Love them or loathe them, bots are fast becoming the next frontier of customer experience.
Yet, some are better than others, and one particular use case gaining momentum is voicebots.
Indeed, as McKinsey & Company states: “IVR systems are evolving from dumb menu systems into smart ‘voicebots’ capable of handling complex customer queries.”
Thankfully, “handling” involves much more than mimicking a traditional IVR that routes calls and offers callbacks.
Indeed, voicebots offer an attractive alternative to the disjointed, cumbersome software well known for frustrating customers.
Why Are Voicebots the Future of CX?
First off, consider contact centre routing. Thanks to advances in NLU and automated speech recognition, voicebots grasp customer intent from in just one or two words – without pretraining. Customers then filter into the correct queue instantaneously.
Of course, capturing intent in such a way also allows for much more accurate ticket tagging.
Yet, let’s reconsider the routing example. Sure, a voicebot can pass the customer onto agents, but it may also send them to a self-service flow powered by robotic process automation (RPA).
The result? Lightning fast service, automated customer contacts, and relieved contact centre agents.
Naturally, self-service will fail from time to time. However, as Patrice Mattez, VoiceAI Connect Business Development Manager at AudioCodes, says:
“At any time, the customer can request that the virtual assistant transfers the call to a human agent. It then does so with the transcript, metadata, conversation history and the virtual assistant.”
Mattez also suggests that when a query is too complex to automate fully, the voicebot can gather customer information – pertinent to the intent – and streamline the following customer-agent conversation.
With the right approach, companies may also design self-service flows by reapplying the logic of existing, high-satisfaction chatbots for voice.
By doing so, companies can maximize the value of their bot efforts across the omnichannel contact centre while adding more self-service flows.
In a world that is becoming accustomed to using smart speakers, customers can take advantage of these voice-driven self-service options to resolve their queries without lifting a finger.
How to Build the Best Voicebot
There are three fundamentals to building a virtual voice assistant:
- Conversational copywriting that stems from a deep analysis of call recordings.
- Psychology that aims to foster helpful service and the empathetic glow of natural conversation.
- Technology!
When it comes to the latter, companies often obsess over working with a single bot vendor, whether that is Microsoft, IBM, or a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader, like Kore.ai.
However, success often springs from companies remaining as open as possible when building bots. This is according to Mattez, who states: