How GenAI is transforming customer experience in APAC

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, customer experience (CX) has become critically important for brands to attain business growth. Businesses across the APAC region are adopting various strategies to drive customer engagement and create differentiation in the market.

But is the execution of these strategies smooth? No, they are not! APAC brands face several challenges, such as inflationary pressure, rising customer service costs, and workforce scarcity, which impact their CX strategies. So, how can brands mitigate these challenges? Well, Generative AI (GenAI) is here to help.

In this blog, we will explore GenAI’s traction across APAC and how it is helping brands transform their customer experience strategies.

APAC has already registered notable progress in embracing AI with businesses leveraging AI and Machine Learning in their business operations. According to a report by IDC, 69% of CEOs in Asia Pacific believe there is a significant opportunity for them to leverage AI to drive differentiation and new business growth.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption, Southeast Asia’s share is marginally higher (21%) than the overall APAC (18%) in terms of businesses that have implemented AI and machine learning (ML) at the advanced level.

Businesses across the region have started leveraging AI to increase operational efficiency and provide better customer experiences, opening doors to new growth opportunities.  

As AI continues to expand its implementation areas, where does GenAI stand? Is its adoption similar? Let’s understand the investment trend across the region.

In Southeast Asia, 24% of businesses plan to invest in GenAI for employee training and consulting services in the next 18 months. According to an IDC report, 29% of APAC investment including China and Japan will be in GenAI during a similar period.

Although AI adoption is on the surge, there is steady progress in GenAI investment in many sectors. You will be surprised to know only 5% of businesses across Southeast Asia have deployed GenAI into their production environments.

So, does it mean businesses doubt the capabilities of GenAI? Although brands are still exploring the phase of GenAI, many sectors have shown keen interest in leveraging this technology.

According to an IDC survey, in the APAC region, GenAI has seen huge adoption in some major industries such as transportation and logistics (74%), telco, media, and entertainment (72%), financial service (59%), and healthcare and life sciences (54%).

GenAI is transforming how organizations interact with their customers resolving various CX challenges. Brands often find it difficult to improve their customer services due to rising costs and staff shortages. So, does GenAI help here? With its unique capability of creating new content such as text, audio, video, and images utilizing existing data, GenAI can provide automated responses to customer queries, minimizing the query resolution time.

With the capability of generative AI tools evolving rapidly, businesses can understand the customer pain points and what the future of customer experience looks like.

Here are some ways GenAI can contribute to CX improvement:

Your customers will love it when you provide them with personalized product recommendations. Here, GenAI assists you in generating marketing content by analyzing customer data and their past interactions with your brand. It can be a past purchase or a listed product they have viewed multiple times.

Businesses need large volumes of content to execute their CX strategies. With GenAI, content creators can generate product descriptions, explainer videos, and interactive product demos to help customers make informed decisions.

With GenAI, brands can create meaningful interactions at every step of the customer journey from initial contact to purchase and beyond. Providing a tailored experience enables brands to improve customer engagement and driver conversions.  

GenAI is undoubtedly improving customer support, with personalized assistance and faster query resolution. The use of GenAI chatbots and virtual assistants in customer service enables brands to handle customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback effectively, fostering better customer engagement.

As GenAI finds its adaptation across multiple sectors, many marketing and sales leaders are already integrating GenAI into their workflows. Here are some use cases that will help you understand the role of GenAI, in making the following functional areas better.

By enabling hyper-personalized communication, GenAI has made marketing more effective encouraging customers to engage with your brand like never before.

Imagine a virtual assistant managing your day-to-day sales process, like drafting sales letters, analyzing data, creating pitches, and decks. Isn’t it exciting?  Here’s how GenAI-enabled models make the sales process better:

The implementation of GenAI in customer service has enabled brands to improve their CX and provide a rich conversational experience.

Croatia’s first fully digital insurance company LAQO wanted to make its customer support better and provide quick, accessible, and personalized assistance.
LAQO used Infobip’s chatbot building platform and Azure OpenAI Service to develop a GenAI-powered digital assistant Pavle capable of delivering 24/7 customer support.

The powerful AI assistant can handle multiple customers simultaneously.

The results:

Podravka, a European leader in the food industry, partnered with Infobip to create an AI digital assistant, SuperfoodChef-AI by Coolinarika to help users make healthy food choices while enhancing their experience. By combining generative AI and machine learning, the chatbot can accurately send multiple recipe suggestions based on the user’s prompts.

The results:

Now that you have understood the potential of GenAI, you might be eager to add it to your tech stack. However, you should note that integrating GenAI into your CX tools requires a strategic approach. Here are some of the key action points:

As you are now familiar with the hype of GenAI in APAC, with many C-suit executives planning more investment in this area, it’s the right time for you to gear up to adopt this technology.

Infobip is here to help you leverage the power of GenAI and transform your CX. We continue our innovation and research in automation and frameworks around ChatGPT ensuring accuracy in our solutions.

Being a global brand and leader in CpaaS, we have developed an end-to-end conversational solution, which includes:

With Infobip, you are all set to create a superior customer experience. Let’s transform the way you connect with your audience!