Just over a decade ago, with our first tryst with Siri, little did we imagine its significance and how Voice AI will change customer support forever. Several generations, from baby boomers to millennials to gen Z, are using voice searches on popular platforms such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, and others is a testimony of its potential. Today, we stand at the cusp of Voice-tech revolutionizing customer service.
Since speech is an integral part of being human, we covet meaningful conversation to connect and express. But today, even the thought of being stuck with Interactive Voice Response (IVRs) and chatbots in an emergency/urgent situation gives us the heebie-jeebies, right? And the long wait for a customer service agent to pick up, if at all, forges a lasting negative emotion towards the brand.
Companies have been trying hard to deliver a delightful customer experience; but with existing legacy systems, it is just not possible. The emerging answer to CX woes is Augmented Voice Intelligence that not only understands and responds but is semantically capable of comprehending the context of customer queries or problems.
For brands, customer experience can make or break their reputation. A Harvard Business Review survey revealed that 73% of business leaders view reliable customer experience as being critical to their company’s overall business performance.
The Conversational AI space has been experiencing explosive growth, and within it Augmented Voice Intelligence sits at the frontier, with the incredible potential of disrupting the way companies interact with their customers.
Why Voice-first Solutions Will Take it All!
Written language differs significantly from spoken one. Spoken content has more information, hidden in the form of pauses and pitch modulations, Chatbots bundled with ASR can transcribe, but not converse. As organizations pour millions into automated voice support, they would want their virtual agents to understand the semantics, such as sarcasm, and not take “oh, you did a good job’ at face value. Those subtle nuances of human conversations get annihilated when we strap a readily available Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) over a chatbot.
Though chat has distinct use cases it excels at, a simple conversion of text to voice and vice-versa does not meet even the table stakes of a voice conversation.
Watch Skit’s Intelligent Voice Agent in Action
Nearly 9 in 10 people preferred speaking to someone over the phone rather than navigating a pre-set menu, showed research from Clutch. That is why the future belongs to Augmented Voice Intelligence!
Companies cannot simply use generic voice engines, as they are built for contextless conversations. Simply because a customer interacts with a company with a very specific context, and expects it to troubleshoot as skilled human support would do.
Voice-tech solutions that are built for voice, from the ground up, will be the ones delivering successful conversations. This boils down to conversing with customers within a specific context enables automated voice support to solve their problems, even complex ones, in a frictionless manner. It requires training in domain-specific knowledge at the speech recognition layer and creating different design guidelines for every vertical and for specific use cases within those verticals.
It is an uphill task, but what’s the prize for all the effort? The biggest prize indeed: Conversations that your customers will love!
The Conversational AI space has been experiencing explosive growth, and within it Augmented Voice Intelligence sits at the frontier, with the incredible potential of disrupting the way companies interact with their customers.
Augmented Voice Intelligence focuses on empowering an enterprise’s workforce by combining the power of human voice and AI. A Digital Voice Agent can easily resolve tier 1 customer service issues and automate cognitively routine work while human agents can focus on more complex customer problems.
Human/machine collaboration is the future of intelligent work. The intent is not to replace the human workforce, but to enhance their productivity by taking away the mundane workload.
The opportunities for the Voice AI ecosystem are only getting started. Data from research platform Allied Market Research showed that the conversational AI space has the potential to touch $32.62 billion by 2030, registering 20% YoY growth between 2021-30.
For brands, customer experience can make or break their reputation. A Harvard Business Review survey revealed that 73% of business leaders view reliable customer experience as being critical to their company’s overall business performance.
End-to-End Customer Support
The main applications of Voice AI or AI-enabled Intelligent Voice Agents can be subsumed into four categories:
- Resolving Tier-1 Issues: All calls can be routed through the Voice AI agent, and it will be able to answer a large chunk of calls completely, without any human assistance.
- Pre-Call Assistance: As the call gets forwarded to the human agent, Voice AI can fetch all the relevant information for the agent to engage in the most meaningful way.
- On-Call Assistance: The Digital Voice Agent listens to the conversation and provides instant data and help to the human agent, augmenting the agent’s capability to serve manifolds.
- Post-Call Assistance: Call summary is essential for feedback, and the agent needs to fill it out. An AI-enabled Digital Voice Agent can perform such post-call activities with semantic understanding; the agent simply has to look and approve.
Read More: Voice AI – The Biggest Automation Trend of 2022
Voice AI is the Voice of the Future
Think of a contact center with a seamlessly scalable team available 24*7, with agents who have customer data at their fingertips, where the quality of calls never drops and no one gets frustrated. Where personalization, relevant up-, and cross-selling are table stakes and call data analytics and feedback are available on the fly.
Sounds like utopia, right?! But this is well within the grasp of businesses, with the right voice technology solution. Now imagine the competitive edge your company can derive from the successful adoption of augmented voice intelligence.
This is the defining moment for custom-centric companies, as their voice strategy will have ripples far into their future.
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Also, for more information: How We Can Transform Customer Experience
