As the world is becoming more technological and digital with the changing dynamics in the contact center industry, Interacting with the customers has been wholly revolutionized. Incorporating innovative technologies in businesses brings out many new features and tools to boost the company’s overall communication skills. One of those tools is conversational AI. The perks of conversational AI are ample, and this article will help fill in regarding them. First, conversational AI empowers organizations to diminish communication abrasion among contact center agents and customers. Consequently, conversational AI is growing more broadly and consistently in almost every business and conveying excellent customized solutions to clients.
By 2023, customers will prefer to use speech interfaces to initiate 70% of self-service customer interactions, rising from 40% in 2019.
– Gartner
Text-based interactions have become a pervasive communication method both at the workplace and in our everyday lives. Nevertheless, using them for customers and customer support provide benefits to the company in several ways. First, the utilization of chatbots has increased over the years, helping organizations bloom.
In addition to the list of perks, AI-enabled conversational chatbots are the new market leadership approach, and many businesses have amalgamated AI with chatbots or speech-based assistants. What’s more, since many are doing that, there must be a reason, right? Right. Nowadays, People have high expectations of customer support and even everything. So, to fulfill them, business owners have been looking out for ways to meet their customers’ expectations and keep them satisfied.
Communicating with customers had never been this easy before these chatbots were regularized. But, the pathway from prospects to marketing-qualified lead to sales-qualified lead can be a long one, and it is a road that seems to have more exits than entrances. But, Integrating conversational AI in businesses helps speed up and increase lead conversion rate.
One of the most useful and efficient methods to meet your customers’ high expectations is utilizing the various advantages of conversational AI in businesses. So let’s see how artificial intelligence-powered conversation can benefit businesses to win more leads and sales.
How Do Conversational AI Bots Strengthen Ties Between Your Business and Its Customers?
Conversational AI-enabled bots enable businesses to do a lot more than just conversing the leads from prospects to SQLs. Instead, they act as the primary contributor in engaging customers, making services accessible 24/7, and working as a human-like experience. All thanks to the features like natural language processing and leveraging semantics, bots can understand what a person is trying to communicate, understand, and help to resolve it.
Conversational AI is an emerging market and is expected to reach USD $1.3 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24%.
– Cognizant
Some of the other significant abilities of conversational AI bots include initiating and communicating on natural conversations, understanding the meaning and context of words, detecting errors and incorrect spellings. Due to these well-defined features, Conversational AI chatbots provide a commendable experience and help strengthen the ties between your business and its customers.
Conversational Marketing Can Supercharge Lead Conversion Process
Lead conversion from prospects to potential customers, marketing to sales (or sales to purchasing) can be a matter of perseverance, karma, or appeal. However, marketing qualified leads will always have a better shot at a high conversion rate. Good and well-researched leads also mean salesperson time is saved and not wasted on unqualified leads. Conversational AI bots respond to customer queries, provide them consultation, convert them into leads and sort them by relevance and potential.
Conversational AI can enable businesses to handle questions (through chatbots on the website or email) in the inquiry phase. AI-enabled bots also ask questions and perform their lead scoring based on businesses’ information or lead scoring system. One of the significant points of conversational ai bots is they save time and budgets as they do not get tired, and their energy does not drain.
Instead of hiring beyond your plans and budget, Ai-enabled bots do not get frustrated in the face of failure. Conversational Ai bots speak so well with the customers that they do not even realize they are not humans. Lead conversion interrupts or declines due to the slower process of following up on qualified leads — but there is nothing to worry about! Conversational AI bots can respond rapidly to queries no matter the lead volume.
1. Increased Productivity
Unlike traditional customer solutions, conversational ai chatbots are available round the clock. It makes businesses prevalent, allowing them to reach out to all customers on various modes of communication channels. There is no longer that time when AI tools were in doubt because of the thought that they would replace human resources with machines. Thanks to extensively spread digital disruption globally, employees are getting more familiar with AI, its advantages and realizing how beneficial it can be to incorporate AI assistance in the workplace.
Starting from nurturing leads by suggesting the right products to them, onboarding, and attending to their grievances, AI-powered tools can help contact center agents in each stage of the cycle.
Top 5 ways conversational AI increases productivity
- Understand customers through data-driven knowledge
- Automates repetitive tasks and saves time
- Improves workflow b/w users
- Forecasts customer behavior through advanced analytics
- Improves customer experience and increases customer satisfaction
2. Cost Savings
Conversational AI chatbots enable businesses to reduce their business’s overall cost by replacing extra human resources. They develop comprehensive solutions to improve the experience for both the customers and the agents. In addition, they respond to every single query, message, request on time and significantly increase the chances of transforming potential customers into leads.
Conversational AI bots require only a minimal up-front investment, can be utilized rapidly, and lower support costs. As per the report by Juniper Research, By 2022, chatbots and NLP will save companies around $8 billion/ year in customer support costs. For example, a chatbot can shave off average call center handling times every second and save as much as $1 million in yearly customer service costs.
3. Seamless Communication
Customers reach out to customer support and services to resolve queries and issues they are facing concerning products or services. Nowadays, they possess less patience and lose their temper within minutes if the problem is not resolved quickly. They also switch to competitors and change their loyalties rapidly based on one or two awful experiences. Using a conversational ai chatbot strengthens the customer support system and enables seamless communication by allowing customers to engage and get their queries resolved without waiting for long. Additionally, conversational ai bots are multilingual and increase the reach of businesses.
4. Better Customer Experience (CX)
The use of conversational AI bots has exponentially increased as businesses have become more aware of consumer engagement through better customer service. Nowadays, consumers want to interact with brands at their convenience, whether it is business hours or a communication platform, and conversational ai bots fulfill that wish.
Conversational ai chatbots supercharge and personalize the entire customer experience through accessible communication and problem-solving capability. It also helps deal with a large volume of customer inquiries and helps brands with their bottom line. One of the most significant advantages of deploying conversational AI in businesses is it improves customer experience and reduces the cost to serve the customers.
5. More Sales
Conversational AI bots help businesses to drive a customer-first mindset. Bot enables brands to provide the correct information and updates on time and boost sales. Proactively, the ai chatbot will interact with customers on the website throughout their journey and help them. As a result, it becomes easier to drive more leads, increase lead conversion rate, and build a loyal customer base.
4 ways of increasing sales with conversational ai
- AI chatbots help in lead generation and automate the process 24/7
- Boost up lead conversion rate
- Personalization through automation without any language barrier
- Provides omnichannel communication and unified customer experience
6. Consumer Behavioral Insights
One more added advantage of conversational ai chatbots is that they provide real-time and valuable insights into business customer behaviors and patterns. Procuring valuable customer insights for future business practices and strategies becomes more accessible by exchanging information between the customers and the bot during a conversation.
Advantages of consumer behavioral insights
- Customers feel like brands understand them
- Customers receive thoughtful and personalized recommendations
- Customers feel supported and recognized during each buying stage