Are You A Conversational Enterprise, yet?
Imagine if all the interactions with your company — whether business-to-customer, business-to-business or employee-to-employee — took place at the speed of an “ask.”
Imagine if time-sensitive tasks within your organization were completed twice as fast using automated conversations that were independent of human input.
How powerful would your enterprise be if it operated seamlessly at the intersection of people, knowledge, and processes using automated conversations at scale?
That’s the promise that comes with becoming a Conversational Enterprise.
What Is a Conversational Enterprise?
Enterprises are complex and diverse entities made up of an array of people, processes, functions, capabilities and cultures. All of these elements operate within their own sets of protocols, creating an intricate network of relationships and interactions.
It’s this complexity that can make enterprise organizations seem impersonal, unresponsive and siloed.
Conversational AI can change this dynamic by providing personalized, simultaneous, contextual and automated conversations with customers, employees and stakeholders across business processes, time zones and geographies.
The term “Conversational AI” covers a wide range of artificially-intelligent conversational bots that use natural-language processing. Combined with machine learning and analytics, this technology creates a neural conversational mesh around the organization — a net that the organization can tap into in real time, transforming the way the business is run and scaled.
When an organization integrates Conversational AI into their workflows, they fundamentally change how they operate. They begin to become more customer-centric, their operational efficiency improves, and as a result their revenue grows with greater speed and predictability.
We’ve dubbed these pioneering organizations Conversational Enterprises.
Driving customer centricity, operational efficiency and revenue growth through Conversational AI is the cornerstone of a Conversational Enterprise.
Let’s dive deeper into the three main benefits of becoming a Conversational Enterprise …
3 Core Benefits of Becoming a Conversational Enterprise
Though there are many benefits to becoming a Conversational Enterprise, we’ve found that they generally fall under three distinct categories:
- Enhanced customer centricity
Your customers are not just numbers in your CRM. They are people with hearts, minds and spirits.
Your customers also have an increasing digital footprint.
To be truly customer-centric today, you must create value at the intersection of rising expectations, needs and wants — while remaining contextually relevant throughout the customer lifecycle and providing superior customer experience. It’s a tall order, but Conversational Enterprises are more equipped to fill it.
AI gives Conversational Enterprises the ability to look into every single interaction with every customer at every touchpoint, and turn this insight into a memorable experience for the customer.
This meaningful customer insight derived at scale gives the enterprise the power to actually anticipate customer needs — providing what the customer needs before they even know to ask for it.
The result is that customers become loyal fans who champion the brand and increase sales through word-of-mouth.
2. Improved operational efficiency
Using AI, Conversational Enterprises remove the drudgery of repetitive tasks and automate manual processes for their employees. They also integrate workflows and connect different business groups across the organization.
By embedding intelligent assistants into front-end and back-end systems, silos are broken. Processes, systems and groups finally begin “talking” to each other.
This enables Conversational Enterprises to quickly evaluate millions of possibilities and find the best solutions using machine learning. They more easily streamline processes to operate at peak efficiency.
The result is that employees are freed up from performing manual, repetitive tasks. They can focus their time and energy on more important, critical and creative tasks such as growth or product development — and a more motivated, engaged workforce emerges.
3. Accelerated revenue growth
Conversational Enterprises drive revenue by creating a superior customer experience and improving customer engagement.
They do this in part by using text and voice interfaces to simplify customer interactions. They also deploy user-intelligent AI assistants to deliver human-like customer engagement round-the-clock. Consequently, customers of a Conversational Enterprise are never without high quality, personalized support.
But these aren’t the only ways Conversational Enterprises grow their bottom line. The real value of Conversational AI is in better understanding customers. The Conversational Enterprise discovers the true motivations of their customers by interpreting the conversational data collected.
The results are more tailored, personalized offerings, and dramatically better products and services over time. When coupled with greater operational efficiency, Conversational Enterprises are primed for growth and success now and well into the future.
How Conversational Enterprises Create Humanized Experiences
We’ve touched on the three major benefits of embracing AI to become a Conversational Enterprise, and some of the strategies driving those benefits. Now let’s look at specific tactics and mindsets that are enabling these enterprises to connect with customers better on a humanized level.
Global real-time access.
Integrating customer-facing and internally focused systems with Conversational AI platforms allows employees and customers real-time access to any information or transaction from any corner of the globe through automated conversations.
Always on. Always evolving.
Intelligent assistants never sleep, tire or take a day off. Conversational Enterprises use deep learning to continuously grow and evolve with every interaction, ensuring the conversations they have are always contextually accurate and relevant.
Personalised customer experience at scale.
Intelligent assistants enable the Conversational Enterprise to create personalized customer experiences at scale. Deployed across an array of devices and channels, AI technology remembers the user’s preference, so every automated response is tailored to the user’s feedback, personal choice and interaction history. Customers feel heard and cared for — without raising the cost of additional customer support personnel.
Fulfilment guaranteed.
Conversational Enterprises take self-service to the next level, fulfilling all transactions using natural language interaction. These interactions build on customer behavior, previous interactions, query resolutions, personal preferences, and buying habits. This allows the enterprise to cross-sell and upsell more effectively, and ensure customer satisfaction through every step of the buying journey.
Ensuring memorable experiences.
By providing all their stakeholders spontaneously blended informational and transactional experiences through contextual, intelligent interactions, Conversational Enterprises ensure every interaction is a memorable and delightful one.
In conclusion
Your enterprise may already be experimenting with Conversational AI interfaces — but likely there is a lot more you could be doing to harness this technology. The difference between an enterprise that is toying with rudimentary AI solutions and a truly Conversational Enterprise is how it has transformed several facets of its business.
To break away from your competition will mean transitioning into this new way of doing business as early as possible.
Not sure where you are — really — on the road to becoming a Conversational Enterprise? Take the free assessment.
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Questions? Comments? Leave them here or write to me at shridhar@senseforth.com. Thank you.
