Conversational AI for CX
May 26, 2022 • 4 minute read

When it comes to CX, Conversational AI is the only game in town

Brands shouldn’t gamble when it comes to customer experience. Just one bad experience can affect customer loyalty and your bottom line. In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.

So when it comes to technology that automates CX, you should place your bets on Conversational AI for the win. Why? Brands who implement Conversational AI applications like virtual agents can deliver exceptional customer experience with added benefits like decreased operational costs, improved CSAT, and increased agent productivity. Conversational AI applications can also help you and your business to:

Scale quickly

Conversational AI applications like virtual agents can scale immediately to handle increases in volume due to seasonal peaks or unforeseen circumstances while delivering the same consistent experience. Even if live agents are unavailable, virtual agents can handle unlimited conversations. This eliminates hold times for customers and lets them take care of what they need to, despite the situation.

Optimize your labor force

Agent churn has always been a challenge for contact centers, especially with associated hiring and training costs. And now with the current labor shortage, this issue is compounded since there is literally no one to hire. Many contact centers are offering perks and pay increases to keep their current agents. However, this strategy is not sustainable and is certainly costly. Therefore investing in technology like virtual agents can help you optimize the labor you do have while not sacrificing customer experience. By offering customers more self-service options via the virtual agent, the live agents you have can be utilized where they are most needed and can make the most impact.

Virtual agents can also play a big role in a brand’s business continuity planning (BCP). For example, during the pandemic many agents could not physically be at the contact center and then had to transition to a work from home model. Many brands turned to virtual agents to keep their business running smoothly despite these challenges and were able to support their customers with little interruption during these times.

Address current needs and long term strategy

When choosing technologies, it’s always better to think in the long-term and not just about short-term wins. Make sure your technology choice can scale across channels and easily respond to new and changing business goals. Once implemented in one channel, virtual agents can also scale easily across channels so as your business goals and customer preferences change, your CX automation can too.

Make things easier for your customers

In a recent Interactions survey, 65% of customers say that they are comfortable speaking with an AI-powered customer service solution, as long as “I can speak normally and get my problem resolved quickly.” Virtual agents can also help eliminate some of the biggest pain points that customers face today. In the same survey, customers indicated if they could change one thing about their customer service interactions it would be: wait times would be eliminated (23%), the interactions would be more efficient (20%), and they would be able to contact a business outside of normal business hours to get things done (18%).

Conversational AI applications bring many benefits to your business, agents, and customers, but not all applications are created equal. Envision the end experience you want to deliver and make sure your technology choice can support that vision. Place your bets on an experienced vendor who not only has customer care and industry expertise, but also design expertise. This combination will help you deliver the best customer experience possible, instead of one that is clunky and robotic.

 

Want to learn more? Let’s talk.