The hottest trends in conversational AI

While there’s a lot of momentum around using conversational artificial intelligence (#AI) in the customer experience, most organizations are scratching the surface of what’s possible. Almost four in five senior executives surveyed by Economist Impact say that AI will be a critical part of their CX operations in the coming years.??

Chatbots, where many organizations dipped a toe in the AI waters, have come a long way since their first (frustrating) iterations. And today’s conversational AI capabilities go beyond simple #chatbots. The technology powers always-on, engaging interactions where customers self-serve with ease – and employees have the context and knowledge to be efficient, effective and empathetic.

How is AI getting to human levels of empathy, faster? Here are three key areas:?

1. Advanced language models?

Advanced language models supported by natural language processing and natural language understanding enable automatic conversations that feel natural and intuitive. More importantly, these conversations result in a meaningful outcome, often with no human intervention. ?

The capabilities that support this include intent surfacing, phrase recognition and real-time sentiment analysis. These insights reveal customers’ intentions and preferences, which help bots have smarter, more empathetic conversations.?

2. Connecting all the dots?

Conversational AI enables #digital bots (#chat and #voice) to draw on a wide variety of data sources like stock availability, shipping and more to get customers the information they’re really looking for.??

Consider, for example, that a customer tells a retailer’s voicebot that something’s missing from their order. The AI tool connects information from inventory, delivery and refund management to provide relevant options. Having the right information readily available significantly lessens time-to-resolution – and that reduces customer effort and improves satisfaction.?

3. Maintaining (digital) eye contact?

Organizations can use conversational AI to begin interactions, and then escalate customers to agents, as needed. A seamless AI-to-agent transition maintains digital “eye contact” with customers. It not only ensures customers don’t have to repeat themselves (a big pet peeve), it also reduces interaction times and saves costs.??

This makes interactions more enjoyable for employees, too. They can get right to the important job of making the customer happy.

Sounds simple? Not quite.?

Any organization that wants to get serious about conversational AI has some groundwork they need to do to prepare.?

The first is how you’ll pull together the knowledge bots will draw on to answer customers’ questions. How do you ensure your bot has relevant, up-to-date information at its AI fingertips???

Other considerations include deciding what type of knowledge base you need. Do you want one dedicated to your bot, or do you want a generic one? How do you make sure that the data in that knowledge base is right? How do you fix it if it’s wrong? And how do you use search inquiries to create new knowledge or FAQs as quickly as possible??

• Top tip: The best knowledge bases work for customers and employees. You just need to adapt the way your information is delivered by giving it usage dimensions.??

The second area of groundwork is around intent models. “Intents” translate what people say naturally (e.g., “Some items were missing from my order”) to an intent that can be matched to an action — helping the person reorder or receive a credit or refund. To enable those, your bot needs to understand the words and meaning correctly.??

That’s a matter of training and it’s hard to do. But modern intent-mining tools build models based on natural speech, so this is no longer done manually.

• Top tip: Build a cycle of continuous learning and support agents with automatic summarization. This can wrap calls with structure while still giving employees an opportunity to add their own remarks. The benefit: more data and feedback from every interaction.?

Time to start talking?

Conversational AI brings humanity to automated interactions. It delivers the empathy and personalization consumers want, while delivering the business results organizations aim for when digitalizing service interactions.

Want to learn more? Download Increase your CX effectiveness with conversational AI now.