Chatting with the Near Future: AI's New Role in the Customer Experience

You describe CM.com as a global leader in cloud software for conversational commerce. Can you explain that in layman’s terms?

Of course! Our Engagement Platform provides software enabling businesses to personally assist consumers throughout the entire customer journey. This doesn’t mean just during customer service, but starting from the initial marketing interaction and continuing beyond. Our software empowers organizations to deliver a seamless customer experience. Across any channel—be it chat, email, phone, or RCS—we can provide support using data and even offer personalized advice. This is blurring the lines between marketing and service. For instance, a customer service inquiry might evolve into a personalized product recommendation, leading to a purchase and transaction within the same channel.

What sets you apart from your competitors?

Many competitors focus on just one part of the customer journey, either marketing or customer service. We at CM.com, on the other hand, cover the entire journey. At the core is our Customer Data Platform, where every interaction is stored at the customer level, ensuring all departments have access to the same data and insights. This helps create a true 360-degree customer profile, allowing personalized experiences at scale with AI.

AI is obviously the trend. Have you been working on it for a long time and do you have a specific approach?

Absolutely, we've been investing heavily in AI for years. We've acquired multiple AI-driven companies and in 2023, we were among the first to integrate Generative AI into our solutions. That allowed our clients to offer faster, more relevant, and personalized responses to customer service inquiries based on documented knowledge. Recently, we launched our Agentic AI platform, HALO, taking things further. While Generative AI enabled Q&A support like ChatGPT, HALO's AI Agents can now autonomously execute tasks at scale. This is especially useful for automating repetitive tasks previously handled manually by customer service agents. With HALO, clients can create AI Agents that have extensive knowledge about your company and customers and can perform specific actions and tasks. For example, many clients have developed AI Return Agents to handle all incoming return inquiries and tasks. Automating these routine tasks frees up customer service agents to provide real value during interactions.

What are AI Agents exactly? Can you explain?

Think of them as digital colleagues handling specific tasks, giving employees more space for human, creative, and strategic work. This makes our work more engaging and enjoyable. We're moving towards a future where each employee supervises several of these agents. So it’s important to understand the basis and rationale behind their actions. That's why we emphasize transparency in what your AI agents are doing, allowing you to provide feedback or step in when needed.

How do you see the sector evolving further?

We need to rethink work and working methods. Some might see AI as a threat, but it can actually enhance jobs, making them more enjoyable. AI will play a crucial, growing role in the coming years. To meet modern consumers' expectations—who want personalized, immediate experiences across all channels—data must be well-organized to facilitate a cross-channel approach within customer service departments. We've had glimpses of what's possible, but developments in the space are moving quickly. This presents opportunities to proactively have automated conversations with customers using relevant data, making marketing for example a two-way interaction instead of just sending. Plus, we believe that the interface of traditional channels like a webshop will be less important. Why browse an entire product catalog on a website when an AI-facilitated conversation can present the right product directly?

Certain specific customer service issues, such as our multilingualism, seem to be resolving themselves?

Yes, multilingualism is becoming less of an issue. Agentic AI provides accurate translations that reflect a human tone of voice, customizable for each channel or AI Agent. This enables seamless communication without the need to speak the same language. Consumers won't notice the difference, and for retailers or e-commerce companies, it offers an opportunity to engage with customers globally without relying heavily on native-speaking customer service agents.

And if we look further ahead?

Projecting the current AI trend a few years ahead, we see the emergence of autonomous teams or even organizations. These would be teams of digital AI agents collaborating, each with their own specialization. Imagine an AI agent capturing and categorizing incoming queries, a solution agent formulating responses based on guidelines and data, and a service agent delivering these directly to customers. Meanwhile, a feedback agent gathers and analyzes customer reactions to continuously improve the experience. This information is shared with an e-commerce agent for better product descriptions and a content marketing agent to create blogs addressing customer questions. I’m convinced we’re just at the beginning of this AI revolution, but the human touch will always be crucial to make AI effective.

What do you see as your contribution to e-commerce innovation?

There's ample room to improve efficiency, automating tedious repetitive tasks and making remaining work more enjoyable. With HALO we make it easy for everyone to create their own agentic co-workers, which will lead to significantly higher productivity. We will for sure stay on top of all AI developments and make sure that these will be adopted in business.