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Today, Conversational AI and voice assistants have highly influenced our lives and are gaining high traction among all business sectors and organizations. It is undoubtedly becoming an essential part of our daily lives – from web searching with the use of digital assistants to providing us with personalized guidance, all the way to making payments at the end – it provides users with an experience akin to human interaction.
This technology has highly augmented the market in recent years and is expected to continue doing so going forward, transforming our lives and how we work. According to McKinsey Global Institute, it is estimated that 50% of today’s work activities can be automated by 2055. Voice AI is exponentially enabling companies and businesses to solve their long-standing communication issues majorly in terms of customer experience and services.
What is Voice bot?
Voice bots are conversational AI bots that examine the natural language and interpret the need of the customer. In other words, these are voice-enabled bots that exchange dialogues with customers with the help of an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. These bots are specifically trained to interact with humans and accept the commands in oral form.
Voice conversation AI will help expedite resolutions for customers’ queries in no time, ultimately ensuring that voice bots play the role of customer advisory, thereby ensuring agents can focus on more critical and bigger expertise tasks.
Customer Care Challenges in eCommerce
COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down and has impacted almost all areas of business. It has immensely changed the working habits of millions of people around the globe. In many organizations, the contact centre was highly impacted – receiving an extensive number of requests in a very short span with fewer resources thanks to widespread lockdown measures. Therefore, 2020 was marked as the most challenging year for contact centres.
In the Post-COVID world, a lot of small businesses may be under pressure and stress since customers will immensely rely on digital customer support channels as a new normal approach. Today, customers are spending a significant portion of their time on online shopping. Many organizations are moving towards internet-based sales to ensure they can experience multi-fold growth by cashing in on the work-from-home trend. As per a study by Kwantics (software development organization) before COVID-19, the US had online sales estimates of $600 billion, and this number is growing exponentially – projected to touch $6.5 trillion in 2023.
Voice bots in the eCommerce Customer Care Space
Some studies estimate that 39% of voice interactions in the eCommerce Contact Centres will be fully automated in the next couple of years. The following factors contribute to the growing demand for voice automation in this space:
- It helps in expanding inbound customer care, sales and marketing & customer care support at a fraction of the human cost of expansion
- Voice bots allow for cross- and up-selling of products or services, and make gathering surveys and feedback easier
- The technology allows companies to provide a seamless customer experience by boosting two-way communication and allows agents to manage tasks efficiently without any physical involvement.
The fast adoption of voice bots in the eCommerce space can also be attributed to the following factors:
- Customers have easy and smooth accessibility to information
- Customers are provided with quick and relevant answers on queries like return/exchange policies, terms and conditions etc. quickly, which leads to a frictionless shopping experience
- Customers find listening more interesting and engaging than reading the same information as text on websites
- Old-age and people who are visually challenged or with some other disability prefer voice automation in comparison to chat
- Industries like e-commerce require customer insights to boost sales. Voicebot provides seamless customer experience and helps the industry in gaining useful real-time customer insights
Customer habits and trends are changing rapidly, and this impacts their buying decisions accordingly. Voice assistants that cater to customers by tracking buying patterns and behaviours are best placed to offer personalized product recommendations that are close to the customers’ needs. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and help reach higher sales targets.
In terms of medium, the speed of response and efficiency of resolution is one metric where it has been found that voice bots are beating human agents, even chatbots. In contact centre services, voice bots are efficient at handling interruptions and generating potential leads for further sales.
IGT’s intelligent automation practice offers voice bot capabilities as part of its conversational AI solution. Currently, IGT is deploying voicebots at the contact centre of a leading global online travel agency and a large global hospitality group. Automating voice operations by introducing voice bots as an alternative to IVR has allowed IGT to help clients improve efficiencies by:
- Achieving up to 35% containment of volumes within the BOT
- Improving CSAT by 15% and NPS by 25%, and
- Providing opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
Author:
Sheetal Arora is a Business Analyst in RPA at IGT Solutions. She has 2 years of experience in the IT industry and has rich work experience in Travel and Hospitality domain. Sheetal has obtained various certifications in UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Outside work, Sheetal is passionate about dancing and travelling. She also loves fashion and styling. She can be reached at Sheetal.Arora@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.