Positive customer support experiences can directly impact brand loyalty. Customer support teams can help establish emotional connections with individuals, helping them feel valued and appreciated, which can increase sales. Human-centered AI helps establish brand loyalty, build emotional connections, and improve a company’s efficiency. This tool allows companies to leverage advancing technology to enhance human qualities rather than replace them to create exceptional customer support experiences aligned with their brand.  

How Customers Feel

With the holiday season here and customer needs high, a new survey from Forethought, which offers human-centered AI customer support technology, highlighted customers’ feelings about using customer service AI. 

According to the survey, customers’ number one frustration is being unable to connect to a human representative. Customers say they often have to repeat information most, if not all, of the time. 

Other key findings were customers’ low tolerance for excessive wait times (50% of respondents will not wait over 9 minutes) and an appreciation for transparency, with 88 percent of customers wanting disclosure when interacting with AI from companies. 

A Customizable Solution

While millennials (56%) and Gen Z are more receptive to customer service AI chatbots than Baby Boomers (32%), companies may still want to consider human-centered generative AI options to help increase brand loyalty and success. 

Forethought is one company offering human-centered generative AI software. This software can be tailored to each business’s proprietary data for brand-aligned responses and provides higher resolution rates than standard chatbots.

Forethought’s founder, Dean Nicholas, stated, “Our goal is to make customer interactions seamless and aligned with the company’s values, while also empowering businesses with actionable insights.”

Nicholas explained how Forethought’s AI agents differ from standard chatbots. The company’s human-centered AI can take autonomous actions like resetting passwords, issuing refunds, and troubleshooting complex problems.

The Future of Customer-Centered AI

As the need for efficiency, coupled with the need for empathy and brand loyalty, is expected to grow further in the coming years, the demand for AI tools to help with customer support experiences, particularly during the busy holiday season, will also increase. 

With more traditional customer support software models often leaving customers frustrated due to excessive wait times, the need to repeat information continuously, and inefficient resolutions, human-centered AI is opening opportunities for companies to become more proactive rather than reactive. Human-centered generative AI can provide emotionally intelligent, hyper-personalized customer interactions to support and improve customer support centers. 

As this technology advances, chatbots and systems will become more capable of handling complex inquiries and a wider range of customer needs with greater accuracy – ultimately reducing human intervention while improving customers’ experiences. 

Balance efficiency and empathy in customer support are crucial to a company’s growth and customer loyalty. Human-centered AI offers a solution for companies, enabling them to provide highly personalized customer service experiences that can tailor resolutions based on a customer’s previous interactions, preferences, and account history. This can eliminate long wait times and avoid customers having to navigate complex menus that can send them in circles, delivering an empathetic and supportive customer experience when needed.