-of-investing-in-loyal-customers/ 

2 & 3: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html