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Today we are on the cusp of a revolution in the customer service industry. The major credit for this revolution goes to conversational AI and adjacent technologies. Thanks to advanced research and technological breakthrough, machines have evolved to become our highly intelligent alter ego. Understanding the nuances of human language and making sense of intricate human speech patterns is today within reach of top conversational AI systems. These intelligent machines, thanks to advanced speech analytics, can understand the customer’s real intent, emotions, and implied needs.
Today it is possible to offer personalized customer experience and bring in more efficiencies and cost reductions within major brands’ customer service departments. Automation of repetitive tasks helps humans to concentrate on more value-added proposition related to customer engagement. Thus, we are at the beginning of a long journey wherein conversational AI will take customer service to new heights in the years to come. Conversational Service Automation is one such AI-based platform that is set to revolutionize customer service.
Conversational AI helps customer service
#1. Automate multiple processes
Not all tasks need the attention of humans. You don’t have to read through every email, listen to all the calls, etc. Bringing in automation powered by artificial intelligence can do all these tasks with the utmost efficiency. This way, the costs are lower, the time taken to accomplish such tasks is drastically reduced, and who knows, you might even be able to discover hidden insights within them which humans would never have been able to find. Today there is also a need to automate real-time conversations, so agents get a head start in servicing customers. Conversational AI does a great job of automating mundane and repetitive tasks in a contact center environment.
#2. Augment agent capabilities
The contact center agents are not going to be redundant any time soon. But what conversational AI can do is augment the agent capabilities with insights, knowledge bases, alerts, and notifications to do their jobs better. If a particular agent is going off course from the script, he might get a signal. If an agent forgets to disclose an essential piece of information to the customer, then the conversational AI system working in the background can send him a notification. Once the call is over, the conversational AI solutions can help put together a neat summary highlighting the action items and deliverables. All this would have taken the human agent’s time, which now can be utilized to do something more valuable.
#3. Improve decision-making
One of the most significant drawbacks of human faculty is that we are prone to errors. Our minds get tired. We are affected by fatigue and other emotions or disruptions going on in our careers or personal lives. All this makes us error-prone. But machines can do the same task again and again with the same level of efficiency and accuracy. Also, conversational AI can help humans make better decisions. This could be because machines give us a better context of the problem, more information, a sight of the bigger picture, and so. Thus overall, conversational AI can help us take customer service to a higher level with better decision-making.
#4. Lower query response time
Today’s customers are impatient. They demand immediate solutions and resolution of their queries. Conversational AI technologies can help reduce response times to customer queries. These queries could be coming in from a host of channels like social media, email, website chat, review sites, third-party aggregators, phone calls, etc. Managing all these tasks might seem herculean for humans but luckily not for machines.
With the right conversational AI solutions, it is possible to read through thousands of emails, scan across the social media channels for customer queries, listen in on customer calls, make sense of customer tickets, etc. All this means there is centralized decision-making, which is powered by conversational AI, which drastically reduces the query resolution time. Ultimately what you have are happier customers and more business!
#5. Personalize customer experience
Gone are the days when one size fits all – was considered a business mantra: but not anymore. Each customer is unique with a unique set of problems and expectations from the brand. Humans would find it very difficult to offer a personalized experience to each customer. Conversational AI can understand every customer, their biases, a unique set of problems, and offer very customized solutions and query resolutions.
Conversational AI tools can collect and analyze historical customer data and extract valuable insights from it. They can build customer personas, their likes and dislikes, personal preferences, and so on. The machines can also detect patterns, trends, and behavioral cues from their speech and help to deliver a very personalized customer service experience.
Offering personalized experience not only helps to provide better customer service, but it also allows businesses to retain customers by identifying the probability of churn. This way, it is possible to anticipate problems before they arise and offer quick solutions to customers’ delight. This means saving the business from having to see a customer run away towards a competitor.
#6. Boost revenue and bottom-line
Everything comes down to revenue and bottom-line growth. So, if we cannot connect the use of conversational AI solutions to improve these vital metrics, we would be failing in our goals. Conversational AI solutions help reduce costs in the customer service arena by taking over the tasks that generally needed human intelligence. This means lesser HR costs, lower overhead costs, and so on. Also, when the customer service improves thanks to conversational AI technologies, it means you get more loyal customers and better word-on-mouth advertising. All this means fatter revenue and bottom-line growth.
Get in touch with Uniphore to learn more about how to deploy conversational AI to improve your customer service experience.