Conversational AI is one of the biggest disruptors ever employed to change customer service architectures. The rise of the digital age and subsequent lockdowns due to the global pandemic has led to a serious rethink of the traditional customer operations for any business. The need to reduce costs at the same time dealing with increasing contact volumes has raised complex problems. And the demand for exceptional customer service to meet ever-changing user behavior, conversation AI is an optimal solution.
Customer operations are all about the systems, processes automation, and line of communication that make a unified possible cross-functional approach to improve customer experience. Conversational AI has long been thought to offer a solution to these problems and enhance the speed of operations to increase customer engagement exponentially. It is expected that 20% of service-based interactions will be handled by Conversational AI agents by 2022. The market for this technology is expected to grow from $4 billion to $15 billion by 2024.
The possibilities this technology can offer to any business are limitless. And in this article, we are going to look at the opportunities that conversational AI technology can create, the problems it can mitigate, and some results to discuss how it is improving Customer Experience (CX) operations.
What is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a network of technologies that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and more to automate communication with customers in real time. Businesses can use this technology by adopting chatbots, virtual assistants, text-to-speech, or speech-to-text-based assistants. This technology is adaptive and helps to create personalized, human-like interactions with customers, most often without the actual need or involvement of a customer representative.
conversational assistants differ from your regular chatbots. Traditional chatbots are trained with distinct algorithms that have a predefined set of answers. While conversational one learns from the interactions with customers and generates responses regarding customer questions for effective communication. As technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, it will be impossible to distinguish between an AI chatbot and a customer representative.
What are the Opportunities with Conversational AI?
When it comes to customer service and customer experience conversational AI is being used in different ways. And it provides a mountain of possibilities to take personalized customer service to the next level. And here are some ways that this technology can boost your customer service and maximize customer experience.
1. Assisting customers around the clock
Customers expect customer service experts or representatives to always be available and provide adequate information and support 24/7. Which is one of the most important and critical challenges for any business to address. The non-availability of representatives and distinct time zones are the two major factors that make businesses fall behind in offering 24/7 assistance to their customers. Conversational AI has made it possible to meet such customer demands. Robustness and ability to work around the clock smooth the operation processes and helps to deal with all kinds of customers most pleasantly.
2. Assisting agent by unlocking knowledge
AI-based chatbots can process humongous volumes of data to perform functions like sentiment and intent analysis. That results in assisting live agents by providing a more reliable source of information, connecting systems, and interacting in more natural ways during customer interactions. According to Gartner, 40% of users are primarily interacting with conversation user interfaces via voice or chat and the agent intervenes at certain times only to provide relevant information, screens, or prompts. Furthermore conversational virtual assistants can anticipate how customer satisfaction can be maximized, by helping agents in real time through a certain course of actions.
3. Reduce customer waiting time
Reducing customer waiting time is a vital need for any business that wants to enhance customer satisfaction and increase its sales. And according to research, the speed of response and the speed of resolution are two factors of customer service that determine the scale of growth irrespective of the communication channel you use. Apart from satisfied customers, reducing waiting time boosts work satisfaction among the employees too. Mitigating waiting hours reduces the count of furious customers, operation time, and cost.
4. Hyper-personalized service
Understanding their customer demographics and what they need is a difficult and time-consuming task for any customer representative. On the other hand, conversational AI can track the customers’ identity, queries, requests, and services based on the previous communication they’ve made quickly and tailor its communications with customers so that the experience gets more personalized and unique.
5. Omni-channel support
Businesses use a distinct set of communication channels for internal and external communications and they shift between these channels whenever they feel appropriate. And when it comes to customers they expect the flow of conversation to continue when they shift between these channels exactly from where they left off. This particular challenge can be addressed by employing artificial agents. These systems can access any channel and in any language to analyze a company’s CRM and other databases for real-time assistance without switching back to basic conversations.
Why AI-based customer assistants?
AI-based customer assistants come in all forms to revolutionize your traditional customer interaction services. They can be deployed as chatbots, voice bots, or intelligent self-help assistants to leverage a full range of customer service channels, including, voice, messaging, chat, push notifications, and SMS. A conversational AI tool kit is also used to analyze and forecast insights from unstructured data in customer interactions. Predicting customer behavior not only boosts live interactions but also future assistance in service. Integrating this technology helps businesses to build a competitive advantage.
Most businesses using Conversational AI are currently in the form of chatbots which contribute 58% of overall deployment according to a recent survey. And Gartner predicts that 70% of customers will most likely choose AI-based assistants over service representatives for interactions and customer assistance by 2023. The increasing demand and exponential growth helping organizations that work on this technology to build more sustainable systems for effective operations.
Soulpage IT Solutions is a pioneer in developing customer assistance technologies like chatbots, intelligent self-help assistants, and more to specify individual business-specific needs. To explore more about this technology or to discover how you can leverage its advantage, talk to our AI solutions expert today!