Designing a conversational AI agent: Framework combining customer experience management, personalization, and AI in service techniques

Abstract

Conversational AI agents are fundamentally changing how firms are delivering service to their customers. The rapid advancement of technology and ready tools means that deploying a conversational AI agent has become far simpler than ever imagined. However, customers remain unsatisfied with their experience and firms are unable to demonstrate value of conversational AI agents. Drawing on the theoretical notions of customer experience (CX) management, personalization, and AI in service, we develop a framework to design conversational AI agents. We propose a six-stage iterative design for conversational AI agents that begins with sensing customer intent, adapting to journey context, assigning tone to the conversation, delegating to humans, orchestrating processes to service requests and training of AI agents to adaptively improve and loopback into prior design stages. Additionally, we recognize that firms need to holistically qualify and allocate service requests to such conversational AI agents based on the firm’ s purpose and CX strategy.