Thrive Amid Covid-19 with Digital Transformation: Voice Bots
Customers today have one need in common — they want their needs met immediately. Today’s digital-forward society has constructed a “cult of immediacy”. If we are craving burgers at 1 am, we want them immediately. Likewise, customer service? We want a response right NOW. In fact, Smart Tribune revealed a 98% of consumers feel that waiting times via phone or chat are too long, while 72% would rather look for answers online instead of getting help from customer service.
COVID-19 has done everything but quell the need for responsive customer service. Instead, it’s made the average customer more irritable and adamant on receiving top-notch support for their queries! With the global lockdowns forcing consumers to move away from in-person contact and instead, engage in remote communication, it’s become ever more imperative that your business stays competitive by looking into these channels of engagement with clients. This way, you’ll deliver only the best customer support in a time where customer satisfaction is of the essence.
Here is where voice bots come into the picture. Powered by the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, voice bots have been built with the goal of improving business efficiency and revolutionizing customer experience.
What is a voice bot?
By the end of this year, ChatBots Journal expected that 50% of customer enquiries made will be voice-technology based. A voice bot is a conversational agent capable of simulating human conversational patterns to communicate with customers. These bots are trained to understand speech and respond in real-time, in the most human-like manner you can possibly imagine.
Through simulating human conversational patterns to deliver seamless customer service via your business landline or a cloud-based phone system, voice bots aim to streamline your workflow and reduce operational costs in the process.
How can a voice bot help your business thrive in COVID-19?
Deliver Optimal Customer Service
- Always available to both potential and regular customers 24/7
Waiting for an available agent to pick up your call is an exhausting experience. In fact, Arise found that a startling 75% would not even wait two minutes on the phone while 72% of consumers viewed being passed around as terrible customer service! This takes a toll on businesses as frustrated customers hang up and turn elsewhere for help. Using voice bots, both local and international customers can receive instantaneous responses, 24/7. In other words, say goodbye to waiting times! They’ll get round the clock, accurate and personalised answers to their enquiries immediately with no rerouting, no matter the timezone.
- Personalise your customer experience
Speech remains to be one of the most natural ways of communicating for humans, and there is a strong demand for personalised service from customers. With a voice bot’s wide variety of voices and accents plus ability to interpret the customer’s intent, they’re able to have a two-way dialogue, answering enquiries with human-like fluency. This greatly increases the engagement you have with your customer, enabling them to build relationships with your company and become loyal customers.
Boost Business Efficiency
- Avoid repetitive customer enquiries
Ever had to put aside pressing tasks to answer the phone, just for customers on the other end to ask the exact question another customer asked 5 minutes ago? You’ll be relieved to know that voice bots can answer those from now on! They’ll automate responses to answer all your customers’ common enquiries while redirecting more complex questions to the right person who can answer it — even if they’re working remotely. All details and context of the enquiry will be passed on as well. To this extent, your business can thoroughly cover all grounds and you’ll never let any potential clients slip away!
- Reduce internal operational costs
Every year, around 265 billion customer support requests are made, costing businesses a whopping $1.3 trillion to service them. Being able to automate more than 70% of your customer service with voice bots, you get to reduce both your staffing needs and operational costs in the process. Additionally, where live agents can handle only 2 to 3 conversations at a time, voice bots have the capacity to operate without any upper limit. Essentially, an unlimited army of agents. You trim costs while still ensuring stellar customer service — now that’s an all-around win.
- Make data-driven decisions with call analytics
Racing to win customers and market share, we frequently see data-driven companies successfully leaving their less-informed competitors in the dust, year after year. With data allowing for exceptional business predictions and superior decisions to be made, it comes as no surprise that they’re constantly outsmarting and relentlessly driving greater revenue. Your company can too.
A voice bot’s data capturing mechanisms will allow you to acquire key phone call metrics (e.g. Number of minutes recorded and the topic of the call), conduct sentiment analysis of phone calls and automatically transcribe all calls. In this way, you can keep track of your minutes and costs while identifying the most commonly asked questions. From there, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions on how best to expand your bot’s knowledge base. Not to mention, you’ll gain clear insight into your customer persona through conversation analytics; understand just how much of your customer base relies on these automated calls.
Still holding on to that Traditional Landline?
You’re probably not alone if you’ve been using the same business phone system for the last 20 years! Most companies have never upgraded from the first phone system they installed when setting up their office. Even though your dear PBX system has well served all your call forwarding, routing and extension dialling needs over the years, maybe it is time to embrace digital transformation around your customer support.
We live in a world where delivering optimal customer experience is key. In order to stay competitive in this digital age and scale your business, you need to fulfil your customers’ needs for immediate, top-notch customer service and be committed to delivering a consistent brand experience. Remember! If you can’t give the cult of immediacy what it needs, it’ll just ask Siri to find someone else who can.
Find out how we can help you with your digital transformation journey and give your customers the excellent customer service they deserve with 2359 Media’s very own Articulo voice — a voice bot built with the desire to ensure complete customer satisfaction.
Written by: Isabelle Tan and Kaiting Hsu
