Transform your contact center with conversational AI

Did you know that most customers are willing to terminate services based on a single negative interaction with an organization’s contact center?

The customer experience impact report by RightNow and Harris Interactive reveals that poor customer interaction solutions were responsible for 82% of respondents stopping their business with a company. It leads us to believe that no business can afford to overlook the quality of customer service they deliver.

Today’s customers require prompt, accurate, and most importantly, personalized service from contact centers. They require rapid answers and do not appreciate waiting for too long for solutions. They also seek seamless experiences across channels and round-the-clock support.

However, as a business grows and the customer base increases, delivering personalized and prompt support to customers becomes a challenge.

So, how do you provide the same level of high-quality support that will keep your brand reputation intact?

“Conversational AI” is the solution that will empower the success of such businesses.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI makes machines capable of understanding, processing, and responding to human language. This emerging technology enables businesses to gain a competitive edge by delivering to customer expectations.

This technology employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze language and break down customer interactions into data that virtual agents (or bots) can understand and respond to just like a human would. It uses Machine Learning (ML) processes to learn new information and improve responses for future interactions.

Conversational AI has primarily taken the form of chatbots that are superior to conventional chatbots. They support contact center activities by answering frequently asked questions, troubleshooting issues, and routing queries that were previously handled by human agents.

Thus, Conversational AI simplifies and automates customer interaction solutions in a contact center. The key takeaway is that conversational AI increases operational efficiency while enhancing the customer experience.

Let us now look at the main advantages of integrating conversational AI into contact center operations.

7 noteworthy benefits Conversational AI brings to contact centers

For any business, consistently delivering good customer experiences is key to gaining the upper hand over competitors. However, adding more human agents to address increasing customer inquiries will result in very high operational costs. Furthermore, this approach will not guarantee seamless customer experiences on different channels.

Integrating conversational AI into call center operations is the practical alternative for the following reasons.

1. Improves self-service experiences for customers

Tech-savvy customers are keen on fixing their problems without having to talk to anyone for support. For simple concerns and queries, they prefer self-service options that quickly direct them to the required information.

Virtual agents powered by conversational AI are designed to not only answer different customer queries but also provide positive customer experiences. Smart AI chatbots can grasp the intent of different customer queries and provide accurate and personalized responses.

2. Reduces response time for customer inquiries

Customers do not enjoy being put on hold or waiting forever during their interactions with contact centers. They expect quick and accurate responses whenever they contact a business. Short response times in turn improve brand loyalty.

Conversational AI improves the ability to quickly resolve customer inquiries. With an optimized system in place, conversational AI can procure relevant details from the customer and provide accurate and targeted responses that satisfy customers.

3. Conversational AI evolves over time

One of the main concerns of automation is that machines are unable to understand customer feelings. However, conversational AI is powered by machine learning capabilities. This means that it is constantly evolving and improving with each customer interaction.

Machine learning studies customer interactions and uses them for predictive analysis. It can evaluate customer feelings in different instances and use this information to improve responses and reactions in upcoming interactions. This enhances service quality and makes the interactions more human-like.

4. Provides personalized customer support

Customers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when they receive personal attention from the business. It makes them feel valued and this special touch makes them reluctant to take their business elsewhere.

Contact centers with conversational AI can successfully deliver more personalized services. Advanced capabilities like sentiment analysis enable virtual agents to identify and reciprocate the customer’s mood. It helps a chatbot detect if a customer is irritated or displeased and promptly escalate the case to human agents at the right time. This in turn improves the response quality and prevents customer dissatisfaction.

5. Easy to scale as the business grows

As a business acquires more customers, the number of inbound calls and queries naturally increases. In customer service, AI and automation are the only ways to keep up with this growing requirement. Conversational AI enables contact centers to handle hundreds or even thousands of inquiries through chatbots without any agent intervention.

By exploiting the scope of artificial intelligence, entire processes like automatic call management and routing can be automated. Furthermore, it improves agent productivity by routing only those calls that need direct interaction with human agents. It is also well-suited for businesses with clients all over the globe, that must provide 24/7 support.

6. Increases the efficiency of contact center agents

Conversational AI is not just about automation and self-service, it is also about agent empowerment. Augmenting regular call center operations with conversational AI solutions improves the overall efficiency of human agents in a contact center.

Routine customer care chores like answering FAQs and delivering customer information from the database can be delegated to AI chatbots. This frees the human agents to concentrate on complex queries.

Additionally, AI chatbots can handle huge volumes of queries without fatigue and offer consistently high-quality service for repetitive queries. It also allows contact center teams to focus on high-priority activities. By sparing them time for training and development, it improves overall agent performance and job satisfaction.

7. Leverage customer data to improve service quality

AI-powered contact centers also offer additional tools to analyze employee performance when dealing with customers. It can provide useful data to decipher what went wrong during an interaction and enable agents to work better on identifying training lapses and improving their performance.

Powerful conversational AI platforms include built-in surveys and interaction analytics. They can be used for training the bots in the future to improve performance. It can also shed light on how you can deploy or improve self-service in other areas of contact center operations.

Conversational AI is the key to delivering positive customer experiences at all levels

International best-selling author Bernard Marr said, “No organization can afford to sit back and ignore the potential of AI.”

Skilled human resources are an asset that should focus their efforts on instances where empathy and human decision-making are essential.

Simpler tasks like taking orders, data entry, or looking up information should be automated to reduce cost and higher efficiency.

Hence, it is essential for any business, regardless of the industry segment they fall under, to invest in conversational AI technology to satisfy customer expectations and experience sustainable growth.

Contact Voxtron today to learn more about how to improve your contact center with Conversational AI for better customer interaction solutions that will propel your business ahead of the competition.