Introduction
The world of customer service is a challenging one. Constant technological advances and changing customer demands have made it even more challenging. Businesses across industry verticals are investing heavily in conversational AI and related technologies today. In any enterprise, call centers have the unique distinction of being at the crossroads of where people, processes, and technologies meet. As a consequence, conversational AI solutions are more essential now than ever for contact centers in order to satisfy evolving customer and business needs. Some of the benefits and reasons why contact centers must leverage the power of conversational AI into their business practice:
Providing Personalized Conversations
Compared to traditional chatbots, conversational AI assistants are capable of providing contextual and meaningful responses to customers since they are built on intelligent technologies such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. With increasing customer demands for exceptional brand experience, conversational AI can help businesses deliver a more personalized customer experience at scale by integrating with key management tools such as CRMs. Through this, customers can experience quick yet personalized conversational resolutions to their queries all through human-like conversations with AI assistants through both voice and text.
Conversational AI also helps improve customer satisfaction by providing fast, efficient support and proactive insights into their conversational journey through businesses so that a business can know what’s working for them and how to better serve them.
Self-Service
A study says that 78% of consumers have contacted a contact center multiple times to address a single concern in their experience. Contact centers are under more pressure and doing more work than ever before ever since the pandemic and it is less likely to slow down in a post-Covid world. By providing alternative customer service options such as self-service, contact centers can ease the strain on their human agents.
A study by Acumen says that 45% of customers are more likely to use self-service than before the pandemic and 55% of them prefer using digital channels to interacting with a live agent. With conversational AI, contact centers can let customers help themselves resolve their issues, automate responses to frequently asked questions, and let their human agents focus on more pressing issues that require their attention, all the while experiencing extraordinary customer service.
Around-the-Clock Support
Unlike human agents, conversational AI can be available 24/7 without requiring any downtime. With Voice-AI and chat assistants, contact centers can reduce call abandon rate and respond to every query immediately from customers anywhere in the world, at any time, even outside of their business hours.
In this day and age, it is imperative that businesses are available all the time, across all channels where their customers are present. This is also where a smart conversational AI can help. When interconnected across multiple digital channels, conversational AI assistants can remember previous conversations with customers and map them across different channels such as Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, or the business’s website — providing an omnipresent conversational experience and staying available for customers no matter what time or day of the week.
Intelligent Call Routing
Conversational AI is more likely to take over specific tasks and activities that are currently performed by humans, making processes easier and more efficient, freeing humans from cognitively routine tasks, and opening up new avenues for enriching their work.
When it comes to queries or tasks that are complex and require human intervention, a conversational AI assistant can find the best agent for the particular query while parallelly collecting relevant details from the customer regarding the task at hand. Once the agent is available, the AI assistant facilitates a smooth handover by transferring the call to the agent along with the query details so that customers do not have to repeat themselves again thus avoiding frustration.
This way, conversational AI can be used to automatically route and escalate calls based on customer intent. The use of intelligent conversational AI routing and escalation allows contact centers to increase agent efficiency by allowing them to focus on more important tasks like engaging with customers efficiently and improving the quality of their interactions.
Reduce Costs
While efforts to move customers to self-service options like a knowledge base are important, it is inevitable that some customers will still prefer to call in for assistance.
In the past, automated voice interactions have been handled by Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, but often, these systems lack advanced speech recognition capabilities. In addition, deploying on-premise IVRs costs money and consumes time, which restricts a contact center’s ability to handle spikes in call volume.
Automating interactions with conversational AI, especially for voice, with natural language IVR can significantly reduce call center costs. Owing to the advancement of NLP technology and the popularity of cloud-based telephony, it’s now possible to build a cloud-based conversational IVR in a matter of days. In order to handle a higher percentage of customer calls and eliminate the need for live operators, these systems can be automated to handle a wider range of interactions and map frequently asked queries to a knowledge base while reducing costs significantly.
Conclusion
Conversational AI is one of the fastest-growing segments of technology, and it’s also one of the most exciting. As mentioned above, this technology has tremendous potential for customer contact centers by helping them automate voice interactions with natural language IVR, handle 80% of routine queries through text or call, save time and lower costs all the while improving customer experience. The real benefit comes from increasing agent efficiency by letting them help customers in a more meaningful way, which could also lead to greater employee happiness and retention rates. To learn more about how conversational AI can be beneficial for your business, get in touch with our team of experts today.
