Maximise the Benefits of Conversational AI for Your Customer Support Strategy
Maximise the Benefits of Conversational AI for Your Customer Support Strategy
Conversational AI is made up of 7 components to ensure a smooth, fast, and reliant customer support engine. Here’s what you need to know about them.
Conversational AI benefits are helping businesses solve their frontline inefficiencies with simply automation solutions. Unsurprisingly, the market for conversational AI will grow to $18.4 billion by the end of 2026, as per Market and Markets. Conversational AI solutions help complement human resources in the sphere of customer service, speeding up the process of query resolution as long as they are comprehensible by the automation algorithms. Components of conversational AI embody seven unique principles, creating an algorithm that helps businesses reshape the face of customer service.
Let’s understand in a little more detail what the 7 Cs of conversational AI are and the benefits of conversational AI in customer service.
7 Benefits of Conversational AI
The 7 benefits of conversational AI are – Convenience, Consistency, Context, Conversation, Compatibility, Cost-effectiveness and Conversion. Each of these Cs has its own role in helping businesses drive the bottom line and improve the quality of customer service that they offer. Let’s see how.
1. Convenience
The first benefit of Conversational AI is convenience. Before the advent of conversational AI or chatbots, it was the customer service representatives who did the job. And even then, it wasn’t entirely possible for all businesses to man the phone 24×7. While that translated into a compromise on customer service, it also meant inefficient resource allocation.
With conversational AI, a business has the convenience to stay online 24×7 on a once-only investment, being ready for consumer queries sharp as a blade, no matter what hour on the clock. Furthermore, conversational AI makes it possible to connect with the consumer on any platform they prefer – e-mails, websites, social media, SMS, instant messaging, etc. Which is simply the convenience that all brands desperately need in the competitive world today.
2. Consistency
All sales representatives are different; while one has a polite approach toward customers, the other is more direct. The diverse human natures work to incite a confusing sentiment in the customers when connecting with the brand. Conversational AI solutions enable businesses to create a brand voice that stays consistent across all consumer communications.
It homogenises everything and gives an idea of what to expect from the customer. You can train your chatbot to reflect your brand’s tone and ethos.
3. Context
All interactions a customer holds with a conversational solution is driven by context and enriched by insights drawn from previous interactions with the same customer. Remembering a customer’s preferences helps brands position themselves on the good side of their consumers, delivering a satisfying experience each time a consumer initiates a conversation with the brand through its intelligent chatbot.
Additionally, the interaction history can be drawn up and accessed by marketing and sales as and when required, aiding in their operations as well.
4. Conversations
One key differentiator of conversational AI is the way it can execute human-like conversations with the customers; they’d be speaking to a bot from the get-go and wouldn’t know it. The algorithms are powered by NLP – Natural Language Processing – that helps the AI system observe and glean from the interactions it has with customers and, over time, emulate the same. This is truly the most unique quality of conversational AI.
While most chatbots rely on a Q&A mode to deal with customers, an NLP-powered conversational AI solution is capable of “talking” to them.
5. Compatibility
For any technological solution to be truly useful to a business, it needs to be compatible with the incumbents (like ERPs, CRMs, ticketing software, payment gateways or any other tool that a business is using) and across platforms that the business operates over.
Thankfully, conversational AI solutions are designed to be cross-compatible with various channels, third-party software and platforms; meaning, deploying a single solution is enough to manage conversations with customers across social media, SMS, and websites. Down the line, this helps in maintaining the relevance of information and accuracy in solving customer concerns every single time. By having the entire ecosystem accessible for the right information on every user.
There is no need to create a separate module for everything – this certainly makes things a lot easier.
6. Cost-Effective
To have humans available for customer queries 6 days a week and 12 hours a day, is a tough task. You would need to have manpower working in shifts to ensure continuity in availability. In turn, businesses incur costs for tasks that are easily automatable – over the long term, this builds up. While conversational AI solutions may cost a little more in the beginning, the savings they enable over time, far surpass the expenses in the longer run. Cost-effectiveness is one of the other ideal components of conversational AI.
If needed, human agents can always intervene where queries become complicated; however, that is when absolutely needed.
7. Conversions
The last benefit of Conversational AI in our list is conversions. It can tailor smooth customer journeys across all brand touchpoints when equipped with ML capabilities. Driving quick conversions in another conversational AI component.
The system is able to effectively guide the customers throughout their experience with a brand by delivering relevant information and recommendations, enriching their experience with personalised and highly targeted communications. This helps a brand qualify their customers better and drive them further into their sales funnels – helping improve conversions.
Conclusion
According to a report published by MIT, conversational AI helped 90% of businesses resolve issues in call processing, customer complaint resolution, and employee and customer satisfaction. It is no wonder that this technological implement is so popular today, and the popularity is only set to increase over time.
Have questions about how conversational AI will bring value to your business? Get in touch with us today.