Voice AI: A Comprehensive Guide to Improving Customer Experiences
Voice AI: A Comprehensive Guide to Improving Customer Experiences
Voice AI is at the vanguard of innovation, offering a future in which human-computer connection crosses traditional barriers. At its foundation, Voice AI uses speech recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and conversational AI to allow humans and machines to communicate seamlessly. Its development has proven nothing short of revolutionary, altering customer support for businesses and reinventing how we engage with technology in every aspect of our lives.
This innovative solution is nothing but an answer to the customers’ expectation of quick and accurate customer service from businesses. To streamline the entire customer journey, businesses are leveraging artificial intelligence in multiple aspects. One of the most successful implementations is AI voice chatbot.
Voice-enabled chatbots are faster than emails, call centres, or navigating support sections on a company’s website. As anticipated, voice AI software bears the immense potential to augment the way your business speaks to your ideal customer.
Let’s go deeper into this interesting field and investigate its potential to change customer support for SMBs as well as enterprises.
What is Voice AI?
Under the vast domain of conversational AI, Voice AI is an amalgamation of multiple technologies that come together to enable a human-like voice based conversation between a machine and a human. Users can easily interact with a voice AI chatbot with voice commands and receive contextualised, relevant responses.
Shopping online or just plain browsing can leave customers with many questions about your products and services. A voice recognition-enabled bot can answer these questions in real-time easily, accurately, and cost-efficiently.
Suggested reading: Voice AI: What is it and How Does it Work?
Exploring the Business Applications of Voice AI
The usage of Voice AI and related products is preliminary for enterprises. Depending on the industry, AI voice chatbots, IVR, outbound dialers, etc. can be used for engaging with customers with robust call control. This can ultimately help in reducing operational costs and improving cross-channel communication. Some of the basic use cases of Voice AI are as follows:
1. Custom-made IVR and Outbound Dialer for Customer Engagement
Interactive Virtual Response (IVR) and Outbound Dialer (OBD) have been used by businesses for a long time now. For various purposes like announcing new promotional offers, sharing important information like a change of address, or simply collecting customer feedback.
Although time-tested, these methods of customer engagement have now become static and are fading away with changing customer expectations.
2. OTP via Voice
Voice calls are being used as a failover mechanism to share confidential information like OTP, in case an SMS OTP is not delivered. This feature enriches two-factor authentication and makes it safer as OTPs received via calls cannot be copied.
In order to personalise this process and reach your global audience, AI-enabled voice systems can be used. Businesses can easily automate multilingual calls without burning a hole in their pockets!
3. Cash-on-Delivery Confirmation Over a Call
This functionality of AI voice chatbots is majorly used by logistics companies and their delivery team. In order to get order confirmation, or to check customers’ availability to take the delivery, logistics companies are using calls.
As messages or emails tend to get lost in the inbox, calls are a more efficient way of communicating with customers at least for important order-related and payment-related updates.
4. Payment Reminders
Recovering payments is a tedious process. Financial institutions need to have a multi-channel communication process set to remind customers of payments. Agents can use SMS, WhatsApp, and inbound calls to reach out to customers automatically.
5. Call notifications
An average user receives an average of 80 push notifications per day on their phones! This makes important notifications such as travel updates to easily get lost.
Call notifications are a much better way to convey your message to the customers about any important updates such as their boarding details, updated departure/arrival time, or any information needed during travel.
6. LLM-powered Voicebots
With the latest technological advancements, LLM-powered voice chatbots have become an irreplaceable space when it comes to business operations. From marketing, lead generation, and sales to customer service, voicebots have proven their benefits throughout a customer journey.
Large Language Models (LLM) have made it easier for businesses to interact with their audiences globally, that too without using a translator.
Voice Chatbot Examples: How Different Industries use Voice AI?
1. Voice AI in Healthcare
The healthcare industry is quickly adopting technological advancements to pave the way for telehealth products and services.
Major healthcare institutions such as Mayo Clinic, American Red Cross, and Cleveland Clinic have already recognised the value hands-free AI-based communication technologies can add and implemented them in various ways.
If your healthcare provider has a voice chatbot that’s accessible around the clock, getting reports and other important information can be as easy as just asking for it.
Voice AI is more relevant than ever before in a post-pandemic world that has almost entirely switched to digital platforms. However, customers would prefer to have their healthcare provider provide them with legitimate information that they can rely on.
2. Voice AI in banking
Privacy is one of the most important things to consider in banking. Often, clients face issues or need help while making a transaction and speak with someone who can walk them through it. However, one problem is that people are hesitant to discuss their financial information with people over the phone, which is no surprise.
Customers can be more comfortable asking an intelligent voice chatbot to answer all their questions and without revealing any privileged financial information to anyone on the phone.
Clients can have secure, encrypted conversations in natural language with voice chatbots and be sure to receive the most accurate information without compromising on speed, clarity, or privacy.
Banks can design their voicebot to solve industry-specific functions. There are various use-cases for voicebots in the banking and finance industry:
- Provide financial tips that are custom-tailored to each customer.
- Perform time-critical tasks like blocking a lost card, show previous transactions, etc.
- Use layered verification to approve settings
- Help assess the risk appetite of clients
- Help clients choose the right financial products for them
- Voice chatbots can personalise marketing campaigns and make them more effective.
- Banks can train the AI voice chatbot to identify patterns in fraudulent activity and stop it from happening, thereby reducing the risk of fraud.
For example, Kotak Mahindra Bank, one of the leading banks in India, decided to deploy an AI-powered voicebot “Keya”, to streamline its customer support function. The bank’s key pain points were overburdened agents, reduced productivity and bumpy support cycles. The experiment was a resounding success. 70% of the customers interacted with Keya before speaking to a live agent. The voice bot was also able to accurately deduce user intent 87% of the time and reduce the overall response time by 50%.
3. Voice AI in call centres
Call centres are always riddled with an unending inflow of support queries. They receive thousands of calls every day, and most of them are about common issues or don’t require human intervention. However, call centres are only as efficient as the support agents working there. They’re bound to feel tired over time and cannot be available around the clock.
Voice AI can help overburdened agents by leading the end-to-end resolution cycle. A voice AI can do most things a call centre can but without the downtime of waiting for an agent to get back to you with the required information.
Customers don’t have to wait in a queue and talk to the call centre voice chatbot just as they would to an agent to receive quick answers. Call centres can entertain high call volumes (in hundreds or thousands) and simultaneously present for their customers.
4. Voice AI in gaming
Games provide another compelling use case for Voice AI. Gaming is all about immersion in the experience, and when customers run into bugs and glitches, it can be frustrating with no one to talk to.
However, a voice chatbot can help take feedback, allow players to report bugs, and even complete tasks in-game by talking to the voice AI. Voice AI in gaming is creating rich and surrounding experiences for gamers worldwide.
Suggest Reading: How to Measure the Success of Your Voice AI Bot?
How can a voice chatbot help in customer service?
Voice-activated chatbots play a crucial role in customer service. Today, there is so much your users can get done by simply using their voice, even when your support agents are offline. Artificial intelligence-backed support tools are consumer-first. It is no different for voice AI.
Positive CXs can help you circulate happy word-of-mouth. Your customers will likely interact with your business again and, better yet, refer it to their friends and family.
Voicebots are a unique feature that you can implement to get more organic traffic to your website. High engagement and lightning-fast resolutions mean you are able to keep a lot more users gripped by your platform. This can give you a competitive advantage in the market too.
But how does a voicebot make customer support lean?
1. Be there, with them
Harvard Business Review says that 81% of customers prefer to resolve queries themselves before reaching out to a representative. This comes as no surprise because it’s just a better and easier way to access information.
A voice chatbot is a self-service tool that does the same. Your customers value getting quick resolutions more than speaking to an agent. Conversational AI voice-enabled chatbots serve as an outlet for your users to voice their problems, quite literally, and receive vocal responses within nanoseconds!
2. Ticket assignment made easy
Voice AI can optimise ticket assignments for you. Your voice chatbot can readily solve most of the incoming support queries. But at times, some queries can be too complex and go beyond the voicebot’s purview. This is when a support conversation may need an agent’s help. Your voice chatbot can seamlessly transfer complicated and high-priority cases. This can reduce the Average Handling Time (AHT) and save your team’s productive hours and resources.
3. नमस्ते! Selamat pagi! !أَهْلًا وَسَهْلاً
Implementing voice AI on your website can help you serve customers from different regions without a language barrier.
You can train the voice AI to speak in as many different languages as you’d like. You can make it default to a regional language based on the visitor’s IP address or give them the option to choose the language of their choice manually. It also makes your website inclusive of linguistic differences, which is a great look for your business.
4. Let your users speak their minds
AI, NLP and LLM are the brains behind customer support voicebots. With semantic analysis, understanding users becomes a lot easier. Your customers will appreciate that they no longer have to worry about whether the AI will understand what they mean. The AI can process and understand the intent behind the message and reply accordingly in natural language. Context-awareness makes interacting with it as easy as talking to a friend. Contextual Relevance is the key to making AI work the way it is expected to.
Voice AI can handle thousands of customers’ queries simultaneously and give accurate answers instantly. It can considerably enhance user experiences and shoot up your CSAT report.
5. Free up more hours
Running a support channel that is active around the clock is a huge time investment. A voice bot is an excellent investment that can help you operate your customer support at higher efficiency with no live agent support needed for elemental queries.
6. “Sorry, we’re closed?” Nope!
You don’t want to miss out on a potential customer just because your live agents weren’t there to assist the visitor. Artificial intelligence ensures that you don’t.
An AI-powered voicebot is ready and happy to help around the clock, no matter what day of the week it is so you always attend to your visitors.
Suggested Reading: If You Have a Customer Support Team, You Need Voice Chat
Voice chatbot benefits: How well do voicebots perform generally?
While 24×7 availability and ease of access are some of the voice chabot advantages, there’s more voice tech can do! There are many benefits to using voice bots and chatbots to interact with your customers:
1. Everything is real-time
Voice chatbot has many benefits to customers. When a customer is looking for an answer to your product or service query, they shouldn’t have to wait minutes on the phone for a simple solution. Chances are, they’d probably choose to shop elsewhere where the answer is readily available. A voice AI program can address this problem by providing instant support to those who need it. It’s highly effective in most cases and can operate entirely autonomously. However, if the customer requires additional support, the voice chatbot can instantly connect them to a live support agent.
2. Power of Data and Analytics
One big perk voice chatbots have is their ability to gather user data. Understanding users, their preferences and expectations becomes a lot easier with access to extensive customer profiles.
A voicebot can also keep an organised record of all the previous conversations for you to know the pain points and problems your users face on a daily basis. This way you can track user behaviour and customise your offerings to specific cohorts using a voice chatbot application.
3. No more abandoned carts
When users cannot find answers to questions about offerings on your website, their first instinct is to ask for customer support. However, if they notice that it takes more effort to call customer support than to look it up online, they most likely will choose to do the latter. This can shoot up your cart abandonment rate. However, using real-time communication using a live voicebot, you can provide personalised answers to your customers’ questions instantly and prevent them from leaving your website for answers.
Building on our previous point, you can also leverage consumer data for effective retargeting campaigns to bring back users to your website.
4. Save a buck or two
It can burn a hole in your wallet to keep a contact centre staffed around the clock and accessible to all users simultaneously. These costs can quickly add up and eat into your revenue, making it hard to provide an optimal standard of customer support.
However, with voicebots, customers are no longer left waiting for a support agent for every interaction, irrespective of whether it is a basic or advanced query. A chatbot is a great way to manage your support team better and put their time and skill to the best use. In effect, this means lower operating costs and higher returns on your investment.
For example, for OTA platforms, the average cost per ticket can be as high as ₹70 per call. But with a voice AI, this cost can be reduced by up to 71% bringing it down to ₹20 per call.
Check out the best tips and practices you need to know when deploying a voicebot.
FAQs
1. Is a voice chatbot and a voicebot the same?
Yes, voice chatbot and voicebot refer to a similar type of conversational AI tool. A voice chatbot or a voicebot is an AI-driven communication automation tool that uses voice commands to receive and interpret directives. The terms can be used interchangeably.
2. How do I build a voice chatbot?
Building a chatbot from scratch needs you to factor in many components that are required as a foundation for your voicebot. These include accurate speech recognition technology, NLP/Natural Language Understanding platform (NLU), team with prior machine learning knowledge, etc. Working on a voicebot from the ground up can be time and resource-consuming.
Deploying a voicebot from a cutting-edge and trusted provider can help you cover more ground to build your industry-specific trained voicebot. Voice AI providers can help you with your own tried and market-tested voicebot that caters to your specific use cases. This way you can also reap their years of expertise and understanding of the domain to create powerful voice chatbots for your business.
3. Do customers like voice chatbots?
The answer is relative. In a highly stimulating world scattered with a myriad of options, businesses need to be available and quick to answer queries. Voice AI ticks all the boxes you need to check to offer support experiences worth remembering. This makes voice chatbots a popular customer support street to take.
4. Do voice chatbots increase sales?
Yes, voice chatbots can be an excellent tool to generate leads and lengthen your lead pipeline. Well-trained voice AI chatbots can listen, understand, and deduce relevant product information to visitors. They are more likely to act upon giving their contact information – voila! A lead.
Get Started with Voice AI With Verloop.io
Real-time speech is by far the fastest mode of communication, for consumers and businesses, alike. With AI advancing every passing second, voice chatbots are becoming more robust, flexible, and secure in the way they service customers. Voice technology, whether in the form of smart speakers or voicebots on business apps, is simplifying daily life for a modern consumer.
Bringing human connections to life, artificially, is a big feat. AI-enabled voice chatbots make it possible with their intricate NLP/NLU-based neural processing. If you are looking for a powerful voice chatbot to amp up your business, you’re in the right place!
Verloop.io‘s Voice AI is designed on robust training models and a speech recognition system that ensures speedy, accurate, and personal responses – every single time. Drop us a hello and schedule a demo with us today to find out how!
