The business case for conversational AI: 5 reasons why you should be talking about Conversational AI technology
Remember the days when sending an auto email promising to respond to an enquiry in 2–3 working days was a benchmark for good service? Today, sending this response will leave your customer significantly less delighted. There are many factors contributing to this rise in service expectations, but one of the most influential is how enthusiastically we’re inviting digital helpers into our lives.
At home, you ask your smart speaker ‘how long will it take me to get to my nearest Tesco’ and a few seconds later you have an answer. Ask your smartwatch to ‘set a timer for 5 minutes’, and it’s done in an instant. With conversational AI you can now say what you need and leave your voice assistant to worry about how to get this done. It’s a convenience we’re accustomed to in our homes, and it’s only a matter of time before we expect this to reach into other areas of our lives too.
How long before your employees and customers expect you to provide the support of a virtual conversational assistant as standard?
5 conversation starters
Here are a few reasons why adding an Alana conversational AI assistant to your customer service team is a discussion worth having.
1. An Alana virtual agent can do more than you think
Conversational AI is no longer limited to stilted chatbots programmed to deliver prescribed answers based on a keyword match. Alana assistants not only hold more human-like extended conversations, they’re also context-aware and able to deliver more natural responses that are enhanced by memory. This elevates our conversational assistants from the limited role of a servant, to become a more engaging and useful customer service agent.
2. It takes the effort out of online searches
How easy is it for your customers to find the service or information they need on your website? Or for your employees to revisit a specific clause in one of your company policies? Our conversational AI interface takes multiple manual steps out of navigating sprawling systems, helping customers and employees to find the exact information they need quicker and with less effort.
3. It makes personalisation possible at scale
You’ll be aware of various attempts over the years to bring a human touch to customer communications. Things like including a customer’s name on mass emails and making product recommendations based on previous purchases. Conversational AI is a natural (but significant) progression of personalisation at scale. A conversational AI assistant allows you to interact with more people but at the same time makes your customers feel like they’re in a 1:1 dialogue that’s focused on their priorities or needs. This delivers a far more engaging interaction.
4. Rapidly scale up (and down) your operations
When you don’t have enough staff to provide an efficient service or you wish to deliver a 24/7 response to your customers or employees, conversational AI can reduce the burden on your team by talking to thousands of people simultaneously. This creates a cost-effective way to deal with high volume, repetitive dialogues whilst allowing your existing team to focus on adding greater value to the customer interaction.
5. Adding conversational capability to your systems is getting easier
Conversational development platforms are maturing. We’re moving towards the goal of creating interfaces that don’t rely on access to huge amounts of data and annotations by highly trained computer scientists. This will make it easier and more cost-efficient for more businesses to use and maintain their own conversation-enabled services.
Why you shouldn’t put off having this conversation
As conversation takes over as our preferred interface, are speech and text based AI assistants on the cusp of becoming more mainstream? If this is the case, you may need to start thinking how you could introduce one into your business. And, at Alana, we’re ready to have that conversation with you.
