The Rise of Third-Party AI Customer Service: Embrace or Compete?

In a recent press release Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70% of customer service journeys will start and end with third-party conversational assistants on mobile devices. 

These predictions highlight the disruptive impact that conversational Generative AI brings to customer service, and in particular how Gen Z and millennials are already turning to platforms like YouTube, Reddit or ChatGPT rather than choosing traditional company owned channels.

But this isn’t just a trend for the Tik Tok generation, In reality, we're all seeking effortless, instant resolutions wherever we can find them, and we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in all consumer behaviour where anything that saves time will be readily adopted.

So should businesses look to compete with third-party Gen AI experiences or embrace them?

When to embrace and when to compete

This isn’t necessarily an either/or decision. I believe the winning strategy is to support both approaches: adapting your content to be highly accessible to the increasing number of LLMs being used whilst enhancing your own conversational mobile experiences to be equal or even better than 3^rd parties.

Embrace whilst maintaining control of data

If you follow the embrace approach there's a need for robust knowledge management, ensuring that information retrieved by third-parties is drawn from up-to-date content that is consistent. The challenge with customers using third-party tools is that they won’t touch your systems, and you’ll need to find new ways to capture data about their choices, behaviours and sentiment.

Enhance your own conversational experiences

Alternatively, if you wish to maintain control, visibility and compete with 3^rd party offerings you’ll need to provide a great mobile app experience that is simple to access, easy to use and offers a broad range of services whilst representing your brand.

An Omni-modal future

It's no longer good enough simply to be present across multiple channels, as highlighted by Patrick Quinlan in the same Gartner insights piece. Customers will increasingly expect to seamlessly switch between text, voice, video and images within a single digital interaction.

With a similar sentiment Andrew Charles Moorhouse has stated on many occasions that businesses trying to automate all journeys on every channel is a waste of time. Customers may initially engage on their preferred channel but different journeys are better served in specific ways. What starts as an interaction on one channel may provide a much better experience when switched to voice, chat, a web portal or mobile app. Trying to automate everything through voice, SMS, WhatsApp, chat and other channels will be almost impossible to manage, and will deliver inconsistent experiences.

There are of course still significant challenges to enable the kind of multi-modal and seamless customer service that Gartner predicts. Accessing the data securely, and the need for robust omni-channel knowledge management.  But organisations that do this well will stand to compete confidently, and co-exist with any 3^rd party systems.

converse360 helping to address the challenge.

At converse360 we understand the challenges and have been experimenting and innovating since our inception to develop customer friendly interfaces that make it easier for businesses to take advantage of the ever-changing AI landscape.

We also know that despite all of the new channels available, voice retains its popularity as the primary customer service channel. It's likely that until you can offer an experience that is better than speaking to a human this will continue to be the case.

Our innovations include mobile experiences where users can choose between text or voice driven processes with real-time transcripts, where customers are presented with relevant, contextual images, videos and custom content  – looping in a human expert when required, either via live-chat or a Contact Centre. Ultimately, these types of multi-modal experiences will become better than a phone call, and will start to offer a genuine choice for customers.

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Traditional Customer Service Channels are Losing Ground to Mobile and AI Innovations Patrick Quinlan, Gartner Research Inc, Feb 10 2025