The CX Imperative: 6 Keys To Delivering Great Customer Experience In The AI Era

CX is the field on which companies rise and fall. But it’s difficult terrain.

Customers aren’t getting what they need or value most, and service teams are swamped by busy work and forced to navigate siloed data systems to complete basic tasks. The key issue: Company decision-makers are often solving the wrong problems, over-prioritizing sheer efficiency — increasingly driven by automation — to the exclusion of other crucial values and outcomes. A prime example is the way companies today rate their own customer service efforts.

“Current metrics are very much based on speed,” says Eric Bensley, vice president of product marketing for customer relationship management (CRM) at ServiceNow. “I think one trade-off that we’ve made as we've automated too much, is that we’ve lost a sense of the human experience of calling a customer support center — and the frustration of that.”

The gap between organizational imperatives and customer needs is the leading takeaway from ServiceNow’s new report, The CX Shift, which highlights the results of a survey encompassing 34,000 respondents — customers, customer service reps and executives — across 18 countries.

How can organizations overcome the impasse the report describes? By implementing a six-part strategy for superior CX in an AI era.

Here are those six must-dos in easily digestible form — each illuminated by findings from the survey and Bensley’s expertise in the CX field.

Organizations have used “customer satisfaction” or “net promoter” scores (the latter a metric to measure the likeliness that a consumer will recommend a company, product, or service) to get a handle on what customers think. Now they can do better. AI models can crunch every service-center call, chat, email and online review to score how empathetic and responsive service is or how much effort personnel are putting into resolving issues. AI also makes possible the granular tracking of customer trust, frustration and satisfaction.

Hospitality groups are already using AI-based sentiment analysis on guest feedback to detect disappointment or delight, adjusting staffing, room standards and digital experiences in response. Retailers and banks are mining contact-center transcripts to pinpoint friction points, such as slow dispute handling, and then prioritizing the fixes with the biggest upside.

To turn intelligence into action, organizations should centralize CX metrics and reporting. A centralized framework standardizes definitions, aligns AI and human-reported KPIs, and lets organizations compare performance by channel, segment and journey stage.

AI tools do more than free up service reps to interact with customers. They heighten reps’ ability to respond to individual customers with empathy, understanding and personalized service. The result is responsiveness at scale.

Here’s how AI can help build emotional connection:

• Generative AI provides service reps real-time context awareness for customer interactions and helps them communicate in a more natural and authentic way.
• Sentiment analysis can help reps better understand customer emotions and provides personalized support that elevates empathy and trust.
• Predictive analysis can help reps anticipate customer problems before they escalate by analyzing historical data, behavioral signals and predictive models.
• Agentic AI supports reps by dynamically interpreting customer intent and offering real-time automation and knowledge retrieval — so they can quickly resolve complex cases.
• Recommendation engines can provide real-time suggestions for customer responses and next actions that fit individual preferences and circumstances.

Customers like self-service options that let them resolve issues without interacting with service reps. Generative and agentic AI can help organizations create solutions that respond to customer needs. Sometimes that will mean using AI alone. Other times, organizations will use hybrid CX approaches in which AI augments human work.

Hybridity is taking off fast. Over the next three years, over eight in 10 executives will be using technology alone or in concert with a human rep to offer advice to customers (89%), manage purchasing and onboarding processes (81%), handle complaints (93%) and respond to inquiries (92%).

AI agents specifically will drive hybridity. They’ll let organizations automate complex processes, uncover bottlenecks, surface customer context and accelerate work between departments and systems. That will make human reps’ jobs easier, shortening response times and streamlining escalations.

Service reps need to prepare for the AI-augmented work they’ll do tomorrow.

Organizations can help by assessing and filling AI skill gaps among CX teams — and then providing ongoing AI training programs. At the same time, organizations should redefine the service rep role, focusing on blending digital and interpersonal skills. Collaboration and communication skills will become critical as service reps work more often across teams and intensify focus on customer relationships.

Other priority skills include a positive attitude toward continuous learning and general knowledge of AI and tech. As for what solutions to integrate into AI service reps’ workflows, decision-makers should consult the experts: the reps themselves.

To foster cross-functional collaboration and create a seamless experience, your CRM should be a real-time experience platform, not a customer database. It needs to unify omnichannel engagement, embed predictive analysis and integrate key workflows in data, marketing, customer service, sales, fulfillment and delivery, and IT.

Agentic AI can help the CRM of tomorrow realize its potential. Whether the task is mitigating a banking dispute or addressing a warranty claim, embedded AI agents can solve customer issues faster, running workflows across front, middle and back offices. Every interaction feels tailored and consistent across all channels, whether the customer is on the web, in-app, in-store or talking to a human agent.

As agentic AI deploys in more CRM systems, turning them into infrastructure for human-AI collaboration at scale, service reps will see their roles change. They’ll shift from operators to supervisors of AI agents that will perform the bulk of day-to-day activities. The result: more time to provide customers with the personal support they want.

Rich customer data can be the rocket fuel for exceptional experiences. Organizations should integrate customer information into a single source of truth, whether it’s ERP software, a billing system, data lake or a legacy CRM platform. Companies also need tools that instantly gather, cleanse and harmonize data. It can’t be a patchwork job. Data needs to be formatted into a single architecture, providing information that service reps can trust.

By integrating data, organizations can treat each customer as a “demographic of one.” Every customer gets tailored offers, service models and experience designs. Every interaction triggers workflows that solve specific issues based on which products the customer has.

Embedding the resultant intelligence into frontline workflows and arming service reps and digital channels with next-best actions for each customer will pay dividends. Look forward to faster responses, more relevant interactions and elevated experiences that deepen customer loyalty and boost growth.