We shared in an earlier blog that Gartner recently predicted,” by 2025, 50% of enterprises will have devised artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration platforms to operationalize AI, up from fewer than 10% in 2020.” RPA is usually the first type of AI businesses first leverage. Conversational AI is typically next in line for a digital transformation journey.
Using Conversational AI businesses can intelligently automate their companies. Conversational AI is way more than a chat box, although some mistakenly see it that way. Using Conversational AI an omnichannel automated interaction can be undertaken with customers, clients and employees of a company.
The channels making up that omnichannel experience can include voice channels like the phone, Amazon Alexa, Skype, WhatsApp, etc. They can also include messaging channels like SMS, Slack, WhatsApp, Rich Web Chat, Facebook Messenger, etc. The channels can be written or spoken. Businesses can automate conversations with AI and transform and automate external and internal focused business processes.
These can include CRM updates, information retrieval, invoice approvals, payroll and reminders. They can also include customer service requests, inventory updates and much more.
Conversational AI is a tool to enable machines, or more appropriately software applications, to interact with humans via language. Conversational AI is what allows us to use language to communicate with our machines or software applications and to automate and bring scale to the process of language recognition. Ultimately, voice control and voice interaction will radically change how we engineer and design applications and all manner of communication.
Key benefits of conversational AI include improved customer service, increased business efficiency, reduced costs for a business, and better data for a company to drive itself. Let’s take a look at these key benefits of conversational AI one by one.
Improve Customer Service
Conversational AI helps businesses dynamically scale customer engagement processes through automation. The ability to quickly add bots or digital workers helps business be more responsive to spikes in customer communication requirements. Conversational AI can be leveraged to supply digital virtual assistants or standalone digital workers.
The ability of having a digital assistant for every human worker is a key benefit of Conversational AI. A digital assistant can make a human worker more valuable, more focused, and more productive. Prescreening and collecting information before a human-to-human business contact makes that contact more productive.
A digital assistant can often answer 70-80% of the questions or requirements customers or clients calling or messaging a business may have. Call centers certainly are a place where Conversational AI is widely used. Currently the ratio of bot versus human interaction on well-designed call centers is around 70% bot to 30% human but this will trend higher and closer to 90% bot and 10% human interaction in the years to come. People will welcome this transition when Conversational AI platforms are elegantly designed and provide quick and efficient processing of inquiries.
Conversational AI uses NLP or natural language processing libraries. These NLP tools are not just written in English. Conversational AI greatly increases the number of languages a business can support engagements in. The net result is that no customer service interaction is impeded or limited by language differences. This capability may even open up new groups of customers for a business.
The quality and capabilities of NLP is advancing at a rapid pace and so is the thinking ability of NLP tools to respond to different human interaction and behavior. Conversational AI powered bots can also work additional hours versus human workers. In fact, they can work all the hours and all the days of the year and not need any breaks.
Empowered customer contact centers and even social media channels with Conversational AI allows customer engagement 24/7 and 365 days a year. As we have mentioned earlier when well done, Conversational AI can make customers feel well taken care of because a business has increased availability.
Increase Efficiency
Conversational AI can reduce costs to serve customers and clients and maximize task processing efficiency. It can also optimize resource allocation and augment and not replace human workers. Human-in-the-loop Conversational AI scenarios allow bots and humans to seamlessly work together. This allows assigning lower value tasks to a bot, while humans manage higher value tasks.
Every department within a company can benefit from this task efficiency. Finance & Accounting, Sales and Marketing, Operations, IT and Human Resources are all loaded with opportunities for increased efficiencies using Conversational AI.
Conversational AI can expand the capabilities to interact with customers outside of working hours. This can be with customers who are in a buying mode or customers who need support or assistance. Bots empowered with Conversational AI can also work faster than humans and this can ensure that when customers are in a buying mode, they do not lose interest in making a purchase waiting for information about their transaction.
Another key benefit of conversational AI is that it can manage countless customer interactions simultaneously where a human or team of humans cannot. This scale has real impact for business. A key benefit of Conversational AI in the area of efficiency is the offloading of straightforward customer and client interactions.
If all the standard requirements can be offloaded to intelligent digital workers using IPA (intelligent process automation) and CAI, all wait times for customers are decreased and clients and customers who absolutely need a human-to-human interaction get it quickly.
Reduce Costs
As mentioned earlier every department in a 21st century business can benefit from Conversational AI, … especially if there is a B2C and heavy customer interaction aspect to them. Call Centers and Customer Contact Centers come to mind typically first when it comes to Conversational AI.
They are not the only department in a business where there are key benefits of conversational AI. A customer contact center can use conversational AI related to the remote management of phone and VOIP, outbound calling, call backs of customers, surveys, plus bots assisting humans in real time
Some conversational AI examples that can lead to cost reduction in Finance and Accounting would include, collections, billing, claim processing, expense tracking, contract renewals, contract management and contract queries. Human Resource departments can also benefit and some of the ways they can use Conversational AI would include recruiter bots, candidate screening, time tracking, onboarding, off boarding, benefits processing, vacation and holiday tracking,
Sales and Marketing can be big beneficiaries of Conversational AI also. IPA and CAI can be used for lead and prospect entry to CRM, customer set up, social media monitoring and social media responses. Operations departments might use CAI for reminders to customers (for any number of reasons), confirmation of appointments, confirmations of service calls, scheduling, data and information collection. Finally, some conversational AI examples that can lead to cost reduction in IT would include, password resets, website bots, and many more.
Better Data
Conversational AI can help a business obtain better data to drive itself with. As you can see from the rest of this blog if Conversational AI is deployed effectively massive amounts of customer and client data will be collected. Because it is collected with a bot, and with IPA, all of it can find its way to be leveraged in analysis and future decisions.
In addition to enhanced analysis and decision-making, better customer experiences are a byproduct of better and more data collection. Each time a customer contacts a company after their data has been collected, saved and analyzed, a more personalized and better customer experience can be delivered.
Data collection is a tedious, mundane and monotonous task. It is also one that requires diligence. Why not deploy Conversational AI and IPA to do this collection for a business. The business and its customer will reap the rewards.
The benefits of using conversational AI tool
Clearly key benefits of conversational AI include improved customer service, increased business efficiency, reduced costs for a business, and better data for a company to drive itself with. Having Conversational AI deployed in a company will boost its productivity and radically reduce the focus on standard and routine conversations with customers and allow more important ones and more personalized ones to take place. Using Conversational AI, the human workers at a company will have time for higher value work that is more complex.
Conversational AI is one tool in the toolbox for digitally transforming companies along with RPA, Cognitive AI, and Machine Learning, among others. If you would like to learn more, please contact us here: Contact us