Harshad Bajpai, Author at Skit

Behind the Scenes: Leveraging SLU to Enhance Customer Experiences

Posted on May 2, 2022December 27, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Voice-first platforms are here to stay and without doubt, they will play an important role in accelerating the adoption of technology across personal and commercial spheres. Users are growing increasingly comfortable with voice-first platforms as they are much more hassle free when compared to traditional written modes of communication, and this is reflected in consumer behaviour across industries.

Data from OC&C Strategy Consultants shows that voice-shopping is expected to jump to $40 billion by 2022 from $2 billion in 2018, suggesting that voice-first platforms might be the next disruptive force in the retail industry.

Voice-activated virtual assistants like Siri or Cortana have become an integral part of our daily lives and enterprises have started implementing Voice AI platforms for enhancing business processes.

There have been several recent breakthroughs in the field of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and this has enabled the rise of SLU-enabled Voice AI platforms that are capable of holding seamless human-like conversations.

One of the industry sectors that illustrates a supremely successful use case for intelligent virtual assistants is the field of customer service.

“…businesses across industries are also aware of this on-going shift in the technology and customer behavior. In fact, many have already begun their voice journey and are transforming the way how customers interact with their brand.” (Trantor Inc)

With an increasing base of digital consumers worldwide, contact centers have been reeling under the pressure of ensuring good customer service while efficiently handling the immense call load that contact centers face. This has led to the adoption of Voice AI platforms for contact center automation- and advances in SLU have allowed such voice assistants to turn into quality customer service agents.

Here is how SLU-enabled voice AI platforms deliver superior customer experiences:

Increased Ease of Usage

Since the beginning of human history, voice has been the primary mode of communication for people and has been around for much longer than written communication systems. It is no surprise that humans tend to be “voice-activated” naturally and find it much easier to interact with technology through voice commands.

Now, with rapid progress in AI-enabled speech-to-text and text-to-speech services, seamless voice-driven customer experience is a reality. As the ecosystem around voice enabled technology matures, customers are starting to rely more on voice. (PwC)

SLU has helped the development of such voice-first platforms, allowing your customers to easily connect with virtual assistant platforms in your contact center.

Such platforms do not require your customers to trudge through the interminable IVR options, enabling them to easily express their concerns or queries in simple spoken language statements, leaving your customers happy about their experience with your brand.

Understanding the Customer

Spoken Language Understanding has taken voice AI to a new level with the ability to simulate a near-human understanding of speech by such platforms. SLU-enabled platforms don’t merely react to a fixed set of commands but rather use various techniques and algorithms to arrive at the true purpose of the customer in making the call.

Intent Recognition– No matter how customers frame their queries and statements, intent recognition algorithms are able to decipher the customer’s intent at one go using keywords or action words, without requiring multiple clarification from customers.

Named Entity Recognition– These algorithms extract important information from the customer’s speech to recognize important names, places or times that the customer talks about.

All these SLU techniques have enabled voicebots to easily achieve human-like “understanding” capability that allows them to easily converse with the customer, eliminating the machine-like qualities from a conversation.

Innovation in voice technology is reshaping consumer behaviour and brands need to pursue creative approaches to accelerate the adoption of Voice AI to align with customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge

Quick Query Resolution

In a world where each second matters, time is of the essence – for you and your customers. If they spend precious time on hold with your contact center while agents are busy, it can only be expected that customers will get frustrated with their experience and shift their loyalties to other competitors.

SLU enables voice AI platforms, which act as virtual agents, to easily access the required information from databases and respond quickly to customer queries. Intelligent solutions like Skit’s Digital Voice Agent have been shown to result in a 50% reduction in average handling time in contact centers.

A Zendesk Research Survey discovered that 69% of respondents associated good customer service experience with a quick resolution of their issue.

This will result in improved customer satisfaction and increased customer retention rates, translating into increased revenues and goodwill for your enterprise.

Consistent Service Experiences

Every time customers engage with your brand, they develop an opinion about the brand. To ensure that the impression your brand gives to consumers is excellent, consistency is key. No matter when and where your customers approach the contact center, their service experience needs to be consistent.

According to Forbes, 71% customers desire a consistent experience across any channel, but only 29% receive it. About 76% receive conflicting answers to the same questions from different agents which leads to loss of customer confidence.

Advances in SLU have enabled voice AI platforms to maintain a uniform dialog flow across the board in all customer interactions. From a standard welcome greeting to the last goodbye, everything progresses in a pre-planned flow which gives customers a sense of stability and familiarity. Every time they get in touch with your contact center, they know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Customers will come to trust your brand as the reliable option and will increasingly engage with your enterprise and not your less-consistent competitors.

There are, thus, several ways in which SLU has enabled voice bots to deliver superior customer experiences that keep your customers pleased and induce loyalty in them.

Keeping customers happy not only helps enterprises increase customer retention, but also helps reduce customer acquisition costs by increased word of mouth marketing and recommendations from loyal customers.

Why CX is the Next Disruptor in Financial Services

Posted on May 2, 2022December 27, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

During the pandemic, financial services companies like brokers/AMCs saw a huge surge in the number of retail investors. According to Statista, Zerodha, India’s largest stockbroker, has added over two million users in 2021, more than twice compared to last year.

According to Jonathan Craig (Senior EVP and Head of Investor Services, Charles Schwab), “A big part of this growth is Generation Investor — the large number of people who are bound together not by their birth years but by when they got started in their investing journey — who is now on a path to ownership and reaching their financial goals”.

However, the pandemic is not the only reason for this growth; a simplified trading platform and low brokerage fees from financial services companies such as Robinhood and Zerodha have a lot to do with the increased surge in the number of retail investors, especially millennials & gen-z.

While the increased growth has significantly boosted key metrics including revenue, it has also brought up multiple challenges like investor engagement and improving customer lifetime value.

Technology is no longer the moat

Platforms like Zerodha and Robinhood disrupted the market with their flat-fee pricing model. This helped them grow rapidly and stand out from their traditional counterparts. They also leveraged new-age technologies and made their platforms fast and easy to use making it very easy for first-time investors to get started. However, with traditional companies changing their pricing models and improving their user interfaces, the seemingly strong moat is evaporating.

With so many alternatives in the market, switching platforms has become incredibly easy. It takes 30 minutes to open a new account and the same time to switch to another platform. This line sums up the current market situation and the competition.

Challenges that financial services companies are facing

Financial services companies customers’ can be broadly classified into two buckets – first-time investors and experienced investors. Since most of the new users are first-time investors, the biggest challenges are around them. For starters, companies face a hard time seeing regular engagement on the platform, mainly driven by poor financial literacy. This leads to a high number of dormant accounts, as a norm, in the industry.

So, how can companies tackle these challenges?

The only way for financial services companies like brokers and AMCs to promote loyalty and increase customer retention is by providing a delightful experience across different touchpoints, every time. The hard truth is that CX will be the dark horse driving the growth along with technology.

CX across different stages in the customer journey

The pandemic did help attract users to the capital markets, however, engaging the user with the first investment and eventually retaining them is where the main challenge lies. Hence, it’s critical for securities companies to reimagine the customer journey from start to finish.

For example, for the first investment, it’s important for companies to –

Educate investors about the different products and services through interactive videos and webinars.
Provide them with suggestions according to their financial goals.
Nudge them intelligently over different channels to ensure they make their first investment.

In addition, they need to proactively support them and resolve their queries quickly. They’ll also have to monitor their behaviour and usage and tweak their communication strategy accordingly.

Alternatively, for an active trader, their approach needs to be different. This is because their priorities are different. For example, in case of downtime, they can proactively inform customers about it rather than waiting for users to reach their support to raise concerns and ask additional questions. Similarly, they can keep them informed about important educational initiatives, newer products, and more.

Voice AI and its role in CX

The highest number of touchpoints when an investor usually interacts with a company is the inbound/outbound support centre, it should be an absolute priority for the winners to enhance this experience.

To enhance customer experience and improve customer engagement, several securities companies are adopting Voice AI solutions. AI voice bots that are powered using Voice AI are built using sophisticated and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and have the ability to understand the context, intent, and hold human-like conversations.

Let’s look at different ways securities companies can leverage it –

Streamlining inbound support

No one likes waiting on the IVR.

But why do we even have the IVR in the first place? Can we get rid of it?

Yes, we can!

Compared to other industries, support queries raised by investors are more time-sensitive and must be resolved as quickly as possible. Customers cannot afford to wait minutes to get a response. However, with the increasing number of support queries (due to the surge in new customers) and limited bandwidth, securities companies are facing a hard time resolving them within the promised time.

To fix this, companies can leverage AI voice bots. They can answer mundane support queries (like a/c status, upcoming SIP due date, current NAV, common questions around selling and buying stocks, etc) quickly while freeing up important agent bandwidth.

This allows more time for agents to focus on solving complex queries thus increasing customer satisfaction. A win-win for both.

Engage investors

AI voice bots can proactively nudge customers and notify customers about exclusive offers at the right time in a personalized manner to ensure that they transact regularly on the platform.

83% of customers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience (Accenture report).

Hence, since the new wave of users is first-generation investors (those who’re starting their financial journey), it’s very important to not only educate and constantly engage with them but also invest in crafting an exceptional customer journey, to retain their minds and wallet share.

What’s next?

While there’s a huge growth potential for the industry, increasing competition coupled with low customer retention rates are a few of the many challenges companies will have to tackle for sustainable growth. The only way they can solve this is by competing on the CX front by completely reimagining their customer strategy and providing an enhanced customer experience across different customer touch points.

About Skit

Skit is an Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform, helping businesses modernize their contact centers and customer experience by automating and improving voice communications at scale. By enabling preemptive, intelligent problem solving and seamless live interactions, we have automated over 15 million calls for global enterprises across industries. We help our customers streamline their contact center operations, reduce costs, and also enhance customer experience and engagement.

Connect with us if you’re interested in learning more about the platform and how it can modernize and transform your contact center.

7 Reasons Why Debt Collection Companies Are Deploying Voice AI

Posted on May 2, 2022March 7, 2024 by Harshad Bajpai

In the new normal, key players in the debt collection industry, from creditors to every downstream collection agency, face significant challenges to improve collections. This is happening mainly for two reasons. First, there are rapidly evolving regulatory and compliance frameworks to which collection agencies must adhere. Second, the mitigation of cost has become an extremely uphill task.

However, there is an additional issue at play: The most common solutions prevalent in today’s market, such as Robocaller and outbound IVR voice blaster, are incapable of conversations, feedback, and insights. Instead, an AI-enabled Voice Agent is capable of meaningful and human-like conversations with customers.

Watch our Intelligent Voice Agent for Debt Collection in action

Unlike the most common solution prevalent today, i.e. Robocaller or outbound IVR voice blaster (incapable of conversations, feedback, or insights), an Intelligent Voice Agent is an AI-enabled machine capable of meaningful human-like conversations.

Learn more about the differences between Robocaller and AI-powered Digital Voice Agent.

Why is an Intelligent Voice Agent Ideal for Collections?

Intelligent Voice Agent, which is the blend of conversational voice AI and human intelligence, holds me

The rapid rise in call volumes, defaults, demand for remote resolution of disputes and diminishing CX have resulted in collection agencies scrambling to catch up.

The need for better outbound collections efforts—along with managing increasing volumes of inbound inquiries from customers—is putting pressure to scale contact center teams, an undesirable and herculean task.

Call center turnover (30 – 45%) has always been a challenge and has generally been twice as high as the industry average (13.5 – 18.5%), while collection agencies perform worse, with some reporting as high as 100% employee turnover. The concatenation of these factors—higher call volumes, regulations, and agent turnover—has made companies lookout for technology solutions such as Voice AI-enabled contact center automation.

Read More if you are interested to know how Intelligent Digital Voice Agents work in detail.

Research provides plenty of information to support the cause of automating collection calls. Apart from research provides plenty of information to support the cause of automating collection calls. Apart from improved recovery, 1 in 4 US consumers prefers interacting with an Intelligent Voice Assistant when handling awkward financial situations, according to a 2018 consumer sentiment survey by The Harris Poll.

Solving Collection Challenges with an Intelligent Voice Agent

The rapid rise in call volumes, defaults, demand for remote resolution of disputes and diminishing CX have resulted in collection agencies scrambling to catch up.

Let’s compare the challenges collections agencies are facing to how a conversational AI-enabled Intelligent Voice Agent meets every challenge.

7 Reasons Why Augmented Voice Intelligence Is Transforming Debt Collections

Augmented Voice Intelligence, which is the blend of Conversational AI and human intelligence, creates meaningful conversations with customers to support them throughout their entire collection journey while staying true to compliances and regulations. Let’s delve deeper into the 7 core reasons:

1. Automation And Human Bandwidth Prioritization

The beauty of deploying an Augmented Voice Intelligence is that it can call all the customers and it then filters out the complex cases that need human agent intervention. In the present system, agents call the entire list of contacts, be it a simple case or a complex one, not creating desired value in the process.

With a virtual voice agent, all the contacts in the portfolio are called at the right time of the day and within a couple of hours. The entire portfolio is then segmented based on the disposition collected for each debtor. The dispositions captured can be: propensity to pay, refusal to pay, wrong-party contacts, disputed debt, call-back later, validation requests, etc.

For willing debtors, the virtual voice agent can not only collect the payment during the call but can also negotiate and offer alternate payment options. It also reminds them of the next due date.

Additionally, the Digital Voice Agent calls back all the debtors who could not be reached in the first attempt without the need for human agent intervention. This takes a huge burden off them.

For the dispositions in which human intervention is required, the Voice Agent can segment the portfolio so that relevant human agents can be assigned the downstream tasks based on the importance of the disposition for the portfolio and the company.

This automation and prioritization of bandwidth unlock massive value for the collection companies.

2. Improved Portfolio Volume and Customer Coverage

If, let’s say, 66% of the debtors are handled by digital voice agents end-to-end, now collection agencies can take up 3X more portfolios or cover 3X more customers with the same set of human agents. This illustrates how the same support team can manage higher levels of business with even better results.

Collection agencies can take up more portfolios or take bigger ones, as they now have better customer coverage.

3. Lower Cost and Faster Collection Speed

Contact center automation with Conversational Voice AI assistant ensures that service quality and speed remain consistent, which otherwise will be volatile as new human agents with less experience join the team. Also, continuous hiring and training is a great operational hassle.

The Digital Voice Agents can make hundreds of concurrent calls at scale, economically, and in just an hour. Not only that, voice agents, being a machine, are very punctual and reach out to debtors that request a callback or make reattempts right on time when the probability of connecting to contact is highest. All this is done within the prescribed compliance framework.

4. Superior Recovery and Collection Efforts

Better collection and recovery require persistent efforts. When nudged at the right time, a debtor who is willing but unable to pay now might pay a few months down the line. Thus, what matters is how persistently collection agencies can reach out to a certain segment of debtors, ideally disposed to pay.

Understandably, a significant section of debtors will not pick up calls in the first attempt or might request a call-back at a certain time in the future. It is near impossible for human agents to follow up on every single contact, but the intelligent voice agent can do it with perfection.

It’s a piece of cake for a Digital Voice Agent to schedule follow-up calls, honoring the regulatory guidelines, spread over weeks/months, and ensure better recovery rates. With timely and adequate calls going out to customers, and 24/7 support, the right voice-tech solution checks all the boxes to improve collections and recovery.

5. Minimize Errors, Ensure Compliance and Security

A significant amount of agent training and monitoring can be avoided with the deployment of Voice AI agents. High employee turnover, clubbed with significant training costs makes the entire exercise of meeting compliance, extremely costly. While the possibility of potential errors as regulatory regime complications is on the rise, it cannot still be eliminated.

Conversational Voice AI Agents operate with negligible errors and can be easily updated, thus improving compliance significantly. Also, a Voice Collection Agent can be well trained in regulatory frameworks and will therefore ensure strict adherence to consumer data security and protection (encryption and redaction) by sticking to industry best practices.

6. Enhanced Customer Experience

A Voice AI agent can ensure a smooth, courteous, and positive debtor experience, leading to a positive attitude towards the collections process and ultimately a positive brand image.

7. Seamless Support Scaling for Any Call Volume

Business volatility and fluctuations put an economic strain on collection agencies that need to maintain a qualified team of human agents which has to grow and shrink with demand volatility. Scaling becomes further challenging as employee turnover is the highest among industries.

With the deployment of Augmented Voice Intelligence, there is no need for maintaining a large contact center team to deal with large call volumes, as voice automation helps in handling a majority of calls. Thus the problem of team management becomes minimized.

Intelligent Voice Assistants: The Future of Agile Customer Service

At times of disruption, it’s essential to leverage technology to craft a sustainable competitive edge by addressing core business challenges.

Growing evidence hints at the power of Augmented Voice Intelligence to enable cost optimization, and handle a broader customer base while minimizing significantly the operational challenges relating to regulatory compliances, and team management.

With a tad steep learning curve, it’s best to be an early bird. The evidence abounds, with the right tech solution partner, there is a great amount of value creation possible.

Move early, move fast, grow faster!

For more information and free consultation, let’s connect over a quick call – Book Now!

Also, for more information visit our Collections Page.

Voice AI To Resonate With and Retain Customers

Posted on May 2, 2022May 25, 2022 by Harshad Bajpai

Customers dislike long wait hours for query resolution and chatbots aren’t suitable for emergency requests. To ensure better services, Voice AI-led solutions work best.

In 2020, the University of Texas at Austin conducted an interesting experiment wherein 200 participants were invited to reconnect with an old friend through either a phone call or email. Despite admitting that a phone call would be more effective, some participants chose email to feel less awkward. And expectedly, those who connected through a phone call were able to form a stronger bond with their friend. It is the overall interaction experience that counts, be it in personal or professional settings.

Whether you were able to communicate, whether the other party understood your feelings, whether any misunderstandings were cleared and whether in the future both parties will be able to reestablish a connection. In the customer experience journey too, brands have chosen to connect with users over multiple points. There is text messaging, email, social media support, chatbots and the customer care centres/call centres.

Depending on the type of query, each customer is redirected to the specific touch-point. For instance, a customer seeking a bank account statement can simply get it through their net banking application while another customer looking for term insurance policies can get information through a chatbot. But for queries that require detailed insights, say reporting or KYC-related changes, customers are redirected to voice-based customer service executives.

Voice is powerful and unique to human beings. Speech goes back to human beginnings, which is almost a million years ago. The Linguistics Society of America estimates that writing was invented around 3200 B.C. It is the voice that gave rise to text, words and other forms of written communication. Because interacting through voice comes naturally to humans, it is self-taught. It is also easier to communicate thoughts through voice than any other medium simply because it is also upto seven times faster than typing. This means that one can have a longer conversation using voice.

Wait times are long and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) may not be helpful for emergency requests. Imagine your credit card getting stolen. You call up the bank’s customer care, but it takes you two minutes just to get to the appropriate node.

Another five minutes in reaching a customer care representative. And the ordeal still isn’t over because the customer care executive puts you on hold to verify details. Total time elapsed: 12 minutes. By the time the query is resolved, your card has probably been swiped at half a dozen places. An immediate solution is critical to protecting the brand reputation of companies. Ignoring customer grievances can often cost a company its clients. A study by Qualtrics XM Institute in the US found that 53% of consumers have cut spending after a single bad experience with a company.

Customers also complained that they missed a responsive mechanism in grievance resolutions. The answer is obvious. Customers prefer voice-based real interactions because this resolves queries quicker. And the practical solution is Voice AI. Built on the strong backbone of AI and Spoken Language
Understanding (SLU), Voice AI uses human-like mechanisms to receive requests, interpret and provide solutions.

NLP is the technology that the system uses to learn, understand and provide content in human languages. Unlike other solutions in this space, Voice AI is evolutionary. It can adapt to different commands and languages as it learns ‘on the job’ like us humans. Since NLP is at its core, Voice AI first hears the customer speak, converts it to text, filters out the noise, and then processes it with its neural networks. Following this, the system finds out the context of the conversation using AI. Based on this, a response is created and then communicated to the user by a
human-like voice. For instance, an individual who has a chequebook reissue request will have a different state of mind than someone who lost his debit card. Voice AI systems will differentiate between these two grievances and offer immediate support.

How customer expectations evolved

Whenever a customer contacts a company, they expect an instant response. An insurance customer only looking to renew their car policy is inundated with information about new products offerings. The same goes for bank/NBFC customers, where needless personal loans are pushed by the systems during such calls.

The pandemic added to such woes of customers. A Harvard Business Review study showed that there was an over 10% spike in ‘difficult’ callsigns in just two weeks between March 11-26. Customers wanted urgent resolution for travel issues, insurance claims, and payment extensions. Here, having a Voice AI solution can not just improve productivity and efficiency, but also improve customer trust during crisis periods.

Market Potential

The Voice AI market is at a nascent stage across the globe. It forms a part of the conversational AI segment that includes voice assistants and chatbots. With customers more accustomed to conversing with voice-devices at home, the same has translated to preferences in a business setting as well.

Gartner estimated conversational AI platforms would have $2.5 billion revenue in 2020, with a 75% year-on-year (YoY) growth. This is built on the premise that speaking is the most natural form of communication that is only set to deepen further.

Data from research platform Allied Market Research showed that the conversational AI space could potentially touch $32.62 billion by 2030, registering 20% YoY growth between 2021-30. For transaction-heavy sectors like healthcare, Voice AI could help solve existing bottlenecks.

In insurance, for example, a Voice AI could guide a customer to immediately file motor claim requests. Gauging the customer’s reactions, a human-like AI system could help calm their nerves and send help accordingly. Additional requests like towing services and highway pickups could also be provided. Since Voice AI is a system that adapts by interacting with customers constantly, the sooner it is deployed, the better will be the user experience.

Global Power

As part of an endeavour to reach all customer touchpoints, brands have globally deployed text-based solutions. But the varying internet penetration and variation in literacy levels could prove to be bottlenecks in customer experiences.

Using text for communication would not be effective in this case, so voice AI for customer services works best here. When it comes to sectoral requirements too, voice could help reduce the turnaround time for financial requests. Chat is able to process a lot of these queries too, but eventually customers prefer the medium of talking for final resolution. The high wait-times at contact centres of all financial institutions is proof.

Picture this. An insurance customer on an international trip meets with an accident and has to undergo an emergency procedure. But the hospital states that the authorities will need to verify the policy terms or speak to an insurance company official before conducting the surgery.

Here, waiting for an IVR response would simply delay the process, while chatbots may have to reroute the query to seek confirmation. On the other hand, a Voice AI would be able to disclose the policy details after authenticating the customer’s KYC details.

Identifying customers based on Know-Your-Customer and personal contact details is the next phase of growth for Voice AI systems. Once a customer’s voice is recorded for a couple of transactions, this would be used for all future conversations to ascertain and authenticate that it is indeed the registered user who is contacting the company. This would be useful for leisure services as well. For instance, seeking a special child seat at a restaurant on arrival often leads to chaos. Sending in written requests seldom works. Here, having a Voice AI that can decipher the messages and relay them back to the restaurant for timely service can be effective.

Future of Businesses

There was a phase where automated messaging was touted as the most preferred form of communication. This changed when voice assistants started seeping into the system. Globally, urban consumers have gotten used to voice assistants at home through connected devices and smart speakers. In fact, the number of Indians using voice queries daily on Google is nearly twice the global average. Since voice is a popular choice for customers’ personal use, this automatically translates into similar trends for businesses, too. A Deloitte study said that by 2030 there will be a proliferation of voice-led technology across the globe and that 30% of sales will happen via voice by 2030. Through voice-led interactions, sales will not only be more intelligent, but companies will also be able to refer to these calls to investigate user complaints.

The premise is clear. Voice is intuitive, easy to use, and has a quicker turnaround time. For customer-facing companies, it is a technology that can no longer be ignored. What’s better? Employees stay happy too. Goodbye to calls from irate customers, abusive user messages, and long working hours during busy seasons. Voice AI could become their complementary solution and improve their quality of work as well.

In a world where emotional intelligence and personalised interventions hold more value than automated responses, Voice AI will spearhead the change. The ones who adapt quicker and deploy voice will be the real winners in the long run.

To download this whitepaper as a PDF, click below.

Author: Harshad Bajpai

Behind the Scenes: Leveraging SLU to Enhance Customer Experiences

Increased Ease of Usage

Understanding the Customer

Quick Query Resolution

Consistent Service Experiences