“A few years back, Artificial Intelligence for businesses was just like a fidget spinner for kids. They were playing with it because it seemed interesting. However, now businesses are utilizing it for real results.”
– Sachin Bhatia (CEO, Ameyo)
As the world becomes more technological and digital with the changing dynamics, Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enabling businesses to reduce communication friction between humans and computers. Consumer behavior has witnessed a vortex of change in the past decade, and technological developments have enabled all industries and businesses to embrace digital transformation at Scale.
Successfully scaling intelligent assistants has become necessary and requires selecting the best customer-facing processes and applying well-proven conversational design and strategy. As the report by IDC suggests, digital transformation investment is expected to approach $7 trillion by 2023 as companies build on existing strategy and investments, becoming digital-at-scale future enterprises.
Conversational AI is growing more extensively every day in almost every business. Delivering exceptional personalized experiences with Conversational AI is the need of an hour to offer and build more intelligent CX. Conversational AI is changing how we engage with customers – vastly improving reach, responsiveness, and personalization.
Understanding real-time natural language will transform how we interact with intelligent machines and applications. Most industries and departments leverage the technologies broadly and widely to get and offer a better customer experience.
What is Conversational AI and Why is it a Global Trend Today?
Conversational AI is the amalgamation of technologies behind all automated or pre-recorded messaging and speech-enabled apps that offer human-like interactions between people and computers. It enables bots to communicate like a human being by recognizing aspects such as text and speech, understanding context, decoding different languages, and responding in a way that imitates human conversation.
Applied Conversational AI requires science and art to create successful applications that incorporate context, personalization, and relevance in human beings to computer interaction. However, while chatbots have gained popularity, conversational AI solutions can be offered over both text and voice autoresponders.
Conversational AI combines different technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, deep learning, and contextual awareness. Conversational AI enables machines to process, understand, and respond naturally to text or voice inputs. When establishing a conversational AI application, it becomes important to integrate the personalization, context, and relevance in the interaction between humans and bots/computers to ensure better CX.
Conversational AI empowers two basic modes of communication, which are text and voice. A bot that entertains the customer interactions over texting (or chatting) is known as a conversational ai chatbot solution, while the one serving the voice responses is known as a voice bot solution.
Businesses can easily install conversational AI across all customer touchpoints to create a seamless customer experience right from mobile apps or websites to social media, voice-based assistants, and other messaging platforms. Businesses use automated conversations to connect with their customers and provide seamless experiences across the channel to cater to the entire user base—reasons why conversational AI has become a global trend nowadays.
- Saves time – With conversational AI, businesses can quickly respond to customer queries, save them from going through the tedious process of connecting with several agents, and provide faster customer service.
- Easy real-time access – Conversational AI enables customers to seamlessly connect with a chatbot and get real-time access, further reducing information discrepancy risk.
- Increases efficiency – By Integrating it into the business, businesses can increase their operational and customer support efficiency.
- Superior Customer experience: Businesses prefer conversational AI to provide an exceptional customer experience with decreased customer support complaints. Businesses can personalize the interactions and all touchpoints by identifying individual customers and their messaging profiles.
The scope of Conversational AI – Building a Less Artificial and More Intelligent CX
Conversational AI initially originated with chatbots built for specific tasks for ensuring better customer experience and user engagement within a limited domain to provide primary responses embedded in the interactive framework. Since then, it has expanded to offer various callouts and services customized to deliver an enriched, superior, and personalized user experience (UX) via voice and text commands.
Nowadays, with the changing dynamics and technological advancement, Customers are giving higher preference to the businesses, continuously enhancing their customer experience strategy and providing exceptional customer support. As per the research by PWC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, indicating that Customer Experience (CX) will be the central focus in the coming days as more and more brands embrace digital transformation.
Superior Customer Experience is a Necessity
Conversational AI platform is upping the Customer experience standards for businesses. While adopting the latest AI technologies to improve customer relationships, it becomes vital for industries to keep an eye on the latest customer engagement trends. Here are a few reasons that explain why a top-notch customer experience is the need of the hour:
- Enable a superior omnichannel experience
- To improve brand loyalty & differentiation
- Expanding new customer Base
What makes a Good Customer Experience?
Before understanding what makes a good customer experience, it is crucial to understand what CX means. CX is the aggregate of how the customer feels about your brand from the interaction point until after the interaction. Businesses engage with customers across several communication touchpoints. Every interaction provides an opportunity for businesses to build or ruin what the customer thinks about you.
So what really contributes to a good CX? Here are a few points to consider:
1) Know your Audience
One of the most crucial aspects to know while framing a CX strategy is knowing your audience. Customer behavior is dynamic. Businesses need to be aware of who their customers are, how they behave, what motivates or upsets them, and their choices. It is important to have an observation of how customers evolve and what your business can do to cater to their new needs.
2) Build with Empathy
Empathy plays an essential role in enhanced customer experience. But, it gets overlooked due to technologies such as AI, ML, NLU, NLP, Cloud. Businesses need to set up technology that syncs with customers and understands their emotions, as most high-tech products fail if they’re not built with empathy. Businesses have to empathize with their customers to create a CX that genuinely stands out.
3) Hyper-Personalized Approach
Gone are the days when marketers and businesses used to treat one location as an overall market. Technological advancement has enabled enterprises to create a solution to talk to their customers in their preferable manner. Customer experience increases when brands interact with their customers in the most personalized way.
The Evolving Role of Conversational AI: Improved CX Strategy
In the previous years, customers have become more tech-savvy and incorporated technology into their business. They have wholeheartedly accepted and welcomed digital companies. As the technologies continue to develop and grow, enterprises focus on redefining what CX means to them. As per the reports by IDC, at least 90% of new enterprises will add AI technology into their apps, processes, and products by 2025.
Conversational AI uses bots (both voice bots and chatbots) to communicate with customers via different modes and channels. Conversational AI allows businesses to provide rich customer insights, enhance processes, develop better products, provide enhanced services, and help marketers with personalized messaging and targeting.
Businesses across different verticals have adopted Conversational AI. CXOs are responsible for providing a best-in-class experience to customers and overseeing the entire customer lifecycle.
Let’s look at how Conversational AI improves CX strategy:
1) Cost Reduction
Conversational AI solutions have several aspects that help increase CX. Unlike standard AI assistants, a chatbot resolve queries quicker, more effectively, and efficiently; agents become 24*7 available to talk to the customers in their most preferred language of communication. A chatbot that is built to handle queries at scale leads to cost reduction and cost savings.
2) Employee & Customer Engagement
Employees and customers are the biggest assets of every company. Conversational AI solutions streamline inter- intradepartmental processes, enhance employee engagement, boost employee satisfaction, and positively affect CX. Conversational AI also assists employees in customer engagement programs that help create a meaningful relationship with your customers beyond a transaction.
3) Purchase Experience
CX cycle starts right from when you walk into an outlet and see if there is someone to assist you or when you go through the web to look for data. All of these are aspects of CX. Every one of these is a part of an awful CX. Conversational AI helps to assist the customers and prevent bad CX.
Conversational AI is not Rule-Based or Scripted
Traditional chatbots are based on a set of pre-defined rules and texts, just like traditional programming techniques. Chatbots were working on the concept of “If this, then that, else this.” With traditional chatbots, customers were getting answers based on the encrypted script and appropriate rules. Due to technological advancement, conversational AI chatbots and voice bots can determine the nuances of human speech, explain how customers are feeling and help to respond accordingly.
