Guest post by Kavya Hemachander.
“Ok Google, find coffee shops near me.”
Getting answers has become simpler and faster. Say goodbye to commands and codes; natural language is all you need to communicate with an artificial intelligence (AI) device. Powered by conversational AI, this component of digital transformation technology is creating breathtaking changes and redefining the customer interaction journey.
Why opt for Conversational AI?
Customers today are smarter and have less tolerance for generic messages. Thanks to the advent of AI technology, smarter machines are leading to smarter conversations. They can collect feedback in ways that don’t damage the customer experience.
With conversational AI, enterprises can interact with their customers in a timely manner across all channels using the most intuitive interface available—natural language. This not only increases engagement, but also provides a sense of satisfaction that heightens trust and reliability in your services.
By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017. per Gartner
How does it work?
As a technology that supports two-way interactions, conversational AI relies heavily on data to keep the conversation going. This data primarily consists of content and context.
While content contains the information exchanged, context anticipates the user’s needs and also takes into account the ambiguity and interruption while engaging a customer. Furthermore, these five core elements effectively assess every query and the potential to which it can be answered. They include:
- Utterance: the action
- Intent: the purpose
- Entity: the category
- Dialog: how the AI processes information
- Nodes: caters to the flow of the conversation
To understand it better, consider this example: a user logs in and asks for a “career opportunity” at a desired “location.” The conversational AI software recognizes and records the following:
- Utterance: Building a conversation on a topic
- Intent: Career opportunity
- Entity: Careers/Job
- Dialog: Does the software give a link to the career page? Can the software collect the required details? Does the software reply saying no opportunities are available?
- Nodes: Where is the information stored? What is the loop from there? Does the AI ask any other questions like work experience, areas of expertise, etc.?
Easy and Effortless: Customers can interact with an enterprise through any channel, anytime, using their own words. The software is digitized to recognize a customer’s need and respond to their request in a human-like manner, thereby making it an easy and effortless task.
Personalized: As intelligent software systems, they collect answers and information provided during the engagement. The systems then identify and comprehend customer likes and preferences to give them better results.
Consistent: Regardless of how a customer phrases their question, they are given a consistent, accurate response over every channel. These systems can also access back-end systems or third-party databases to provide a comprehensive answer.
Creating better CX with Conversational AI
Voice is the next big thing in the communication space. It’s creating opportunities in the market by revolutionizing how customers find information, shop, and engage with enterprises.
The shift from typing to talking makes sense because it’s convenient and much faster. Using conversational AI software can help enterprises answer the million-dollar question: can conversational AI improve customer experience?