Artificial intelligence innovation is revolutionizing search’s role in providing better-connected customer experiences (CX) on CRM platforms.
The latest research on consumer behavior shows that one of computing’s most basic functions for users — the search window — paired with generative AI is becoming a new tool for creating more connected CX during customer engagement.
On July 10, Coveo released its fourth annual CX Industry Report, titled “Is GenAI the Missing Piece to a Connected Customer Experience,” based on a survey of 4,000 U.S. and U.K. adults aged 18 and older who use a computer for work in companies with 5,000 or more employees.
“I’m not going to say that gen AI is the missing piece to connected CX, but it is an important one,” Patrick Martin, EVP of Global Customer Experience at Coveo, told CRM Buyer.
In partnership with Arlington Research, the study examined the holistic, interconnected digital customer journey, asking, “What will be the role of search in the new ChatGPT era for customer experiences.”
Search-Satisfaction Connection
According to the findings, search remains the gold standard when people need information. Forty-two percent go straight to a company’s website or help center. A lower percentage goes straight to Google. While only 5% pointed to gen AI tools like ChatGPT as their first choice for search, more than 72% expected their digital experience to evolve with trends like gen AI.
The connection between search results and customer satisfaction significantly impacts retaining satisfied consumers and clients. The report shows that slightly more than half (56%) of respondents complained they could not easily search for and find the information they sought. Additionally, 61% revealed that obtaining enhanced results in just a few clicks would substantially influence their opinion of a company.
According to Martin, search is the main throughline for the entire digital experience. The findings showed that people see brand sites as more authoritative than Google searches.
“Embedding AI search and generative answering into sites has never been more important. The search bar is transforming into an intent bar or advisory bar, providing a window for brands to interact directly with their customers in different ways to deliver better experiences,” Martin said of the new role of AI and search in CX.
Empowering Customers With AI-Powered Self-Service
Coveo, a Canadian SaaS company, provides e-commerce and enterprise search software for e-commerce, customer service, digital workplaces, and websites. The company believes that CX’s future is business-to-person and that experiences are the new competitive front line for every business.
To that end, remarkable experiences do more than enhance user satisfaction, which Coveo calls the AI-experience advantage. This approach yields significant gains for enterprises.
The company’s software helps organizations measure success by the degree content, products, recommendations, and advice people get online aligns easily with their needs, intent, preferences, context, and behavior.
The survey reinforces the guiding principles that Coveo bakes into its CX platform. For instance, shoppers expect virtual assistants to help guide and troubleshoot. Forty-nine percent of respondents expect a virtual shopping assistant to guide product selection or troubleshoot issues.
Customers are equally demanding regarding product searches and providing accurate information to answer questions and solve problems. As 37% of respondents noted, they want to leverage gen AI for education before shopping. They expect ChatGPT/generative answering to evolve their online shopping experience by helping educate them on products and their attributes before they start shopping for a specific project.
“The role of search in the new ChatGPT era is changing for customer experiences,” Martin said. “It will have a significant role to play in this era, and the report confirms this.”
Consumer Searches Reveal Intent
A significant portion of respondents said that when they need assistance with products or services, they go to the company’s website or perform Google searches. According to the report, only a tiny portion (5%) noted that gen AI tools like ChatGPT are their primary choice for search. However, 72% expect that their digital experiences will evolve.
“I think search is probably ingrained in our behaviors, and we can thank Google for that because search has become how we interact with information. This is not going away. To me, this confirms that consumers are expecting some type of generative AI experience in the gen AI and connected CX future,” Martin offered.
He sees intelligent search as the most efficient way to deliver these experiences. The search box is probably the best way to capture the person’s intent.
“Once you’ve understood that and know what they want, you can start tailoring the experience according to retrieving the relevant information that is going to meet that person’s need and generate an answer or any type of generative experience grounded in this content,” he said.
In addition, that makes the answer accurate and factual, which is what people expect. That will become a significant role for search to play within CRM environments, he added.
Making Connected CX Work
Historically, Coveo introduced more channels for customer interaction with brands. Most of these channels use different technology solutions that do not communicate with each other. So, it was hard to create this connected experience.
This resulted in a multichannel experience in which customers navigated from one channel to another to get what they needed and connect the dots, which introduced a lot of friction.
“This has been a challenge for many years, and now a lot of companies are [discussing] how do we transition from multichannel to omnichannel where the channels are connected to provide this cohesive experience,” Martin noted.
Organizations need to build tight integration points among their solutions to do that, which involves common content repositories.
How an Integrated, Unified AI-CX Platform Works
The Coveo AI-integrated CX platform brings AI search and generative AI to every point of experience. This approach enables personalized digital experiences that drive business outcomes.
Coveo’s process starts with getting enterprise content wherever it resides and moving it to a central hybrid repository. Then, AI breaks down the content into chunks. Semantic and lexical capabilities then build a searchable vector database.
The software catalogs all acquired data within a unified index and renders the connected experiences within that digital engagement layer. Martin added that this can be done without generative AI, but generative AI does it better.
“Where gen AI plays the role is how this evolves. So instead of having people click on [lists of] results, Coveo gives them cohesive, complete, accurate answers,” Martin said.
With natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), intent detection becomes much more precise and easier because the tool is not just a keyword search or just a Lexile (or reading level) search. Instead, a whole semantic element is tied to it.
“After that, within our platform, you tie in what we refer to as relevance augmented retrieval, which is an evolution of typical retrieval augmented generation [RAG],” continued Martin.
Consumer Expectations of AI Assistance
According to the Coveo report, most customers prefer self-service. Almost two-thirds said having access to a live customer service representative (CSR) to assist them would improve their experience (64%).
People prefer human help over AI, especially for complex issues. When asked whether issue complexity made a difference in preferring self-service or human-assisted gen AI and connected CX support, more (35%) preferred humans regardless.
However, another 31% were more accepting of AI help for some solutions. For example, basic tasks, such as resetting passwords, could be handled as self-service. Respondents preferred a live agent for complex issues such as an invoicing problem.
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