Conversational AI can be described as an artificial intelligence technology that is capable of holding a conversation with a customer like a human would. Because of its ever-developing features, conversational AI has taken the contact centre industry by storm over the last year.
Moving away from the standard, robot-like IVRs, and chatbots, advanced conversational AI uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to interact with customers over text, voice, and even video. The AI provides intelligent responses while also learning how to communicate better in a given context or situation. This way each interaction becomes more natural and more efficient than the previous one.
In an almost all-digital world, companies gravitate towards automation for every possible process. It’s no doubt that automation helps with a host of manual tasks and can save both time and money, however, if employed incorrectly, it can do more harm than good on companies’ overall customer experience.
The new era of conversational AI is upon us. Automated voice recordings and stale chatbot messages no longer work. In an exclusive interview, CX Today spoke with Derek Roberti, VP Technology at Cognigy, to learn more about the ins and outs of an ideal conversational AI solution.
The need for implementing conversational AI for employees
Before delving into the very core of conversational AI, it’s important to understand what pushes companies to turn to this type of technology. Contact centres are the main ‘employers’ of conversational AI and rightfully so since the majority of challenges that occur in contact centres are related to human resources. High employee attrition in such a fast-paced setting leaves little to no time for the drill of the newly-employed workforce.
Roberti begins: “For the past decades, the primary occupation of the contact centre management is dealing with recruiting, training and retaining employees. With the current market forces around employment, these challenges have become even harder.”
As the number of people quitting their jobs increases on a daily basis, the turnover rates are higher, creating even bigger pressure on the contact centre management. This is where conversational automation or conversational AI comes to the rescue.
Roberti continues:
“Being able to automate a lot of the repetitive work that does not require human judgment, decision-making, or empathy adds to the time that human workforce has to do meaningful, challenging tasks.”This way, human workers are left with more engaging, interesting calls allowing them to become higher-performing employees who are more motivated by the inherent qualities of the job.”
In this case, automation takes care of the repetitive administrative tasks that can take an unnecessarily large portion of humans’ time, but what happens when we automate interactions between customers and businesses?
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Conversational AI interacts with a customer in form of a voice or through text. Before implementing the best solution that fits the needs of a business, customers’ preferences need to be put first. If chatbots are not able to provide the information a customer is seeking, they will likely turn to a phone call.
Roberti says: “We want to give people the option of contacting a human agent, but we want to make it easier for them to do everything in a self-service fashion first.”
“That’s what conversational AI or conversational automation does. It provides a natural language interface and allows users to speak in their own terms so they don't need to worry about remembering which button to press, and they can quickly solve problems on their own.”