Effective customer service is a key component of any successful business strategy. To underline this, statistics show that 83% of customers stay loyal to brands that quickly respond to their complaints.
2-way SMS service and human agents were some traditional customer service options brands used.
Voice bot is an AI-enabled software that receives and responds to customer inquiries through speech. With speech being a more hands-free option and faster communication, voice assistants have become handy tools to automate customer support services.
If you want to integrate a customer service voice bot for your customer support service, this guide is for you. It will teach you more about voice bots, how it works, and their benefits and challenges.
If you use a smartphone, you must have encountered voice assistants like Siri on iPhones or Google Assistant on Android phones. These assistants take voice input from users to respond to a query.
In the same way, voice bots are communication tools that combine artificial intelligence with Natural Language Processing to receive, analyze and respond to oral complaints by a user. NLP is the ability of software to understand human language as a person would.
This makes it possible for customers to speak to enterprise websites and receive useful responses. A good example is Starbucks, which allows customers to order their favorite coffee with just their voice.
This technology became more common following the high volume of callers into business customer care centers following the Covid-19 pandemic. Many customers were frustrated with having to wait a long time to speak with customer support staff.
Voice bots cut waiting times and offer a more personalized service for each customer.
Voice bots are composed of the following:
Use cases of voice bots in the industries include
Advancements in technology are set to drive further adoption of Voice-enhanced assistants by brands. The voice recognition market was worth about $12 billion in 2023 and is set to reach about $50 billion by 2029.
It is also projected that by 2024 there will be about 8.4 billion digital assistants in devices worldwide. These figures show how common this technology will be soon.
Some of the innovations in voice bot technology to look out for include the following.
In the future, we will see voice chatbots becoming smarter by integrating Neural voice. It is a technology that enables the bot to imitate the voice of humans.
Custom Neural voice technology removes the robotic voice of AI and gives callers in a call center the experience of talking to a real person.
Further advances will see voice bots becoming more emotional in response. Instead of a bland-sounding voice, AI voice bots will be more empathetic to the challenges faced by the caller.
Verification through voice prints is one of the top 2FA methods used by companies. Fraudsters sometimes call customer care support of financial services using hijacked credentials to gain access to a customer’s account.
A future potential of voice bots will be embedding voice prints into conversational AIs. The real customer is quickly identified through his voice. A fraudster will be logged out of the system even if he presents the right credentials. M
Another advantage of this is that it significantly shortens the call duration. Voice biometrics will eliminate the preliminary security questions which customers must answer.
Another prediction for the future of chatbots is that they will become more intelligent than we have now.
Using Neural network technology that imitates a human brain and deep learning technologies, voice bots are set to be more proactive in providing solutions.
Voice Bots will be able to understand the intention of the customer and give the best answer.
Without a doubt, using conversational AI for your business needs guarantees better output. In particular, AI-powered voice assistants have positively impacted customer support services.
A human agent can only attend to one caller at a time. This is not the case with customer support bots. It is unlimited in the number of calls it can handle. If you have a business with a worldwide audience, voice bots allow you to scale your customer support seamlessly.
An upside to the efficiency of voice bots is reduced costs to the company. Since it can handle more callers, you don’t have to hire many customer care representatives.
According to Gartner, conversational AI tools will reduce customer support agents’ cos ts by u p to $80 billion by 2026.
A voice bot frees you up for other tasks as it can handle routine inquiries without help.
A superior customer experience is crucial for maintaining customer loyalty. According to a survey conducted by Statista, 94% of customers cite a positive customer experience as a crucial factor that encourages them to make repeat purchases.
Voice bots emulate human interaction by engaging in interactive dialogues with customers, enhancing their user-friendliness. Moreover, voice bots significantly decrease wait times for customer service calls. Callers to your call center are instantly met with a response to their complaints or guidance on product navigation.
Voice bots work for a larger demographic of users. Visually impaired people who can’t type with their hands can use voice bots to resolve their complaints. Unlike chatbots, voice bots are easier for disabled and older people.
Voice bots, over time, study a customer and automatically provide answers or recommendations using the past purchasing experience of such customers. In this sense, personalization is crucial to building customer trust.
Another important benefit of using voice bots for customer support is that the technology knows when to hand the customer over to a human agent. Even though these systems are highly intelligent, they are limited to the information they are trained on.
AI-based voice bots are best used in providing simple answers to uncomplicated questions. Once the inquiry becomes too complex or confusing, the system puts the customer through to a human agent. The advantage is that instead of supplying misleading responses, it intelligently calls a human agent for help.
A key benefit you enjoy with a call center bot is its availability. Customer queries can come at any time of the day, especially from customers in different time zones. A conversational tool like a Voice bot keeps your business open to attend to customer issues 24/7.
Voice bots offer stronger security features than other traditional customer support options. Voice one-time passwords are already a common authentication method used by companies. Using voice bots helps you better protect your customer details and prevent unauthorized access to your system.
As good as a voice bot is, it is riddled with several challenges affecting its implementation.
Let us see some of these problems.
Interactive voice response bot technology is still a growing field that affects the deployment of voice bots. Pre-trained conversational AI may recognize speech in a certain tone or accent.
For instance, non-native speakers of a language may need help using this technology due to the possibility of not recognizing their speech. Improper recognition of speech affects the quality of the response supplied to the customer.
In solving this problem, voice bots need to be trained to recognize a variety of tones and accents in a particular language.
Statistics show that people do not trust conversational AI to make calls for them. This skepticism from customers makes implementing a voice bot for customer support an arduous task for brands.
One solution to this challenge is to continue educating customers about conversational AI’s benefits. The speed and ease of use are selling points you can use to convince more clients to use them.
For companies using voice-based conversational AI, it is a faster way to attend to customers. However, customers may not find speaking to a machine appealing. Voice bots are as unemotional as robots.
They lack an important human touch, such as empathy or the ability to offer heartfelt apologies. The company may be unable to garner useful feedback from customers who find the voice bot too linear and rigid.
One way to solve this challenge is to make the voice more human by using the voice pattern of a real person.
Let’s quickly see some real-world examples of bot customer service.
This voice bot has been specifically designed to serve the hospitality industry and is utilized by prominent hotel chains, including Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. The AI voice bot is expertly crafted to comprehend guest complaints more effectively, thus alleviating the workload of front desk receptionists.
A distinguishing feature of this system, known as EVA, is its use of a real human voice, as opposed to a robotic one, enhancing the system’s naturalness. Furthermore, EVA is a multilingual system capable of understanding various languages, facilitating more interactive conversations with customers.
Using the EVA voice bot, customers can effortlessly reserve hotel rooms or dinner tables, request directions, and access other relevant information.
Erica is Bank of America’s interactive voice response software. It is a chatbot and a voice bot used by millions of customers daily. It helps customers with their financial transactions and to answer routine questions. The voice bot connects the customer to an expert for more complex transactions like mortgages or investment portfolios for more guidance.
Since its launch in 2018, Erica has cut the bank’s customer support costs and now responds quickly to customer complaints.
Customer support bots help to handle repetitive customer inquiries freeing staff to handle more complex issues. They also provide more personalization for the customer, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The rapid growth of voice bot technology will soon eliminate the need for human customer agents. The future of customer service is automation powered by AI-conversational technologies. It would help if you considered a tried and trusted technical partner to get the best out of conversational AI to scale your customer support service. BSG — a global communications platform , is the partner you need. We help you with your voice bot needs and are a bulk SMS provider providing solutions for effective SMS marketing.
The telecommunications industry continuously evolves to meet user needs. For BSG, staying at the forefront
Anna Bondartenko is a Business Development Manager at BSG company, a global telecommunications platform and
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