Chapter 13. Providing a personalised service experience using artificial intelligence

Customer service needs to be personal to enable a pleasant customer service experience. The concept of relational personalisation shows that a personal touch is characterised by the fulfilment of the customer’s emotional needs and the creation of social relationships. Providing relational personalisation, however, becomes increasingly difficult with increasing digitisation and automation of customer service. In this chapter, we examine opportunities for conversational AI to bridge the gap between automated digital customer service and the delivery of personal touch. We draw from personalisation, customer experience and AI in service literature and present a framework of the four critical steps of contextualisation, conversation style, delegation and training when managing customer service experience with conversational AI. We further outline the role of the emerging technologies metaverse, generative AI and web 3.0 for the future of personal touch in customer service and discuss their challenges.