IDC Shares Generative AI Implications on Customer Experience in Asia/Pacific

7 out of 10 C-Suite Executives in Asia/Pacific are Either Exploring or Already Investing in Generative AI

In the recent IDC report, Applications of Generative AI in Customer Experience, IDC discusses the generative AI (Gen AI) landscape and its implications on customer experience (CX). IDC's FERS 2023 Survey Wave 2 APJ results show 70% of Asia/Pacific C-suite executives are either exploring generative AI use cases or already investing in them.

"Gen AI holds immense potential for CX. Experimenting with this technology will also help determine which use cases – customer facing or employee facing constitute the greatest value for a specific business model. Those technology vendors who identify and iteratively test these factors early with the right metrics will become the game changers." says Lavanya Jindal, market analyst, customer experience and enterprise applications, IDC Asia Pacific.

While the top 5 use cases in Asia/Pacific of Gen AI are knowledge management, code generation, marketing, conversational, and design, the ones that hold the most value in enhancing CX are knowledge management, marketing, and conversational applications.

Gen AI has multiple benefits when it comes to CX:

• Ability to offer hyper personalized CX through customized insights;

• Enhance employee productivity and efficiency;

• Enable collaborative intelligence – by helping identify the optimal task mix of human and AI.

Despite economic downturns, Asia/Pacific organizations press on with CX investments There are several players in the market which have targeted their generative AI efforts towards conversational applications like Zendesk, Freshworks, Intercom, Salesforce, Baidu, and so on. This highlights the need for technology vendors to accurately identify untapped areas in the customer journey that can be augmented with AI to enhance the overall experiential value for the customer. Through its abilities of text summarization, sentiment detection, manual task automation to name a few, generative AI can help technology buyers deliver elevated experiences to their customers that can translate to improved customer engagement and retention. IDC predicts that by 2025, 45% of the Asia-based 1000 organizations will use AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upsell potential.

In today's digital-first world, customers have made the experience they receive from a brand a crucial aspect of any engagement or customer journey. To thrive in today's marketplace, brands will be competing for customers and their loyalty based on the strength of their empathetic relationships. To this end, they must become what IDC terms empathetic enterprises and deliver empathy at scale — developing deep relationships with customers at scale by understanding any situation from their point of view and acting accordingly.

• Customer digitalization — how, why, and when customers and consumers adopt technologies in a transformative way

• Taxonomy and use cases for customer experience technologies

• Growth and proliferation of customer experience driven by digital technologies, online behavior, and tech-enabled consumption

• Impact of new and emerging trends (e.g., the metaverse)

• Impact on traditional players across industries like retail, travel, media, and telecommunications

• Opportunities and threats for technology buyers and vendors — driven by emerging sales, marketing, and commerce trends in device-based commerce, immersive media, experiential shopping, and consumer behaviors

• Vendor profiling and assessments (IDC MarketScapes)

Key Questions Enterprises Should Ask (according to IDC report)

• How is digitalization driving change to customer expectations, preferences, and buying behavior?

• What is customer empathy, and why does it matter?

• How can technology suppliers better serve organizations today across industries and countries?

• How mature are Asia/Pacific organizations in their CX journeys?

• Which technology priorities do they have, and what are the challenges they are facing?

• What are the new and emerging technologies that enable organizations to deliver empathy at scale?

• Which organizations are providing empathy at scale, and how are they doing it?