What will this emerging technology mean for service teams? Here are early thoughts.

Customer service organizations today are fighting an uphill battle. Service agents face record case volumes, and customers are frustrated by growing wait times. Often, to manage the caseload, agents will simultaneously work on multiple customers’ issues at once while waiting for data from legacy systems to load.

Customer service organisations today are fighting an uphill battle. Service agents face record case volumes, and customers are frustrated by growing wait times. Often, to manage the case load, agents will simultaneously work on multiple customers’ issues at once while waiting for data from legacy systems to load.

Discussion of generative AI has maintained a fever pitch since OpenAI released ChatGPT-3.5 in late 2022. Many leaders’ instinct is to provide direction and codification when trying to drive adoption of new tools. This is particularly true in sales, a function rooted in processes, playbooks, scripts, and templates. However, driving adoption of generative AI as a new way of working — leading sellers toward creative use of generative AI, and helping them to use it as a coaching and learning aid — requires a very different approach. The author offers four steps to get you started.

Sales teams have typically not been early adopters of technology, but generative AI may be an exception to that. Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting. AI can help do these tasks more quickly, which is why Microsoft and Salesforce have already rolled out sales-focused versions of this powerful tool.