November 22, 2024
From voicebots to chatbots, conversational AI is becoming more and more popular in customer communications and business practices. Around 37% of businesses use AI. While 91% of the world’s top companies use AI to boost customer services. From faster response times to reduced costs, there are several benefits to using AI in customer communications.
Gartner’s research VP Chris Howard warns that companies who fail to adopt AI will quickly be outgrown by the competition. If you don’t want to get left behind, we’ve got you covered. Let’s dive into this quick guide to conversational AI for your customer communications.
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI engages in real-time conversations with people by analyzing their intent and use of language and responding in turn. Conversational AI accomplishes this with the help of machine learning, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and natural language processing (NLP).
You can use conversational AI across a range of channels, such as voice, online messaging, and SMS. The most common forms of conversation AI are voice bots (speech-enabled applications) and chat bots (that mimic human messenger conversations).
Smart brands use conversational AI to
- Answer front-line customer questions.
- Route more complex customer problems to an agent with the right knowledge and availability.
- Help customers fulfil basic tasks. These tasks include cancelling subscriptions, changing address information, or updating an old password.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of conversational AI in more detail.
Conversational AI can cut average response times
Your reps can’t always be available to instantly meet customers’ needs, but conversational AI can. Moreover, hiring staff to answer the phones round-the-clock can quickly get expensive. From high call volumes to employee onboarding and training, traditional omnipresent customer support is costly.
Anywhere365® uses the cloud-based AI capabilities of e.g. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to efficiently interpret and respond to front-line customer problems when your agents are unavailable. You can use conversational AI to take care of over 25% of inbound dialogues.
Conversational AI can take care of over 25% of your inbound dialogues for both voice and text channels.
Facilitate customer self-service
You can also use conversational AI to facilitate customer self-service. Many customers crave self-reliance. BT crowns this group of self-directed consumers, ‘autonomous customers’.
These autonomous customers want fast and efficient self-service. They are digital natives. This means they’re confident using a variety of online channels. And they only want to deal with companies that are easy to buy from and interact with. Even though 62% say most of their brand interactions are exhausting.
You can use AI to empower autonomous customers to find the information they need. For example, bots can direct them to the right page or content. Beyond supporting on-site navigation, bots can actively facilitate customer self-service. Bots can support customers to make their own changes to their accounts, services, subscriptions, or contact details.
Boost Customer Satisfaction
AI-facilitated customer self-service can provide a huge boost to customer satisfaction. They are intuitive, easy to use, and far less time-consuming than digging through your company’s FAQs. Enabling customers to resolve their problems anywhere, any time, and on any device.
Moreover, these kinds of issues are often highly repetitive for customer service reps, eating into their time and productivity. With the help of conversational AI, customers can ensure the fast resolution to their problems without the help of an agent.
Match your customers’ preferences
You can use different forms of conversational AI to meet different communication needs and preferences.
For example, 51% of teenage consumers between the ages of 14-17 say they have interacted with a speech or voice recognition device. In contrast, only 15% of people who aged 55 and older have.
This highlights that more digitally savvy consumers, who have grown up with devices, are more likely to feel comfortable with voicebots. By providing different forms of conversational AI, you can provide better customer experiences that suit the needs of every customer.
Access enriched data to better resolve customer problems
By seamlessly integrating customer communication across different channels, you can create a unified brand experience throughout the customer journey.
In addition, via integration with your CRM, you can use customer data to provide consistent support. With the right data, both bots and agents have the information they need to deliver personalized customer experiences in every interaction. Anywhere365® offers over 30 seamless CRM integrations, including Salesforce, Dynamics 365, SAP and ServiceNow.
How Anywhere365® Opens Up Your Virtual World
Anywhere365® Dialogue Cloud platform empowers you to seamlessly support your customers across their preferred channels. While providing agents and AI with the contextual information they need to provide the best personalized customer support.
In addition, you can use Anywhere365® to centralize your customer data and map the customer journey from start to finish. Reporting and recording are easy. You can use Anywhere365® to manage and report on customer dialogues from their first point of contact with your business, through to the final resolution.
You’ll get the actionable insights to boost your business and support customers at every stage. No matter where, when, and on which device your customers contact you.
Don’t miss out on the benefits of conversational AI
Customers want fast, efficient, 24/7 customer service on their favourite channels. When your reps can’t be there to support customers, conversational AI can. From slashing your response times to boosting the omnichannel customer experience, there are several benefits to using conversational AI in your customer interactions.
Curious to learn more about our conversational AI solutions? Have a look at our zero code Dialogue Studio for the automation of your enterprise dialogues!
