Voice Technology Archives - BotCore

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers.

Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented call volumes and put tremendous pressure on traditional IVR systems, support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. This led to longer than usual wait-times, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers were unwilling to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.

Additionally, voice-based channels are not only difficult to scale but are costly too, as traditional voice interaction, on average, costs $15 per exchange. Yet, voice as a medium to provide customer support isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.

So, let’s explore what voice bots are and why they are the future of contact center customer service.

What are voice bots?

A voice bot is a computer program that understands spoken natural language and uses synthesised voice to converse with people. AI-powered speech recognition technology enables voice bots to recognize users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice.

In other words, voice bots are computers that can speak with people.

These bots are a scalable way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers. Moreover, they ease the burden of human agents, allowing them to focus on more productive, higher-value work and pressing customer issues.

For example, you want to book a flight. Now, instead of going through the myriad of traditional IVR options, simply call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” The bot will ask you for other details, including the date of the journey, preferred departure time, and book for you the flight of your choice, or directly route you to the right agent, saving you the long and tiresome drill of a legacy IVR system.

Hence, voice bots shall pave the way for interactive and wholesome conversational IVR in the contact centers.

Essential capabilities of a voice bot

Here, we list down the core capabilities that a voice bot should have to deliver better conversational experiences.

1. Understand the ‘intent’

Voice bots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the semantics of the human language, including grammar, synonyms, canonical word forms, and slang.

Customers aren’t always literal in what they utter. NLP helps extract the intent behind user utterance and helps voice bots understand the meaning behind the words. For example, when a customer says phrases like “sure” or “why not,” the bot must be able to understand that they are most probably saying “yes.”

Hence, intent analysis is one of the most significant capabilities of a voice bot.

2. Allow a barge-in

The ability to pause, listen, and speak accordingly, whenever a customer interrupts an ongoing interaction saying, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m looking for” or “no, I am not interested in this product,” is one of the best features of a smart AI-enabled voice bot.

3. Streaming recognition

Speedy and efficient resolution is essential for every business. Therefore, a bot must be able to interpret and act at the same pace at which the customer speaks. Slow responses and lags may hamper the reputation of a business.

4. Personalization

When a customer calls a business, they are looking for a fast response. For instance, after reaching a contact center, if customers need to identify themselves through details like account number, id, address, etc., it can really add to their frustration levels.

Therefore, optimal integration with the support desk database is vital for the bot to greet the caller by name, know caller history, identify the likely reason for the call based on past interactions and customer persona, and tailor suggestions based on the customer knowledge.

5. Handover to a live agent

At any point during the conversation, if the bot is unable to answer the user issue or if the customer asks for an agent handover, the bot must be capable of transferring the call to the right human agent or subject matter expert.

6. Keep Learning

An AI-powered voice bot must never stop learning. It should leverage its machine learning capabilities to improve accuracy and continuously learn from past interactions.

Advantages of voice bots

With voice bots, you can reap the following benefits –

1. Provide fast resolution to customers

Research by Harvard Business Review has concluded Customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

Therefore, a customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity for earning more profit. Traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple options and menus, wait for the next available agent, or try again during regular business hours. However, voice bots offer instant resolution with 24X7 support, even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.

2. Scale up your voice operations and reduce costs

A single voice bot can engage with thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading mundane, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.

3. Reduce transaction times

When it comes to speed, voice is any day faster and more customer-friendly than typing. Moreover, specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence reducing the overall transaction times.

4. Humanize support staff

Repetitive tasks, the mundane nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support center agents. With bots taking over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of contact center staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.

5. Create sales opportunities

Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU) and synthesis; they can deduce what the customer really means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create opportunities for new sales.

Voice bots - The future of contact center customer service

Voice bots are indeed the future of contact center customer engagement. They lead to an enormous reduction in cost by taking over the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale.

Moreover, they make personalized recommendations based on the customers’ preferences and previous purchases and enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and positively impact customer experience.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop a voice of their own with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore, supporting them in delivering exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal?

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:37:53 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, businesses have been focused on ensuring strong collaboration for their remote workforce by adopting new technologies such as modern intranets, cloud, and AI.

However, now, when lockdowns ease but COVID-19 continues to loom, businesses need to start thinking about bringing employees back to the workplace while ensuring social distancing and physical safety. Given that almost every surface has the potential to carry and transmit the virus, the way employees interact with the built environment has to be reimagined.

Voice technologies and contactless interfaces can be the key enablers in establishing safe working environments and ensuring customer experience. In this blog, we’ll discuss how companies can use voice assistants in the new normal.

Understanding Voice Bots

A voice assistant is a software that uses voice recognition, language processing algorithms, and voice synthesis to understand voice commands and deliver responses or perform tasks. Voice bots initially gained popularity in the consumer electronics industry with the launch of smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Echo, etc.

Back in 2016, chatbots and voice bots weren’t a top priority when a company implemented an ERP or HR solution. But now, as more enterprises realize the business benefits of bots, providing an easy-to-use, conversational interface has become a norm. In the past few years, we’ve seen several enterprises deploy voice assistants for use cases like IT helpdesk, HR operations, customer service, sales, etc. By 2021, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant (VEA) on a daily basis. This will be up from less than 2 percent in 2019.

Learn more: The Amazing Benefits Of Voice-Enabled Business Intelligence

A 451 Research report has predicted voice bots to become the top investment choice for businesses as their workforce returns to offices. Let’s discuss why.

Voice Bots In The New Normal

1. The Voice-First Workplace

We can’t go about our regular business like we used to amid this pandemic. It’s no longer safe to touch even everyday objects like doorknobs which could potentially expose us to the virus.

Many companies had already been exploring the potential of voice technology at their workplace even before the pandemic. Now, voice technology would have a huge role to play in this redesign of offices. Voice-activated controls can be utilized in office entry and exit points, elevators, meeting rooms, shared office devices to reduce the amount of physical contact needed to navigate in the workplace.

Use cases like integrating meeting room equipment with voice-enabled virtual assistants like Microsoft Cortana, Alexa For Business, Google Assistant will become more popular. With these integrations, employees can give voice commands to perform tasks like managing meetings, and controlling conference room devices and settings – temperature and lighting, etc. Last year, we could have thought of these as “nice to have” but these are now imperative for a safe workplace.

2. Voice technology powering customer service and experience

Social distancing will continue to be the most effective way to prevent the spread of the virus until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available. Thus, retailers will need to ensure business continuity without compromising the health and safety of their consumers by minimizing physical contact.

COVID-19 has pushed automation for all industries, nudging them towards digital transformation. Many businesses such as Amazon have adopted tap card payments to ensure contactless transactions but the physical interaction can be further minimized with voice technology.

Voice automation is being adopted at a rapid rate across multiple locations and industries. Businesses in industries such as airports, restaurants, retailers, etc. have seamlessly adopted voice bots to power their customer interactions while ensuring social distancing and high customer experience.

3. Voice assistants will improve remote worker productivity

Remote workers can leverage voice assistants to improve their productivity and collaboration. Microsoft recently integrated its virtual assistant, Cortana, into its Microsoft Teams app. This integration enables Microsoft 365 Enterprise users to complete communication, collaboration and meeting-related tasks using spoken natural language. They can connect with their colleagues by making a voice query such as “Call Mark” or “Send a message to my upcoming meeting”. Users can schedule meetings, share files, check calendars and more without any keyword stroke or mouse click.

Learn More: Cortana in Microsoft 365

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted human interactions all over the world. As businesses reopen their workplaces, social distancing will continue to be the norm. However, one certain thing is that to safeguard the employees, businesses will accelerate the adoption of digital technologies with voice bots leading the pack.

If you’d like to learn more about voice assistants, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation. We’d also be happy to share our success stories and how we can help you implement voice bots for your business .

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The post How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal? appeared first on BotCore.

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:39:00 +0000

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Leading industry analysts like Gartner predict that voice assistants are gaining a firm hold in the workplace. It is believed that by 2021, 25% of the entire digital workforce will use a virtual employee assistant. Another interesting prediction that Gartner makes is that by 2021 consumer and business spending on VPA speakers will top $3.5 billion in 2021. All the attention that this technology has received so far, isn’t without reason.

Though text-based chatbots have till date been rapidly deployed by a number of organizations, enterprises are willing to take on the next wave of innovation in conversational AI. A number of organizations today are eager to learn about voice-based bots. Some are even using have Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant on the business front.

From scheduling meetings to setting alarms to reading emails aloud to bringing in efficiency and order to the helpdesk to helping make more sound decisions, voice assistants are transforming the enterprise workplace.

Want to know what all a simple voice assistant can do ( and do much better than any human can) for your enterprise workplace? Read on.

voice aI-based knowledge capture

AI-based voice bots can be trained in capturing knowledge from a Subject Matter Expert (SME), transcribing audio, tagging and storing in Knowledge Management systems like SharePoint, Azure, etc.

Enterprises can now leverage an AI bot to tag your documents in ECM accurately, at lower overall costs, and a higher speed. Manually tagging one item costs around $4 to $7 and is highly error-prone. AI bots not only tag your documents but also transform your taxonomy into a living and breathing entity that automatically evolves along with your enterprise.

Learn more: How to Leverage AI to Improve Information Discovery in Your Enterprise

voice-based updates in CRM

If integrated with your CRM systems, voice bots can eliminate the need for manual data entry into CRMs. Consider this scenario. As soon as a salesperson finishes a meeting, he/she can make a phone call to the voice bot and update the meeting notes, opportunity, etc. directly in SFDC, Dynamics CRM or any other CRM system.

Users can have a quick conversation with the CRM voice bot and ask it to update/change the records with the provided specifications. They don’t have to undergo the hassle of logging into their system, navigating throw dashboards, and make changes to the records. Imagine the amount of time saved and increased productivity!

taking notes during the meeting

Let’s consider a simple scenario. You have to take down minutes of the meeting but your laptop battery dies. You’d probably have to take mental notes, half of which you’d not be able to recall later. However, with a voice assistant, you can simply ask out loud to ‘take notes’.

customer support

Voice bots can provide relief from the long IVR menu to customers. They can connect callers to the right department by asking questions like a human secretary. Voice bots transform the live chat experience. They can be integrated with social media apps, emails or live chat windows. Instead of typing lengthy texts, customers can quickly express the problem they’re facing. Transaction times for repetitive tasks like cancellations, booking, and booking can be drastically reduced.

conversational business intelligence

Now, let’s consider a more complex work process. Today, most large businesses store data in their Business Intelligence, LOB and CRM systems. Retrieving and processing information accurately with tons of data to decipher has become manually impossible, making the case for AI voice assistants stronger.

Employers can rely on voice assistants that are integrated with these systems for fetching data and processing information in a matter of seconds.

With intelligent chatbots like Acuvate’s Business Intelligence bot, you can easily access data and analytics within your 3rd party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack, etc. Simply ask “What is my predicted sales” and the bot will respond via text or voice. In this way, decision-makers get all the information instantly with a bot at their service.

time management

One of the basic steps, yet a road less traveled towards productivity, is time management. Most of us find it difficult to properly manage time. Today, voice assistants can help us track our time and utilize it efficiently. And, it couldn’t get any simpler. You can ask your Google Assistant to create time entries by simply saying, “Create a new time entry for 4 hours for Mark Day”. Similarly, attendance bots are also helping employees at the workplace manage their work hours and PTOs better. Be it attendance management, absence management, or shift management, attendance bots help you manage it all easily.

predictive ability

We’ve discussed the capability of AI-enabled voice assistants to quickly provide the right information at the right moment from your data storage systems. Additionally, voice assistants can analyze this data to cleverly predict our future needs or requirements. If your inventory is nearing the finish line, your voice assistant can remind you to restock. If you’ve not turned off your office lights, your voice assistant will let you know. That’s the predictive power of intelligent voice assistants. They’ll utilize data to be of any help that you tune them to be!

wrapping up

Voice is a new innovation in the chatbot ecosystem. Whether it’s a bank that you have called in for resolving your money transfer query or a healthcare service provider who you want to book your next appointment with – bots will be everywhere in the future.

This trend is likely to continue strong, and there will be soon a time when you will no longer need to write full-fledged emails to your HR to explain things like leave policy or payroll. Instead, a voice-based will handle all this for you. As such, employee and customer satisfaction will drastically increase when they get instant responses to all their queries. With bots taking over the workplace, each function will witness an increase in efficiency levels, streamlined workflows, and reduced costs.

As AI continues to fuel productivity, are you joining in the voice and chat technology-enabled bandwagon? Talk to our experts now!

The post How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace appeared first on BotCore.