When you think of conversational AI, do you think of traditional chatbots? Then you’re missing the most important aspect. Automating phone support has a much bigger impact. That’s why it’s one of the hottest topics for businesses looking to improve their customer service. It’s easy. You can create your own automated voice calls, tailored to your business and customers.
Of course, it is up to you to decide which type of conversational AI is better for you and your business. However, at Parloa, we recommend that anyone who is interested: Start with voice automation! This is much more efficient and will help you get started quickly. Later, you can derive chat support from it and refine it further. Why exactly voice automation is so much more efficient, especially in the beginning, you will learn in this article.
Chat vs. Phone – This is why phone automation has the biggest initial impact.
You might think that a chatbot can be trained quickly – especially since you’re only working at the text level and the voice component doesn’t matter. While this is true, it doesn’t have as much of an impact on the implementation as you might think. Regardless of how high the call volume is compared to chat requests, automated voice calls save your human agents more time.
The reason is simple: phone calls are handled by agents 1:1 and one at a time. Your agents cannot talk to multiple customers at the same time. However, individual agents can handle up to 10 chats simultaneously. This is mainly due to the delayed response time that does not exist in a phone call.
Unlike a human, Conversational AI can handle multiple phone calls simultaneously. It’s also smart enough to answer more than just standard questions. It can also perform repetitive tasks, such as changing an address or other data in the system. It only routes callers to the right contact center agent for more complex inquiries. In this way, it relieves agents of more work in one fell swoop and saves them time. Now they can focus on the really interesting tasks and cases.
Ultimately, this affects your return on investment. With speech automation, you can handle far more customer inquiries than you could without it. This is especially helpful as call volumes increase.
Design your chatbot while training voice automation on the fly
Start with automated voicemail and get 2 for 1. Before Conversational AI is ready to go, you need to train it and teach it responses-using text. The dialog you create for training should sound as natural as possible when spoken. This is the only way to achieve a pleasant phone call with high customer value.
Best of all: You can use these dialogs to train your automated chat. Vice versa often works less good. Many things sound good when read, but not when spoken. That’s why it’s better to start with the voice version and use the same content for the chat format.
Voice AI can be trained faster
The more input your conversational AI receives, the faster you can train it – this is true for both chat and voice. In our experience, call volumes are often higher, so you can gather more input in less time. The artificial intelligence learns with every call. Based on the greater variety of information it collects and analyzes, it will learn things like:
- The most common requests.
- What matters most to your customers.
- How to eliminate errors and minimize the error rate.
As your conversational AI improves, it becomes increasingly capable of performing repetitive tasks, reducing the need for human intervention.
Automating the phone to deliver the best customer experience
Basically, Parloa wants to help you provide an optimal experience to your customers. With a telephone support service, you are much closer to your customers than you are with chats, e-mails or instant messengers. After all, spoken language is the most natural and intuitive way to communicate.
However, the underlying technology of automated phone support is much more complex than chat. Customer concerns must first be converted from speech to text, then recognized and processed, and then converted back from text to speech. On top of that, the sound of the speech must be as natural as possible, especially in the case of telephone support.
At Parloa, we use highly specialized NLP technology and Microsoft Cognitive Services. Our conversational AI recognizes the caller’s requests and can respond in a natural way. This makes the customer support call not only efficient, but also provides an optimal customer experience.
Want to learn more about chat vs. voice automation? Contact us and we’ll explain how Parloa can help you improve your customer service with customized conversational AI.
