The holiday shopping season is a complicated time for retailers and consumer companies. On the one hand, such periods bring great opportunities to earn and fuel future business growth. On the other hand, mistakes, bad planning, or execution can lead to missed opportunities and significant losses.
Is there a way new technologies can help businesses avoid problems and boost the highest effectiveness for better conversions, sales, and customer satisfaction? Numbers tell that Artificial Intelligence is such a technology, and today we will discuss how it can improve communications with customers.
Omnichannel communication for higher conversions
According to a survey conducted by IBM, 4 in 10 companies fail to adopt an integrated multichannel marketing strategy, which leads to $83b in lost sales annually.
Customer interaction is a crucial element of any sales cycle, and this means that the business should align with the customers’ communication preferences. According to stats, 86% of shoppers prefer email communications, while 65% call, 53% contact the company via the website, and 52% via text messages.
These channels should be interconnected for better conversion. For example, if the customer asks to send some information to WhatsApp or email during the call, failing to do so will result in a lost sale. Still, a call center employee most often can’t send additional information to other channels.
AI-fueled voice agents at Neuro.net can do this and immediately send the needed information to the channel of choice.
Reduced wait times
Clients do not want to wait in line. According to stats, 44% of customers are not ready to wait more than 2 minutes while on the phone, and 13% are not ready to wait at all!
With the contact center AI, i.e., a virtual agent answering with a human-like and almost indistinguishable voice, the business can serve lots more customers, and no one will hear “all of our agents are currently busy.”
Sustainable customer care quality
When there are a lot of calls, humans get tired fast. This predominantly affects the quality of their work. Call center agents can spend more time helping customers, forget to follow the script, which can lead to lost up sales, and even be rude – this translates to the lost sale at all!
AI-based agents never get tired, and the quality of their work is constant. And while the human can remember ten answers to questions and oppose ten objections, you can teach your virtual assistant to process a broader list of possible sales situations. This will also increase your conversion in the highest paying period of the year!
Better control
This is hard to ensure the consistency of customer service. Human agents often fail in following the script or choose wrong intonations or facts to answer the customer’s objection. Every mistake during the dialogue can lead to a lost sale. Company management can be sure scripts are enforced for 100% with the AI-powered virtual agents, and the correct tone is always selected.
Easy scaling
The holiday shopping season brings spikes that are hard to predict in full. This means that sometimes the call center’s planned capacity may turn out to be not enough to fill the demand. Quickly adding more sales and support agents is a complicated task. People require time for training to be able to provide high-quality support.
AI learns fast – the algorithm needs an input of several hundreds of previous calls to know. A human can’t even process that high volume of information! And after the learning curve is over, the business can add up as many virtual agents as needed at almost no extra costs on salaries, office space, etc.
Final thoughts: is everything that great?
There is a widespread idea that people do not like computer-fueled communications. This is only partially true. Some people mix AI-based communication with automated spam voice calls, which is not correct. Such calls are not intelligent, these are only pre-recorded scripts, and the system can’t change its behavior during the call.
Another critical factor, that if people do not know that they’re communicating with the voice bot, the overall satisfaction is higher, on average. For example, a disclosure of a chatbot identity at the beginning of the conversations decreases conversion for up to 79.7%, while the undisclosed bots are as efficient as humans. Only 1% of customers can distinguish AI-based voice agents from human agents.
So, the key takeaways are as follows:
- AI-fueled virtual agents improve productivity and simplify control. AI can communicate via multiple channels at the same time. It never gets tired or breaks the rules.
- Intelligent voice bots are a great tool to survive the holiday season. Algorithms solve employee training and call center scaling problems, just 600 call records and three weeks to get a virtual agent that knows everything about your inventory and popular customer objections.
- People can’t distinguish a good AI from a human. Only 1% of the customers asking the business will understand they are talking to the bot; the other 99% will be as satisfied as after the conversation with a human agent.
