Reimagining the customer experience with the power of AI

In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern business, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping the way organizations innovate and drive organizational impact at scale across every function. By seamlessly integrating generative AI across the customer journey, businesses can not only optimize operational efficiency, but nurture long-term loyalty by providing a better customer experience — increasing value at every touchpoint.  

In a world driven by relentless technological advancement, adopting a customer-centric approach fueled by AI isn’t just an option — it’s imperative for staying competitive in today’s market. Microsoft conducted research using a combination of surveys and experiments to deeply understand how generative AI and Copilot are transforming work — learning with and alongside our customers as we evolve. 

What did we find? AI helps employees deliver faster and more focused customer care, with 67% of participants reporting they can spend more time with their customers and 64% saying that it allows them to better personalize customer engagements.  

Increasing operational efficiency with generative AI  

At Microsoft, we began exploring the use of AI in our customer service operations. As one of the world’s largest support organizations with tens of thousands of agents assisting more than one billion customers worldwide, we recognized an opportunity for AI to enable a more consistent and seamless experience. Harnessing the power of generative AI to address traditional pain points in customer service and support centers has enabled us to achieve productivity gains and empower employees to leverage their full expertise. 

With Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, our support agents can leverage AI capabilities – combining the power of large language models (LLMs) with our own organizational data to provide real-time assistance to replace previously cumbersome processes with more efficient workflows. This solution seamlessly analyzes data to extract important business intelligence and empowers employees to provide high quality care to customers.  

For example, the enhanced routing feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which combines case management and digital engagement capabilities, helps to better match a customer to the best-skilled agent for their specific issue.  As a result, handoffs have been reduced, resulting in a 20 percent decrease in misroutes and a 31 percent increase in first call resolution. 

With the integration of Copilot, agents can now streamline the most complex support scenarios, looking across multiple customer cases and knowledge bases to aggregate information, assess case risk, and facilitate reviews. This enables teams to focus on more high-value and strategic tasks where their expertise can make a difference delivering improved customer service. As a result, we are seeing transformative outcomes: a 12 percent reduction in average handle time for chat cases, a 9 percent increase in cases and chats managed by support agents, and a 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve a case.  

Building on this success and continuing our efforts to modernize customer service with generative AI, we've just announced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This new product leverages insights from our own Copilot usage and years of investment in voice and digital channels to embed generative AI across contact center workflows and connects to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps. It enhances communication channels, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service, and operations, helping contact centers solve problems faster, empower agents, and reduce costs. 

Leveraging generative AI to improve loyalty through better customer experience  

Our journey harnessing the power of generative AI allows us to serve customers with tailored interactions that deliver solutions, providing them with a personalized, innovative experience. Whether it’s suggesting next steps to customer service agents for troubleshooting or providing summaries of important technical information to engineers in seconds, it’s easy to understand how integrating generative AI to improve the customer experience has emerged as a transformative strategy. 

Ensuring timely access to precise knowledge empowers employees to assist customers more effectively and efficiently. Our customer service and support teams are experiencing notable productivity enhancements with case and conversation summaries, streamlining case handling processes. “Now the whole process [of summarizing and sharing cases] is taking 15 minutes or less, where it used to take 30 or 40 minutes. You’re getting your best [agents] to more customers,” says Michael Simons, Support Escalation Agent at Microsoft. 

Additionally, the use of AI is also particularly effective in onboarding new agents to quickly find relevant information and build their knowledge with customers. For example, with Ask a Question, Copilot acts as your everyday assistant to find the right answers by searching through disparate knowledge sources, like internal documentation and websites. This in turn empowers agents to get up to speed and resolve customer issues faster and deliver better customer service.  

As a result, customer satisfaction and loyalty are heightened as the quality of interactions improves and individuals feel understood and valued, fostering a more meaningful connection between the customer and the business. And this is just the beginning. As generative AI adoption accelerates, the real opportunity is to not only help service teams provide a more personalized customer experience but to lift the capability of the entire organization to focus on the work that is best delivered by our teams working collaboratively with our customers.  

Increasing business value throughout the customer journey with generative AI 

As organizations continue to adopt generative AI, it’s crucial for them to recognize its significant impact across all stages of the customer journey. From pre-sales engagement and sales conversion to post-sales support, generative AI has the potential to enhance customer value at every touchpoint. By leveraging this technology effectively, businesses can streamline processes to engage prospects, streamline sales processes to drive conversions, and enhance support to foster long-term customer satisfaction.  

For example, as customers initially explore their options for the best solution, generative AI can streamline the sales process by facilitating smoother transactions with intelligent chatbots, providing customers with richer insights on products and services. Sellers can strengthen relationships with AI-supported insights, with 67% of Microsoft sellers reporting that they can spend more time with their customers with Microsoft Copilot for Sales and 58% saying they could find CRM information faster. Within customer support, AI-powered systems can efficiently handle routine queries, freeing up service agents to focus on more complex issues and delivering successful customer outcomes.  

Moreover, 79% of sales and customer service agents said it reduces the amount of administrative work they must do. While these are early findings, we expect Copilot to continue to result in more customer cases resolved and happier customers — the measures that not only make the work more fulfilling but that drive the bottom line.  

The speed at which AI is transforming business today is unprecedented, reimagining the way we work. We envision a future where AI alongside human expertise reduces and eliminates the seams in the support experience. Ultimately, AI has the potential to drive operational excellence, nurture customer loyalty, and grow value through the entire customer journey — making it one of the most valuable tools for enterprises to create a consistent, differentiated experience, build meaningful relationships, and deliver better customer care. 

To learn more about how AI is transforming Microsoft’s customer support experience, I encourage you to watch my recent conversation with two members of our Customer Support organization to hear directly from them about how AI is reshaping our business and improving customer experience.