The New Era of Chatbots for Customer Service

Customer expectations continue to rise across industries. And with chatbots for customer experience, businesses are feeling the pressure to keep up and provide excellent services. Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 70% of customers will begin their customer service journey through a conversational AI interface, while Salesforce reports that service organizations expect AI to handle half of all customer service cases by 2027, up from 30% today.

As a result, companies don’t view chatbots as standalone customer support tools anymore. They are becoming a bigger part of the overall customer experience, helping organizations deliver faster service, more personalized interactions, and better support across channels. At the same time, businesses are learning that successful customer experience still depends on people, processes, and trust—not just technology.

Let’s take a closer look at how customer experience chatbots are evolving and where they’re headed next.

How AI Is Changing Customer Experience

The earliest chatbots focused on simple tasks like answering FAQs or helping customers navigate a website. Today’s AI-powered chatbots are becoming a much more integrated part of the customer experience. They help organizations personalize interactions, summarize customer history, assist support teams, and connect customers to relevant resources faster. Customer personalization, case summarization, and agent assistance are among the highest-value customer service AI use cases because they improve both efficiency and customer experience.

As customer expectations continue to rise, organizations are looking beyond faster response times and focusing on creating more connected, seamless service experiences across the entire customer journey. Customers increasingly expect support that feels personalized, remembers past interactions, and works consistently across channels.

Many organizations are beginning to explore more autonomous AI capabilities. While today’s customer service chatbots primarily answer questions and guide users to information, the next generation of AI tools helps coordinate workflows, retrieves information across systems, and proactively supports both customers and employees.

What Industries Are Using Chatbots?

Organizations across nearly every industry are using chatbots to improve customer experience. However, the use cases vary depending on customer needs and business goals.

Healthcare

Healthcare organizations use chatbots to support appointment scheduling, patient access, benefits questions, and other administrative inquiries. These tools help simplify routine interactions while allowing care teams to focus on patients who need more personalized support.

Telecommunications

Telecom providers use chatbots to assist customers with service issues, billing questions, account changes, and technical troubleshooting. With high volumes of customer interactions occurring across digital channels, AI-powered support has become an increasingly important and regular part of the telecom customer experience.

Technology

Technology companies use chatbots to support product onboarding, troubleshooting, knowledge management, and customer success initiatives. As products become more complex, AI-powered support helps users find answers faster and get more value from the tools they use every day.

Financial Services

Financial services institutions are using chatbots to help customers with account servicing, fraud notifications, onboarding questions, and claims support. In an industry built on trust, successful AI-powered customer experiences depend on accurate information, clear communication, and easy access to human support when needed.

Life Sciences

Life sciences organizations are exploring how chatbots can improve access to information and support services. This is especially true within highly regulated environments. The industry’s focus on trust, quality, and documentation makes governance and oversight especially important. As AI adoption grows, organizations must balance efficiency with documentation, quality, and regulatory requirements.

Retail & Consumer Services

Retailers use chatbots to help customers track orders, process returns, find products, and access loyalty programs. As expectations for always-on service continue to rise, many organizations are using AI-powered support to deliver faster, more convenient customer experiences.

How Companies Are Solving CX Challenges

As chatbots become more advanced, organizations are discovering that customer experience challenges are rarely solved by AI alone.

Connecting Chatbots to the Right Data

Fragmented information acts as one of the biggest barriers to better customer experiences. Even the most advanced chatbot can only be as useful as the data it can access. IBM’s 2025–2026 State of Salesforce research found that only 33% of surveyed AI initiatives are meeting ROI targets and identified poor data availability and quality as a leading barrier to agentic AI adoption.

To address this challenge, organizations are connecting customer experience platforms with CRM systems, knowledge bases, billing platforms, operational workflows, and approved content repositories. The goal is to give both customers and service teams access to accurate, relevant information when they need it.

Building Human-Led AI Experiences

Despite growing investment in automation, the future of customer experience is not about removing people from the equation.

The organizations seeing the strongest results are using AI to support service teams rather than replace them. AI can handle repetitive requests, surface relevant information, and streamline routine workflows, allowing employees to focus on conversations that require empathy, judgment, and problem-solving.

Service representatives using AI typically spend less time on routine work and more time on higher-value customer interactions. At the same time, Gartner predicts regulatory changes could increase assisted-service interactions as customers continue to seek access to human support channels. The result is a model that is increasingly AI-powered but remains human-led.

Creating Consistent Experiences Across Channels

Customers do not think in channels. They simply expect companies to know who they are and understand their needs regardless of how they choose to engage.

Leading organizations are using AI to create more connected experiences across websites, mobile applications, messaging channels, and contact centers. Zendesk reports that 74% of consumers are frustrated when they have to repeat information across interactions. In the same report, 76% of customers say they would choose a company that allows text, image, and video interactions within the same conversation experience.

As a result, businesses are increasingly focused on creating seamless transitions between channels instead of optimizing each touchpoint independently.

The Next Evolution of Customer Experience

The next phase of customer experience will likely extend beyond answering questions to anticipating needs and helping resolve issues faster. As organizations explore agentic AI capabilities, customer-facing AI tools are being designed to do more than provide information. They can help coordinate workflows, surface relevant insights, and support employees in delivering more personalized service. Success will depend on how effectively organizations integrate AI into the broader customer experience.

Turn Chatbot Support Into Better Customer Relationships

Today’s organizations are using AI to create more connected, personalized, and responsive customer experiences while positioning themselves for future innovations like agentic AI. The organizations that will lead in customer experience are the ones that successfully bring together the right data, the right people, and the right strategy.

At Insight Global, we help organizations design, deliver, and scale AI-enabled work through a combination of talent, consulting, and AI expertise. Whether you’re modernizing customer support, exploring AI-powered customer experience initiatives, or preparing for the next evolution of service, building stronger relationships starts with creating experiences customers actually want to use. Reach out to our experts today to take your customer experience to the next level.