Businesses and contact centres have long employed call handling technology like IVRs, diallers and queue technology to more efficiently, faster and with better customer satisfaction manage customer calls. In this article, we explain how voicebot technology, which uses AI, text to speech and automated speech recognition to understand human voice utterances and respond in a conversational, human-like manner, can take your customer service to the next level, delivering massive improvements across a range of key metrics.
Human-like, Versatile Assistance
Voicebots can handle any number of random, unrelated questions, unlike a an IVR which guides you down a single-context path from which it is difficult to return. This makes them very versatile in customer service as they can quickly switch from a finance related interaction to a sales question about a new product without asking the caller to wait or to be transferred. Additionally, by working over traditional telephony, they, unlike chatbots which require the person to be online, offer you a chance to reach out to less tech-savvy users.
Reduce Operational Cost
A high quality voicebot costs around 3-5p per minute, which equates to around £2.00 per hour of connected time regardless of the time of day. Each voicebot can handle multiple, simultaneous interactions. The equivalent cost for a human team to cover a 24 x 7 time period would probably be 10 times that number. The voicebot can reduce existing costs by providing a cheaper way to service clients and it can also make it commercially viable to move to 24 X 7 hours.
Provide 24x7 Service
Extending your customer service hours will give you a competitive edge. When your customers become familiar with what your voicebot can offer they will choose a time that better suits them to fulfil their requirements.
Opening your sales door 24x7 will increase sales and customer engagement.
Security
A voicebot interaction is inherently secure because there are no humans involved other that the person talking to the bot. There is no visible code or web interface for hackers to focus on and the voicebot server can be secured with firewalls, encryption and a good set of policies and procedures such as ISO27001 or PCIDSS. Utterances can be saved in a secure environment like Amazon AWS.
Real-time CX Data
Voicebot and chatbots unsurprisingly generate vast amounts of textual utterance data which is very useful when monitoring customer experience. Unlike telephone call recordings or traditional IVR interactions where textual data is very hard to extract, voicebots generate text data which is very easy to use for analysis and behaviour predictions. The more the voicebot is used the more data is produced which ultimately helps with refining itself and improving customer service.
Outbound Campaign Pre-Qualification
Voicebots can be used as an outbound calling agent and work very effectively in conjunction with an automated dialler. The dialler instantly connects the voicebot once the called party answers their phone and can perform a range of suitable tasks such as debt collection, appointment reminders, important notifications, surveys sales lead generation. Voicebots can be used to pre-qualify sales calls to reduce wasted agent time. The voicebot can ask a series of simple qualifying questions without tying up an agent.
Easily Handle a Change of Appointment
Appointment reminders are an important tool in helping your business to ensure arrangements go smoothly; however, present technology is limited, resulting in customers needing to still have to make a call in to your business to make changes. A voicebot can go beyond simple appointment reminders, enabling your customers to smoothly change the appointment time and conveniently look up additional information without tying up staff resources.
COVID-19 Services
Being deployed in the cloud is an advantage for a voicebot in the context of disaster recovery. Once all staff are home working, they may not be able to perform certain tasks securely such as payment processing or changing personal data. Furthermore, they may not be able to deal with surges in calls as well. By delegating more tasks to the voicebot, you can take pressure off the homeworkers and maintain a good level of customer satisfaction. The voicebot can be loaded with FAQs relevant to COVID-19 so that customers can be kept informed 24 x 7.
Easy Administration
IVRs are often speech enabled and, from a caller’s perspective, can appear similar to AI voicebots; however, behind the scenes, IVRs require complex coding and engineering skills, meaning frequent changes to utterances/prompts are disruptive and expensive. Ai voicebots on the other hand are compiled from a series of natural utterances which can be easily saved in a simple web interface. There is no coding and utterances are saved in the same format as they are spoken, enabling the voicebot's 'brain' to be trained easily and frequently by non-skilled staff.
Hostcomm’s Voicebot Solution
Hostcomm is a Google Cloud Partner. It’s voicebot solution integrates Google Contact Centre AI with Hostcomm’s telephony gateway to optimize performance over telephony. It also offers easy integration with hosted diallers and with a range of CRMs and other key business software solutions.
