Voice AI: Future of customer support
Customers want to access information at a rapid speed and organizations are working towards fulfilling these demands by giving them a digitized experience through self help consumer service solution.
According to research, only 33% of millennials wait for about 1 to 3 minutes to get customer support and that led to 56% of them switching to companies with more efficient customer support. Early approaches to self help customer services like the Interactive Voice Response System(IVRS) which is the most widely used self help customer support tool, although widely used it has not really been successful; it becomes too tedious to use as it’s menu size increases. These methods are cost effective but it fails to fulfill its former goal, which is to enhance the customer experience. Now the users have to go through the tedious IVRS following with the agent helpline queue.
The other way for people to access customer support could be through interaction of the customer directly with a human agent. This would lead to marginally high costs since the support would be working for 24 hours a day. This approach also comes with its disadvantages as customers would sometimes face delays in their issues being resolved as the information that the agent has might not be sufficient enough to provide a solution and they would transfer calls between the various levels of departments to get the issue resolved.
Voice AI bots can help us with this purpose to provide an enhanced customer experience.I will list the benefits of using these voice enabled assistants over the existing customer service systems:
An escape from the monotonous IVR Menu
IVR systems have existed for a while now. This technology has been extensively used since the 1970s but from 2000s it has been in use commonly. It is easily deployed, but now it is time to bid adieu to them as voice AI can replace it in a much efficient manner. AI helps to curb out the tedious 1 to 9 IVR menu and allows users to skip nesting of menus and submenus that was there in the existing IVR system.
24 X 7 availability
Personally , I have faced this problem of availability a lot. The support executives would call me at untimely hours which would be during my official work hours. When I used to tell them to arrange a callback at my preferred time which would be generally after my office hours or a holiday when I would be available, they wouldn’t be available to make the call because they would have similar structure of holidays. After all they have an office too! However, in case of AI it would not be the same case as it can call the customer or arrange a callback at the customer’s time preference.
Repetition of user queries
I have had discussions with many customer support representatives and all of them have one thing to say, which is that most of the user queries are simple and repeated queries for example in an e-commerce company the question can be like do you deliver to xyz location or do you provide cash on delivery? Etc,. These could be easily answered by a trained AI assistant and these questions wouldn’t require such laborious amount of time and effort being spent on them.
Fast information retrieval
Is it just me or its a common phenomenon to be put on hold even before being answered for the most amateur form of queries or information that you demand from the support executives. Trust me, it’s not their error, humans are not made for processing of rapid information retrieval, that is the job of machines, for example, you call a courier service to ask for the transportation cost from pin code X to Y, the support executive will put the call on hold, calculate the prices, and give you results; whereas, a machine can do this at once, and now instead of manually feeding the value in the system to calculate the prices, the machine can now do it all by itself.
Error Free
Human involvement is prone to error, human errors that can take place at any step of the entire process, like there can be error in hearing or it is even possible for a person to hear correctly but recording it can have some error;whereas, AI is able to capture(hear) information correctly, hence there are more chances that the remaining process will follow correctly.
Personalization
Has it ever happened to you that you called customer support and explained the complete problem and midway the call gets disconnected; you call again, someone else picks up and then you have to explain everything all over again. While on the other hand AI can follow through with the context of the conversations contexts from the first call and continue it as need be and assists the agents to know the users before the call gets transferred.
Conclusion
With all this being said, These bots as of now cannot replace human agents but can help them in doing their jobs better, this is not a win or lose situation. We’re going to wind up as a partner to our smarter machines, and that partnership will be fostered by our augmentation through technology. Voice AI will certainly revolutionize the way customer support is done at present, providing a better and hassle free experience to the consumers.
