Conversational AI For Customer Service: Redefining Support for Modern Age

Conversational AI products are taking customer service and user experience to a realm never seen before in the contact center industry. Its predecessors, clunky Interactive Voice Response (IVRs), have finally been replaced by a virtual assistant that makes sense of what you want and provides the best possible answers. 

Before we dive deep into the subject, it’s vital to note that conversational AI technologies refer to a combination of multiple AI processes working together to identify intent and provide accurate answers. Given the focus on quality results and conversations, customers can solve problems on their own, skipping hold times and leading to a more positive experience overall. 

This new customer service era, where AI solutions work with human agents, redefines customer service on multiple levels. This entry will discuss how this is happening and how you may take advantage of it for your business. 

Conversational AI: Understanding the Basics

While each platform and provider may be different, a few basic processes occur behind conversational AI solutions for customer service. 

1. Input Generation and Reception: Customers interact with the virtual assistant via voice or text. Advanced solutions can also receive these inputs via phone, chat, or apps.
2. Input Synthesis and Analysis: Natural Language Processing (NLP) breaks down the user's input into a format machines can understand. It then identifies the intent and relevant data needed to provide a helpful answer.
3. Response Generation: Leveraging Machine Learning (ML) technology and pre-trained datasets unique to the business, the conversational AI platform generates a helpful response for the customer. Unlike its predecessors, the response provided has a contextual layer and considers the conversation's nuances.
4. Response Delivery: Finally, the customer receives an appropriate answer. This process repeats until the customer's concern is fully addressed. If conversational AI can't solve a particular query, it can also act as a bridge, connecting the customer with the best-suited human agent to handle their interaction. 

How Businesses are Using Conversational AI in Customer Service

The use cases for conversational AI platforms are as diverse as the businesses themselves. However, we have found some usage patterns worth exploring when implementing conversational AI into your business. 

24/7 Uninterrupted Customer Support

Having permanent support for your customers that helps them solve their problems sets you apart from your competitors. While many have some form of self-service experience, it is often based on limited decision trees that lead to frustration rather than answers. Conversational AI becomes a new tool that allows enterprises to provide answers anytime and anywhere while also having a higher capacity to identify context and transfer the call to a human agent if need be.

Personalized Customer Interactions

Conversational AI combines a deep understanding of context from each interaction with robust data sets. This mix allows companies to build precise and personalized journeys for multiple segments and journeys to provide the best possible answer for every customer. 

Proactive Engagement With Customers

Beyond providing solutions, conversational AI can also act as a proactive tool that informs customers of potential issues, promotions, or updates. It can even become an automated process that acts in tandem with internal processes for your organization, simplifying your CX and customer success teams' workloads. 

Predictive Interactions

Given the number of AI technologies that interact with each other to ensure conversational AI works, the platform can identify patterns faster than an analyst would. This feature becomes an internal and external advantage for organizations by helping business units make sense of customer data and proactively tackle potential challenges based on new trending data patterns.  

Omnichannel Support

A common issue with customer service is that the service channels don’t communicate with each other. While that may not represent a problem for the business, customers face a frustrating experience if they have to explain why they reach out across mediums. With conversational AI platforms, users can begin the conversation via sms, continue on the phone, and end in a platform chat without losing track of their historical updates. 

Taking the Self-Service Options to a Whole New Level

Not all self-service options are the same. While some enterprises have set up outdated systems to help customers who do not identify context nor provide proactive and thoughtful answers, conversational AI actually focuses on solving problems first. Of course, not all queries can be solved without human assistance, but for routine interactions, a robust conversational AI platform becomes a source of answers (not just a call containment tool).

For Sentiment Analysis in Real-time

User interactions vary depending on the reason behind them. With a conversational AI platform, rather than providing a limited set of standardized answers, companies can quickly identify the emotional signals behind each interaction, prioritizing certain conversations and quickly transferring them to a human agent if needed. 

Intelligent Routing and Prioritization

Given that conversational AI tools can understand the context behind each interaction, routing, and prioritization have become more effective business processes. Customers can either solve the problem themselves or get routed to the right service representative who can help them with their queries. 

Data Collection Offering Valuable Insights to the Executives

Internally, conversational AI is also a powerful tool that provides information to help decision makers improve the quality of their decisions. For example, imagine a scenario where a particular product receives more than 50% of customer complaints; in that case, you could allocate more resources to that issue or flag it to the correct internal team to prioritize it.

Benefits of Conversational AI

The number of benefits conversational AI brings to organizations is varied and nuanced, given the nature of every business. Having said that, if we had to list the top five benefits of using conversational AI in customer service, they would be: 

1. Helpful answers for your customers at all times: Instead of hold times or repetitive machines that do not help, conversational AI assists customers in solving their own problems or connecting with the right representatives if needed.
2. Better data analysis and decision-making: A fully integrated data management system using AI can help you make better sense of information to improve customer retention, satisfaction, and decision-making across your business.
3. Operational efficiency: Rather than having a large number of customer service specialists, you can focus on training top performers, reducing costs, and helping more customers faster.
4. Meaningful work for your customer service team: At the same time, having a customer service team that does meaningful rather than repetitive tasks improves your overall internal satisfaction and employee retention metrics.
5. Improved brand perception: Getting answers from your favorite brands in seconds makes you stand out across your industry. Your enterprise wants to be recognized as a helpful partner rather than a difficult service or product provider.

Top Industries Being Transformed with Conversational AI

While most industries can benefit from introducing conversational AI into their businesses, a few are rapidly evolving and worth highlighting.

• Finance: Banks and financial institutions worldwide are starting to deploy conversational AI solutions to be more present and helpful to customers with their everyday banking needs. 
• Healthcare: By improving patient care with reminders, booking appointments, scheduling exams, etc., the healthcare industry is changing with conversational AI. 
• Insurance: Insurance firms are also rapidly evolving, allowing customers to file claims much faster with conversational AI. This leads to better solutions, less stress, and a better overall customer experience. 
• Retail: Help customers track orders, receive updates, receive promotions, and more to improve CX, loyalty,  and overall brand perception. 
• Telecommunications: Whether your customers need to update their information, report an issue, change their billing plan, or do anything else, a conversational AI platform can help businesses contain and solve up to 57% of their calls.
• Travel: Businesses in the travel industry can have a more present and helpful interaction with their customers by using conversational language to remind them of trip updates, help them find flights, or even provide quick solutions to routine problems. 

How to Choose the Best Conversational AI

Every business has unique challenges when it comes to implementing conversational AI. However, to simplify the process, here are the most important aspects to take into consideration before choosing a provider:

1. Do you want a small solution to test the waters? If so, a less robust solution built by young entrepreneurs might be perfect for you. This solution is less expensive, but it still requires a lot of resources and effort.
2. Do you want a complete service solution? If so, a more corporate partner such as Mosaicx would be ideal. We provide end-to-end support, a consultative approach, and decades of experience to bring solutions that work for enterprises that want to avoid risks and ensure customer satisfaction at all times.

Kickstart Your Conversational AI Journey Today With Mosaicx

We partner with enterprises looking to start their AI journey and redesign support for their customers. Our robust conversational AI platform, strategic experience, and focus on service are ideal for mature organizations with complex interdepartmental systems and requirements.

Book a demo of our scalable AI-driven voice and messaging platform and learn how to increase revenue and loyalty through empowering conversations with every customer.