Chatbots and conversational AI have been around for quite some time now. With Covid-19, the demand has increased further due to the easy omnichannel deployment and reduced cost of development of these AI-powered customer support services. They enable businesses to stay connected and increase customer engagement, provide 24/7 customer support, and meet customer demand for self-service while freeing up resources to focus on innovation and growth. As a result, the global conversational AI market size is expected to grow at a rapid Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.8% from USD 6.8 billion in 2021 to USD 18.4 billion by 2026.
Customer Service Automation with Conversational AI
One of the key areas where the impact of conversational AI can be felt is in customer service automation across industry verticals. Popularly called chatbots or virtual agents, it is an AI-based tool leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to assess customer needs and respond to their search inquiries by responding to basic, standardized questions.
The conversational AI is trained to respond to simple and standard customer inquiries, including:
- Password recovery
- Account related questions
- Sales recommendations based on past purchases by the customer or similar purchases by other customers
Along with improving customer experience through prompt response, it also frees human agents to focus on more complicated customer queries. Instead, they can use the time to plan campaigns, improve service, and create marketing strategies based on data generated by the chatbots and other customer-related data.
5 Reasons You Need a Conversational AI
Conversational AI is built using advanced dialogue management technologies including Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition, Advanced Dialogue Management, and Noise Cancelling AI. It can be text-based, like chatbots, or audio bots such as Alexa.
5 benefits of using a conversational AI in your organization include:
Benefit #1 Accuracy: Often, Conversational AI is designed for a specific purpose and provides simple, standardized responses to regular queries. By eliminating the need for humans to respond to queries and introduce potential errors, the chatbot provides accurate answers promptly, thus improving customer satisfaction.
Benefit #2 Efficiency: The chatbot is suitably connected to the relevant data sources, because of which it can cut down the search and respond quickly. In the case of chatbots used to take orders for food, the order can be sent directly to the kitchen, which speeds up prep time and improves service. This also minimizes the chances of human error. In retail, it can analyze past purchases and make suitable recommendations. Automating such tasks also makes the human agents more efficient as they are free of working on repetitive tasks that add no value either to their personal growth or the organization’s growth.
Benefit #3 Contactless Customer Experience: By deploying chatbots, businesses can overcome shortage of personnel. They provide customers with contactless ordering experience maximizing safety in these times of Covid-19 risk as well as protect employees from the risk of overexposure to several customers.
Benefit #4 Upsell and Cross-sell: Conversational AI uses machine learning to assess customer preferences, other factors influencing a purchase decision, and cross-sell and upsell products in e-commerce marketplaces.
Benefit #5 Lower Operating Costs: Conversational AI is a feature-rich tool that can track, provide feedback analytics in addition to handling customer queries, thereby reducing operating costs. It works 24×7, thereby providing customer service anywhere, any time at no additional costs. It also does away with the need for multiple employees to handle the many tasks it can perform, thereby improving productivity and savings on wages.
Challenges of Conversational AI
While Conversational AI is a blessing, it can also bring its own challenges which can be easily overcome. Gartner points out that one of the key challenges is in identifying the purpose of the conversational AI platform (CAIP) to understand which solution will best suit the organization’s need. With several chatbot solutions being available, businesses must define their short and mid-term goals.
Some of the key challenges include:
- Security: Data privacy and security are sacrosanct, not only from a regulatory perspective but even from the point of view of the customers. Ensuring confidentiality becomes essential while information and data from customers to process their queries.
- Capturing the Customer Sentiment: Human emotions are fragile and any misinterpretation can lead to severe consequences for the business. At the same time, human emotions are complex too, making it hard for a chatbot to interpret it correctly. This requires training the tool to understand the nuances and respond accordingly.
- Dealing with Dialects: Language is dynamic with different regions speaking the same language differently. The bot will have to be trained to handle the different dialects to be able to respond accurately.
Digitech to Power Your Conversational AI
Digitech Labs is a cutting-edge software solution provider that develops bespoke solutions based on your organization’s growth needs.
Our approach to developing Conversational AI includes:
- Developing AI-powered chatbots, IVRs, or live bots to improve conversations with your customers across platforms, agent productivity, service quality, speed of responses, and decision making using chatbots, IVR bots.
- Chat analytics and monitoring to track bot performance, gain insights from chats, bots, and agents, and enable fine-tuning and improve their performance
- Automating and streamlining processes across functions of your organization such as HR, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Procurement and Order Management, Vendor Management, Legal and Administration for greater efficiency
- Ensuring security by implementing a secure solution aligning with the organization’s governance and security policies
To know more about the Digitech capabilities, visit: https://digitechlabs.com/landing/redefine-digital-customer-engagement-with-solutions-from-digitech-labs