According to the statistics, 78% of customers have backed out of purchase due to a poor customer experience. One can hardly overestimate the importance of prompt, professional, and effective customer service.
Today, however, contact centers need to extend their digital presence across various channels to meet new communication patterns while ensuring customers can get their issues resolved quickly and seamlessly.
Is there a way to expand your contact center offerings without hiring a whole new bunch of employees and spending too much on their training? Let’s see.
How can AI automate customer support?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the leading trends in technology — more and more businesses adopt AI solutions as an extremely powerful tool for marketing, sales and more. It also continues to gain popularity for companies that wish to provide a highly personalized, exceptional customer experience.
Comprehensive AI-based solutions for contact centers can include voice agents, chatbots, email robots, which turn out to be specific types of a more general term “virtual agents” (VAs). Those agents can help businesses in many ways: reaching out to customers, answering incoming calls, guiding through registration/installation processes, fixing common issues, collecting feedback, and solving other routine tasks leaving human employees more time to focus on creative work. This makes AI a highly effective automation tool for all kinds of contact centers.
What are the benefits of VAs?
Productive and cost-effective
Unlike human customer care managers, AI-based virtual agents never get tired and are available 24/7/365, which drives overall productivity to an unprecedented level.
Moreover, VAs can literally save your money — the AI-powered contact center provides up to 50% economy on operational costs.
Minimized wait times
Since VAs can work simultaneously on many tasks, customers no longer need to endlessly wait in line to have their issues addressed. Instead, they enjoy immediate responses, which certainly improves their experience.
It makes for a significant benefit, since 44% of customers are not ready to spend more than 2 minutes waiting on the phone, and 13% are not going to wait at all.
Easy to scale up
AI-powered contact centers can be easily scaled up with no need to hire and train employees. All you need is to launch some extra VAs. It’s especially useful in times of seasonal sales or new product launches when contact centers are loaded with calls.
Besides, it’s much cheaper, and you won’t be restricted by limited office space or lack of additional hardware.
Predictable high quality
VAs can help you eliminate common human-related problems, such as inconsistency, incompetence, or even bad mood.
With AI systems, you can be sure that your scripts are followed 100%, and every communication follows the correct tone of voice.
Omnichannel experience
More and more customers get used to various communication channels apart from the phone calls, so brands need to keep up with the trend and make their support available across those channels.
With AI systems, you can launch VAs to support customers on their platform of choice, including Email, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Viber.
How to deploy an AI solution that’s easy to manage and upgrade?
At Neuro.net, we offer a full-fledged conversational AI platform for contact centers that can be deployed within only three weeks. During this time, we prepare the optimal scenario and run a pilot implementation. Here’s how it goes.
First, before we start, we need to collect some data which will be used as a training set for our NLU Engine. In most cases, 600 conversation records are sufficient to train an accurate VA in your subject area.
Then comes the conversational flow design stage, when we analyze the data and develop smooth conversational patterns fitting to your customers’ needs. People expect bots or virtual assistants to have human-level conversational abilities, so it’s highly important to create a seamless and naturalistic flow design.
After that, we use the collected samples to train the NLU Engine to recognize the user’s intention. It usually takes a week. Pre-trained AI is already capable of handling most of the requests. Following the implementation, the training process continues and reaches 95% recognition accuracy after only several thousand calls.
Final thoughts
The great benefit of AI systems is their ongoing ability to learn and adapt to users’ needs, making the customer experience more satisfying than ever. 99% of people can’t distinguish a VA from a real person since it is able to change intonation, make pauses, and follow the logic of the conversation to sound natural.
It is no wonder that more and more brands are embracing conversational AI because it can provide a highly personalized approach while being much quicker, more convenient and affordable than traditional ways of interacting with businesses.
