Elevating customer experiences with Microsoft AI

Impactful, personalized, and loyalty-driving customer experiences are critical to the success of many businesses. The need to differentiate, drive efficiencies, and create new products and services is more critical to the survival of businesses than ever before.

Microsoft’s AI offerings provide a huge range of solutions and tools capable of enhancing customer experiences across the domains of marketing, sales, service, commerce, and immersive experiences.

This article looks at Microsoft’s significant investment in AI, the spectrum of possibilities to elevate customer experience, industry examples, and the impact that can be achieved.

Microsoft’s significant investment in AI

Over the past decade, Microsoft has made significant investments in AI to ensure its platform and solutions are comprehensive and market-leading. This investment includes a commitment to building a robust AI platform from the ground up, from silicon to software. It also includes an open approach to leveraging enterprise data wherever it resides, it is a platform that covers a spectrum of opportunities from human-in-the-loop copilots to fully autonomous agents, fostering partnerships with leading AI organizations, and providing the guardrails for safe and responsible AI.

• Building AI from silicon to software: As well as partnering with leading chip maker NVIDIA, Microsoft has invested in designing custom AI chips to optimize the performance of its AI workloads. The upgrading of global data centers provides the necessary infrastructure to support large-scale AI compute workloads across their vast network of Azure data centers. This backbone is then used to provide AI features across the full Microsoft suite of products, plus tools for developers and makers to create and deploy bespoke AI solutions.

• Open approach and connectivity: Microsoft is committed to an open approach to data and AI, providing over 1,400 connectors that integrate seamlessly with a wide range of applications and services. This approach enables copilot and autonomous agent solutions that complement existing platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP, ensuring businesses can leverage AI without disrupting their current ecosystems.

• Continuum from simple to fully autonomous agents: Microsoft Copilot agents span a spectrum from simple agents that perform basic tasks like answering frequently asked questions, through intermediate agents that can handle more complex tasks by integrating with various data sources and systems, to advanced agents that have higher levels of reasoning, to fully autonomous agents that can orchestrate other agents and handle complex multi-step processes.

• Partnerships: Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI has led to the development of advanced AI models, including GPT-4o and GPT-o1 providing a range of options from multimodal experiences to deep reasoning as well as models of different sizes.
  
  Also, Microsoft has partnered right across the industry to offer a catalog featuring hundreds of models from model providers such as NIVIDA, Mistral, Meta, Hugging Face, and Cohere. This means the right functional and sized model for the job can be deployed on Azure.
  
  
• Responsible AI: Brand trust can be rapidly eroded when customers perceive brands are unethical or when companies misuse customer data. Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles are designed to ensure AI systems are developed and used in ways that are ethical, transparent, and accountable. These principles include fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. By adhering to these guidelines, Microsoft aims to build AI that customers can trust. This trust is critical for a positive customer experience, as it ensures that AI systems are not only effective but also respect user rights and societal values.

Elevating customer experience: A spectrum of business cases

To understand how businesses can effectively drive business value from generative AI to enhance customer experiences, it’s helpful to consider three business case patterns introduced by analyst Gartner.

Defend: This involves deploying solutions such as copilots and agents that protect and maintain the current market position. These solutions are often designed to optimize existing individual productivity in pursuit of improving customer interactions without the need for extensive customization.

Extend: Here, businesses can extend and differentiate existing processes. This approach allows for more personalized interactions, greater use of the breadth of customer data and solutions that fit unique business models and customer needs.

Upend: This case focuses on creating entirely new categories, markets, or processes, often by training and fine-tuning foundational models, chaining models, and using vast repositories of often underutilized proprietary data. These innovations can significantly disrupt the market by offering unique and highly engaging customer experiences and products.

Let’s look at each business case in more detail together with industry examples of applying Microsoft AI:

Defend: Deploying Microsoft Copilots and agents

For over a year, Microsoft has offered a suite of copilots for sales, service, and marketing scenarios. Now, with new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, further business benefit can be achieved across the personalization of content and efficiencies for customer-facing staff.

Industry examples include:

• Retail: Supplier Communications Agent optimizes the supply chain and minimizes disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, identifying and responding to delays, and thus freeing procurement teams from time-consuming manual activities.
• Manufacturing: Sales Qualification Agent helps B2B sellers focus their time on the highest-priority leads, personalizing emails, and guiding customer contact.
• Telecommunications: Microsoft Customer Intent and Knowledge Management Agents work hand in hand with customer service representatives to resolve customer issues autonomously and add knowledge base articles to ensure customers have consistent interactions whether they’re on a website or speaking to a support agent, leading to better service quality, customer loyalty and agent productivity.

Benefits we have achieved with customers include:

• Improved customer and employee satisfaction
• Improved agent productivity – up to 50%, resulting in greater case throughput
• Reduction in training time for service agents
• 45% increase in sales task efficiency.

Extend: Extend Microsoft Copilots and create custom copilots and agents

While significant business benefits can be achieved through the scenarios above, they are unlikely to truly differentiate a business and the services they provide. For that, more bespoke and autonomous scenarios, leveraging data and systems from across the enterprise, will be required.

Microsoft provides low/no code tools such as Copilot Studio for creating bespoke copilots and agents or extending with additional skills. As well as this, Microsoft provides a comprehensive set of services and APIs that enable businesses to integrate AI into their applications effortlessly. Tools like Azure AI Services make it easier for developers to build multimodal services that use text, speech, and vision.

Industry examples include:

• Finance: In banking, AI-powered agents can handle routine customer inquiries through text or voice about account balances, transaction histories, and loan applications, providing immediate assistance and freeing up human agents to deal with more complex issues.
• Education: Educational institutions can use Copilot Studio to create AI tutors that provide personalized learning experiences for students, addressing their unique learning styles and needs.
• Automotive: Car manufacturers can enhance their customer service by creating AI agents that assist customers with vehicle information, maintenance scheduling, and even remote diagnostics.

Benefits we’ve achieved with customers include a financial services customer where an interactive voice service built with Copilot Studio is expected to deflect up to 40,000 calls from the contact center in the first year of operation.

Upend: Creating new categories of products by training foundational models

The largest scope for differentiation and revenue growth comes from completely unique products and services that re-invent or redefine a category.

Microsoft provides a series of advanced AI services such as Azure speech avatars for photorealistic avatars, Azure AI model catalog for “Model-as-a-Service” capabilities, and Azure AI Studio for completely bespoke copilot scenarios where full control is required.

These services open up industry examples such as:

• Immersive content creation: Leveraging Azure’s AI capabilities, entertainment companies can create immersive, interactive experiences. These virtual events could feature AI-generated avatars of real artists or entirely new AI-created performers, offering unique and engaging experiences for fans.
• E-commerce: By training foundational models, online retailers can develop personalized shopping assistants that understand customer preferences deeply, provide curated product suggestions, and create a highly engaging shopping experience.
• Travel: Travel companies can create AI agents capable of planning entire trips based on user preferences and past behaviors, offering personalized itineraries and real-time updates.

Conclusion

Microsoft provides a rich AI platform for transforming and elevating customer experiences. By understanding and addressing the unique needs of customers through defending, extending, and upending traditional approaches, businesses can create significant mutual value for both themselves and customers alike.

As AI technology continues to evolve from human-in-the-loop copilots to fully autonomous agents, the opportunities to enhance these experiences will only grow, promising an exciting future for businesses and their customers.

To understand how to elevate your customer experiences, together with Microsoft AI, visit Capgemini at Ignite 2024.