Human speech is extremely complex and automating or handling it seems impossible. Most of us today have used Alexa or Siri and know the discrepancies between human interaction with a voice bot. What if we say Voice AI is here to change the world of customer service using voice interactions?
Today, automation and artificial intelligence have reformed the interactions between customers and businesses. Evolving and aligning with the requirements, AI has supported businesses to keep up with the ever-changing needs and demands of customers in terms of customer service.
This article will give you a deep understanding of voice AI. You will get a clear picture of how you can use voice AI in customer service and retain maximum benefits for your business. Let’s begin with the basics.
What is Voice AI?
Voice AI is a division of conversational AI that focuses on simulating human-like voice conversations with customers. With this technology, businesses can honor their customers with the freedom to use voice commands to give instructions and raise queries.
The most amazing thing about voice bots is that they provide a hands-free customer experience. Your customers can be cooking their meals and yet ordering products from your website. Voice AI can provide a hassle-free experience to your customers and allow them to multitask without any hindrances.
With Voice AI, businesses have seen extraordinary results and thus it has become a trending market. By the end of 2024, the global market of voice-based speakers is expected to be worth $30 billion.
Before you start using voice bots, it is important to dig deeper and get a thorough knowledge about the topic. This will help you use the tool to its full potential and get maximum results. In this article, you will learn about the working of voice AI, its benefits for businesses as well as customers, and the challenges incorporated with it.
Components of Voice AI
Voice AI works exactly like a two-way human conversation. Just like a sender encodes the message and sends it, while the receiver receives the message and decodes it, the same phenomenon happens between a voice bot and a human.
The combination of voice AI and automation can build an extremely powerful voice bot with the capability to solve almost all customer queries with the most rational responses. Basically, voice AI technology works as the brain for a voice bot.
Let’s understand all the components and their functionality so as to choose the right voice bot for your professional use.
1. Automatic Speech Recognition/Speech To Text
ASR/STT is a technology that converts human speech into computer-understandable text. This is done using a pool of words, their phonics, and a recognition algorithm.
Using STT, a computer decodes the human message and further understands it in order to provide a response.
2. Noise filter
There is a probability that the human message received by voice AI contains some noise or ambiguous glitch. For an instance, let’s say you received a customer support call while you were in a movie hall. The background noise can make your message unclear.
Thanks to voice AI, this message can be filtered and the exact message can be recorded. A voice bot can then respond with higher accuracy and solve the issues faced by the customer.
3. Neural network
Alike the human brain, artificial intelligence also has a structure of neural networks. These neurons break the text string into smaller pieces and find the best match in the pre-existing data pool.
After analyzing the complete text, voice AI matches the customer’s query with the best possible outcome.
4. NLP engine
Understand the syntactic and semantics of the customer query through natural language processing. With the NLP engine, the voice bot can get the complete context of the voice message.
An NLP engine can also help you understand the intent and sentiments behind the user’s messages. If a user is angry or not satisfied with the voice bot’s performance, you can assign a human agent to take the conversation forward.
5. Response evaluation
Once the user-generated message is understood, voice AI carefully lists conclusions in order to respond to the customer. The response evaluation algorithm then selects the best possible response to send as the final response message.
6. Deliver response message
The final response to be sent to the customer is converted into an audio format and saved for future reference. It is then sent as a response to the customer query.
The entire process is extremely fast and does not make humans feel that they are interacting with a voice bot.
Top 10 benefits of Voice AI for businesses
Now that you know what is voice AI and how it works, let us throw some light upon the business benefits of voice AI. However, your organization can observe much more than the benefits listed below as voice AI has unlimited possibilities in customer support.
1. Streamlined customer support
Customer support is indeed a demanding job and has many repetitive tasks like sending emails, gathering feedback and resolving simple FAQs. Voice AI can help your team streamline the complete process and automate repetitive tasks.
With voice bots, your organization can help employees focus only on important tasks that need human involvement, while, the repetitive tasks can be completed by the bot.
2. Refined customer experience
With instant responses round-the-clock and accurate query resolution, customers love the support provided by voice bots. Voice AI can help your organization interact with customers in their vernacular languages and at their convenience.
All these features can overall provide a refined and better customer experience leaving your organization with a competitive edge and an improved customer satisfaction rate.
3. Personalized and automated customer interactions
Personalization has proven to be a game-changer in customer support. Your organization can attend to each customer with personalized responses based on their historical data. Voice bots can fetch the information from a database and use it while interacting with the customer.
All of this can be achieved without any hassle or human intervention. You only need to automate the responses once and it can be used every time a customer reaches your voice bot.
4. Reduced customer support costs
Automation of customer support can save costs in multiple ways. Firstly, the number of queries resolved by a voice bot is much higher at a very low cost. Secondly, the passive effects of deploying a chatbot include higher customer satisfaction, which saves the cost of acquiring new customers.
With automation, you can save a lot of working hours that are usually devoted to doing mundane repetitive tasks.
5. No-barrier communication
With artificial intelligence, a business can build a strong interactive communication channel where customers can come and communicate with a voice bot. A voice bot is a multilingual, round-the-clock, personalized support channel that can help your customers with all their needs.
Voice AI helps businesses build a bridge between customers and the company for effortless, frictionless communication. This helps businesses improve customer experience to a great extent.
6. Simplified data-collection
Filling a form or verbally telling your details, what is easier? Voice bots, collect all the customer information without any hindrances, delays or friction. You can even gather feedback via voice bots.
Once the data is collected by a voice bot, businesses can save and use it for future reference and in the case of complex queries, forward it to the human agent.
7. Rationalized agent-handoff
A well-designed voice bot knows when a situation goes out of control and when to hand it off to a customer support agent. The hand-off with artificial intelligence is extremely seamless.
The voice bot provides all the prior information to the human agents so that they can understand the situation thoroughly and the customer does not need to repeat his problem repetitively.
8. Improved call deflection
Call deflection is a technique to answer a customer’s call to an alternate customer care channel so that the human agents only attend to complex cases. With voice bots, most customer support calls are answered and resolved automatically. This helps the business in reducing the average time required for closing a support ticket.
Even the calls that need human intervention are resolved faster as the human agents have lesser responsibilities and fewer tickets to close.
9. Increased first-call query resolution
With artificial intelligence, automation, seamless agent handoff and no-barrier communication, most of the queries are already resolved during the first contact.
An increased first-call resolution will increase the customer satisfaction rate and customer retention for your business in the longer run. It will also help in reducing the churn a customer goes through in order to receive satisfactory and accurate support from a business.
10. Used by differently-abled customers
A customer-centric approach needs to focus on all the segments of customers. Your business needs a voice bot so that visually impaired customers can avail themselves of customer support services.
Visually impaired employees can also handle customer support with voice bots. Voice assistants complete their tasks with simple commands.
Top 3 benefits of Voice AI for customers
Now that you have all the reasons to deploy voice AI to your business website, app and all other communication channels, let’s understand how it will benefit your customers. After deploying the voice bot, you can expect positive feedback from your customers on the following points.
1. Self-serve
In the digitally transformed era, customers are in a habit of self-serve their queries and requests. With voice AI, customers don’t need to scroll through FAQs or watch your demo videos. They can directly ask their questions to the bot and get a response instantly.
The process of query resolution becomes faster, smoother and better for your external and internal customers.
2. Less friction in communication
Before voice AI, customers needed to frame emails about their complaints, send them to the business support email ID and then wait for their response. The process had a lot of friction and customers felt annoyed.
With voice bots, the whole process has become frictionless and needs no effort from the customers’ end. Clearly, customers are more satisfied with your product and services.
3. One-time data-collection
Another annoying characteristic of a customer support team without artificial intelligence is that every time a customer needs support, he needs to provide all the information and details to multiple teams repetitively.
Voice AI can help customers by saving their details for future reference and sharing them with every human agent that comes across to solve the problem.
Challenges of Voice AI
There are still some discrepancies with voice recognition that need to be rectified using artificial intelligence. Even a well-designed voice bot can sometimes fail to deliver the expected results. Some of the challenges that your business needs to address while initiating the use of voice AI are listed below.
1. Ambient noise
Voice AI can recognize some of the surrounding sounds as a part of the user-generated voice. It can create confusion and lead to distorted results.
2. Speed of speech
If a customer speaks too fast (beyond 200 words per minute), it becomes difficult for artificial intelligence to understand the information and process it and provide a response.
3. Dialects and pronunciation
Dialects and pronunciation vary from person to person. Voice AI might fail to understand if the variation is high or if pronunciation is unclear.
However, with the pace at which voice AI is being accepted by contact centers and customer support teams, advancement is bound to happen. With machine learning, you can start improving the functionality of your voice from the first day.
Voice AI: The future of customer experience
There are a few major reasons why voice assistants are gaining popularity and trending in the virtual marketplace. One of the major reasons is the way voice search is transforming SEO and other organic marketing efforts. Businesses with voice AI tend to rank better.
Another reason is the feasibility of ordering using conversational voice AI for e-commerce websites. Studies have shown that by 2030, 30% of the total revenue generated by e-commerce websites will be through voice searches.
People are adapting voice AI as a part of their daily lives and so should you. If you are a business looking to upgrade your customer service with artificial intelligence, we’ve got you covered.
Yellow.ai is a one-stop solution to fulfill all your needs for improvisation in customer experience and employee experience. We hope after reading this article, you are 100% sure about adopting voice AI as a part of your customer experience efforts.
For more details about conversational tools and voice bots, you can request a demo with our experts. They can help you in leveling up your customer experience and give you a competitive advantage.
