Conversational AI is a new artificial intelligence technology that allows computers to interact with people through speech or text. It decodes a customer’s intent using natural language processing and machine learning and then provides pertinent answers.
It also helps improve customer service and increase the overall customer experience. It’s a powerful tool for delivering personalized experiences, driving revenue, and reducing customer churn.
Reduced Customer Service Costs
Customer support is often viewed as a cost center. In addition to the labor costs involved, customer service teams are also required to provide training and re-training for each agent and manage and maintain the tools and resources they use.
Increasingly, organizations are turning to conversational artificial intelligence software to help cut down on these costs and improve customer satisfaction. By automating many of the tasks that agents used to perform, organizations can significantly lower their costs and increase the efficiency of their support teams.
For example, a financial services company can use voice assistants to handle repetitive tasks like customer inquiries on their web banking portal. By integrating voice-based assistants into their web banking, they can provide customer service that is consistent and personalized.
This technology can determine each client’s emotional needs, personality profile, and communication preferences and match them with an agent who has the skills to meet their requirements. This way, the customer gets fast, high-quality support whenever needed.
Using chatbots to resolve low-priority customer inquiries can free human representatives to tackle more complex issues. In turn, this leads to faster service and happier customers. Additionally, conversational AI models can solve more fundamental problems and uncover insights that human reps may not be able to detect. By reducing the number of support tickets handled by agents, organizations can also decrease labor costs and streamline operations.
Personalized Experiences
Personalized customer experiences are becoming a must-have for many businesses, and it’s no different when it comes to conversational AI. This technology allows companies to automate processes and deliver relevant content to customers at the right time based on real-time data.
To do so, conversational AI uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand a customer’s intent and delivers a response that reflects it. This helps customers feel as though their questions are being heard and answered.
The AI learns to account for grammar and punctuation, syllable emphasis, accents, intonation, and other factors that can influence the meaning of a customer’s words. This means it can engage in more complex customer interactions than basic voice interfaces.
By understanding customer intent, chatbots and virtual assistants can proactively address pain points and concerns in the customer journey. This can lead to improved satisfaction and a reduction in churn.
This can also help businesses generate higher revenue by engaging customers more proactively. For example, a chatbot can collect information about the consumer’s spending habits and make recommendations based on that data.
One of the best benefits of chatbots and virtual assistants is that they can answer questions and provide support 24 hours a day. This can significantly reduce customer wait times and make customers feel cared for. It also reduces the time agents spend on simple questions, allowing them to focus on more complex ones that require more human intervention.
Accelerated Revenue Generation
As we move closer to 2023, organizations increasingly focus on improving customer experiences as key to revenue generation. They’re investing in new data, applications, and infrastructures to enhance customer experience quality and accelerate business operations.
Businesses must provide a unified experience across various channels, including the web, phone, social media, and mobile messaging, to meet customer demand for more personalized interactions. Conversational AI is ideal for meeting this need and delivering superior customer service across every interaction.
By automating and empowering employees, conversations can be conducted at scale without sacrificing quality. They can also support individual customers with specific needs and preferences.
Especially in the financial services sector, conversational AI helps guide customers through complex processes and avoids long hold times on live agent lines. For instance, when customers land on their web banking portal, a chatbot prompts them to complete a loan application. It then shares the direct line to a live agent who can assist them with the process.
In this sense, conversational AI is an excellent partner for revenue teams with a heavy focus on nurturing leads and guiding prospects through the sales funnel. It’s a perfect tool for driving product adoption, extending current customer relationships, and politely urging past-due payments. It also helps automate workflows for repetitive tasks that staff have to perform, enabling the team to focus on more valuable sales and marketing activities.
Reduced Customer Churn
Today’s customers expect high-quality service, fast response times, and a personalized experience. Companies that fall short of these expectations risk losing out on future business.
Conversational AI can help reduce customer churn by identifying and proactively nurturing the accounts that most need assistance. This can include several actions, such as sending automated thank you and follow-up messages, updating rewards balances, and sending sale or price drop alerts.
As an added benefit, it can also identify and flag accounts at risk of canceling for a predictable reason and provide remedial action to turn them around. This saves your company money and the need to hire a dedicated team of telesales agents.
This can save you thousands of dollars per year and prevent significant potential revenue loss. It can also help you manage a much lower customer churn rate, leading to increased loyalty and referrals.
Finally, AI-powered bots can handle more customer requests than human agents. This enables your business to divert low-value, repetitive, and routine support calls away from your employees-thereby, freeing up time for higher-value work like improving customer satisfaction and generating new sales.
This can help your HR department handle more tasks, such as automating employee time off requests, scheduling shifts, tracking paychecks, and managing other administrative tasks. Moreover, it can relay relevant information when there’s a bot-to-human hand-off so that your agent can provide a more comprehensive, seamless service.
