Automation and Conversational AI - The Future of Virtual Assistants

The idea of using technology to replicate human conversations isn’t a new concept - witness the booming market of chatbots, Interactive Voice Response (IVR)s or virtual assistants like Apple's Suri or Amazon's Alexis. 

Indeed, Gartner has forecast that this year virtual customer assistant or chatbot technology will be integrated into 25% of customer service and support operations – up from less than 2% in 2017.

But until recently, the technology has often been constrained to the specific solutions it is contained within.

That’s all changing.

We’ve seen two big shifts in recent months, both of which point to a future where conversational AI and automation join forces to provide real benefits for businesses. 

From solutions to capabilities

The first shift is the move to talking about the technologies not in terms of solutions, such as chatbots or IVR, but instead as a capability: a conversational AI platform, underpinned by natural language processing (NLP) and text to speech and vice versa, but also encompassing other abilities including intent capabilities and conversational flows.

The big difference here is that we’re talking about a channel-agnostic capability. You’re now creating a centre of excellence (COE) or a single source of truth for your customer service or internal operational conversations, and you’re then able to direct those into whatever channel is most relevant for your business or service, be it Facebook Messenger, a chatbot, a website messenger or IVR.

You are, effectively creating a highly durable, highly flexible and highly scalable capability for a business, one that isn’t a single technology, but is multiple technologies in aggregation, based on a business’ unique strategy and roadmap to create a future operating model.

Adding the arms and legs to conversational AI’s ears and mouth

If conversational AI can provide new ears and a mouth for your business providing the ability for technology to receive and send information in conversational form to humans, automation when harnessed in tandem with conversational AI can provide the arms and legs, taking automated customer service and virtual assistants to new levels.

Consider using a website chatbot. If your experience is anything like mine, most of the time when I tell a chatbot what I want to do, I just get directed to another page on the website. It’s helpful in cutting through all the other information and (hopefully) getting me to the information I need more quickly.

But consider what could happen if automation was added to the chatbot’s ability to receive information or give it back to you.

Suddenly the chatbot could ask questions to recommend the best options and start collecting the information inputs for whatever process you require and serve it up to an automation solution to enable automated processing.

That’s when things get really exciting - and the possibilities for business become unlimited.

We’re seeing live use cases where the technology is performing identity verification using random security questions or enabling people to make or update hotel or service bookings or complete customer requests such as sending invoices, all using voice or text inputs. When you bring automation and conversational technologies together the possibilities really are unlimited. 

Providing real-time customer insight - and compliance

While the technologies can be revenue generating or can benefit a business through reduced cost conversational AI and automation benefits extend beyond that.

One benefit I’m particularly keen on is the ability to provide real-time, ongoing customer insights which can inform business operations and shape the future of your business.

Through the use of conversational AI, businesses can gain rich and deep analytics on customer interactions. What are the problems that are being reported, where are the biggest pain points for customers, what is making them dissatisfied or happy?

Information normally obtained periodically through research now becomes more accessible than ever before.

But another critical benefit can be helping around error rates and, importantly, compliance.

So many sectors are now massively governed by compliance. Getting it wrong is not an option and that is where the technology, can provide a benefit from a risk protection perspective, ensuring compliance is adhered too as well as creating high audit-able and credible audit logs.

Harnessing the full potential - a use case

Late in 2019 at the AI Summit in San Francisco, considered the world's largest AI event for business, a presentation by US-based cable television provider Comcast highlighted the potential of automation and conversational AI platforms.

Comcast is using machine learning and automation to identify problems before they occur and proactively reach out to clients. It’s the nirvana of gold standard customer service. And it’s reaping big returns for the company which has a staggering 25 million utterances by NLP and delivers 70,000 predictive recommendations daily. Those predictive recommendations have helped Comcast achieve a 10-40% improvement to NPS scores on a per transaction basis. 

So what’s it all mean for NZ business?

Here in New Zealand, we’re in active conversations with customers who want to understand how they can integrate conversational AI and automation into their operating models.

While it’s not a solution for every use case - if you’re only getting asked once a month to do something there likely isn’t a use case - but for areas of core requests in businesses conversational AI and automation will have a role to play going forward.

In fact, there are very few use cases that conversational AI and automation couldn’t be used to address.

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