“Hey Alexa, can you check the status of my order?”
“Hi Alexa, can you please switch off the light?”
“Good Morning Google, What’s happening in the world?”
These are a few questions no one thought 10-15 yrs back that we would be using or well asking an intelligent virtual assistant or ai chatbots to do for us. Now we have entered a new era wherein we are bypassing screens – The Era of Voice. Hence, the fight is on to own this new operating system and app ecosystem that comes with it. The voice-enabled bot is sure to fuel voice-enabled commerce, which is expected to be worth more than 80 billion per year by 2023.
“More than 50% of all searches by 2021 will be voice-driven. ”- Forbes
Intelligent Virtual Assistants have evolved and voice support is playing a key role in brand-to-consumer engagement. Leveraging AI-based voice bots for providing an instant and omnipresent brand experience while automating sales, engagement, and support is on a high priority list for all businesses.
Voice is a more natural form of communication. It is informal, intuitive, and fast!
Before we get into the benefits and the how and why of voice bots, let us define Voice bots.
What is an AI-powered voice-enabled bot?
A voice-enabled chatbot is a variant of a conversational AI solution. It leverages NLP combined with speech-to-text(self-developed or already existing platforms) and automates the speech recognition to deliver resolution immediately. Voice Assistant can either be a complete voice-based model or as a multimodal chatbot supporting both text and voice.
The voice bots can be deployed in two formats:
Inbound voice bots
Inbound Voice tbots are your welcome IVRs, faq, agent transfer IVRs, and brand assistance provided on Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Using the inbound voice bots, the customers can check for their balance, recharge, register any complaint or any other queries.
Inbound Voice bots facilitate:
1. Self-Serve Customer Support: More than 65% of advanced queries can be resolved by voice assistance, giving your team time to work on resolving critical issues.
2. Information on demand: Satiate customer’s queries with on-demand voice virtual assistance across channels( phone, Google, Alexa, etc) of their choice.
Outbound voice bots
Unlike Inbound Voice bots, where the business is not aware of the new callers. IVR is the most popular format of outbound voice bots. The outbound Voice bots utilize the database entered in them or extract the data from the business’s CRM and calls their user for lead generation, notifications, reminders, surveys, etc
Outbound Voice bots facilitate:
1. Onboarding/Welcome Calls: With outbound voice bot plan, execute and track multi-step transition processes like onboarding.
2. Reminder Calls: Outbound voice bots can be used to send reminders or confirm appointments, bookings, and reservations or effectively remind consumers about payments, due-dates, adherence.
3. Notification Calls: Using outbound voice bots send your customer’s suspicious account activities or even send verification account messages.
4. Feedback/Survey Calls: Launch conversational surveys that understand free-text and modify the survey flow based on respondent sentiment for higher CSAT & sharper analysis.
7 Reasons to have Voice bots for your business
1. Self service customer support
Self Service via a voice bot is more scalable and customer-centric. Even though the self service model is difficult to implement but when implemented the right way by deploying automated multimodal customer support systems drives a lot of value in terms of ROI and customer satisfaction for the business. A study by Drift showed that chatbots usage has increased by 92% since 2019, making it the brand communication channel with the largest growth.
Giving your customers a voice bot as the first mode of communication can help them resolve their queries faster and for major queries the AI-enabled voice bot can transfer the call or the message to the right agent.
2. Zero wait time
Calling any customer support center can be a nightmare for most people, basically, because of the wait time and redirections. Enabling FAQs on automating general queries on IVR, Alexa or Google Assistant can save a lot of time and the agent can take over or the call can be transferred to the agent only for critical issues.
3. 24/7 Availability
Humans require rest, but machines do not. Even if your agent is not available, the voice bots can resolve the queries for your customers and take their details in case of urgent queries. And your agent can contact them at their earliest convenience.
4. Break from monotonous texts
Provide a multimodal Intelligent Virtual assistant supporting both chat and voice, rather than just a text-based chatbot. Just a text-based chatbot requires a lot of patience, and time from the user’s end. And also sometimes it becomes difficult to understand voiceless messages as it lacks sentiments. AI-enabled voice bot is a highly automated, intelligent, and customer-friendly; making it a need of the hour for brand-customer engagement platforms
5. No human contact
Pandemic made it really clear the need for an automated customer support system, as most customer support offices were closed down. Many businesses and banking institutions were seen adopting IVR support for resolving customer queries like Kotak, ICICI, etc.
6. Save cost
Automated AI-enabled voice bot increases your team’s productivity, by taking care of all repetitive queries. Your team can just focus on critical queries, thus saving a lot of time and money for your business.
7. Increased productivity
Using voice bots, your customers can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, and in one call. Customers can schedule appointments, organize and modify meetings, check balance, do transactions, get account details, set reminders, etc.
Conclusion
In this time of extreme competition, businesses should not leave a chance of engaging their customers with the best customer support service available. The voice bots can be used to resolve queries and capture qualifiable leads while engaging customers with personalised engagement.
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