How to Enhance Customer Experience and boost ROI with Conversational AI
Many modern companies have customers around the world. These customers expect good service and support to be available at their fingertips 24/7. This puts pressure on companies’ resources, workforce and margins.
Many founders and CEOs of scale-up businesses have discovered that customer engagement costs can rise quickly as a company grows and sometimes get out of control. On the other hand, skimping on customer experience often leads to drastic drops in customer satisfaction and loss of clients.
Customers are now engaging with brands at any time across various devices, channels and touchpoints, which forces businesses to rethink how they engage customers. Engaging in conversations lies at the basis of any successful business, underpinning workplace productivity and brand-customer relationships. However, running an excellent conversation isn't easy for most organisations because we live in a world where people expect instant responses from their social media posts or emails. There is always someone else out there ready and waiting!
To remain competitive, companies must provide their customers with an exceptional experience. And to provide an exceptional experience, companies must be able to understand and respond to customer needs quickly and effectively.
This is where conversational AI comes in.
Conversational AI allows businesses to automate customer interactions and vastly improve the customer experience. Companies can use conversational AI to understand customer needs better, resolve customer issues faster, and boost ROI.
What is Conversational AI, and How is it Different from Chatbots?
Conversational AI is a technology that allows businesses to automate customer interactions. It does this by extracting data from various sources (e.g. call centre logs, social media posts, chatbot transcripts) and then using that data to train a machine-learning model. This model is then used to generate responses that are indistinguishable from those of a human agent.
Conversational AI is the next generation, more modern chatbots. Older, simpler chatbots are often rule-based - decision-tree, menu-based, script-based, button-based, and are structured as ‘If a customer says X, the chatbot replies Y’. They are similar to automated phone menus and often drive customers mad just like those.
Conversational AI uses technologies that recognise and respond to speech and text inputs. It interacts with customers in a human-like way, via a chatbot in a chat or as a voice assistant on the phone. Conversational AI helps deep learning algorithms determine user intent and better understand human language.
Conversational AI is being adopted fast: the global conversational AI market is expected to grow from USD 4.2 billion in 2019 to USD 15.7 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 30.2%. According to Business Insider, by 2023, chatbots will save the banking, healthcare, and retail sectors up to $11 billion annually.
How Can Conversational AI Enhance Customer Experience?
There are many reasons why businesses should use conversational AI to enhance customer experience. Let's take a look at a few of the most important ones:
Faster Response Times: Automating customer interactions with conversational AI enables businesses to respond to customers faster. This is because companies no longer have to wait for a human agent to become available to address the issue.
Improved Customer Understanding: Another benefit of using conversational AI is that it helps businesses understand their customers more deeply. By extracting data from various sources and training a machine learning model on that data, companies can gain insights into customer needs, wants, and preferences that would otherwise be unavailable.
Increased revenues: The best way to increase sales is by providing customers with a frictionless experience. Conversational AI provides this, intelligently introducing people who are looking for new products and services from your company while also increasing revenue thanks to its supporting solutions, 24/7 availability and rapid reaction times - all under one roof! Chatbots have been known to increase revenue by an average 67 per cent.
Increased customer engagement: Chatbots provide timely suggestions and offers to customers. They can be used as an additional communication channel with your consumers to boost their engagement by providing what they need when needed most.
Increased ROI: Conversational AI can help businesses boost ROI by reducing operational costs and increasing revenue. Operating costs are reduced because companies no longer need to staff as many sales representatives or customer service agents. And revenue is increased because automated customer service agents can handle more interactions than human agents, thus freeing up human agents to focus on higher-value tasks such as upselling and cross-selling.
In conclusion
For businesses to remain competitive, they must provide their customers with an exceptional experience. And to provide an exceptional experience, companies must be able to understand and respond to customer needs quickly and effectively. Businesses automating customer interactions with conversational AI can better understand customer needs, resolve customer issues faster, and boost customer engagement and ROI.